It’s officially one-million-summer-camps-stitched-together-to-form-some-semblance-of-childcare season, and the fact that we’re halfway through the year blows my mind—but in a different way than other years.
When I left for the U.K. in mid-2024, time flew because I was “booked and busy”. At one point, I had clients across 14 different time zones.
I was happy for the abundance of work, and grateful that every single person and team was an absolute dream to work with…But I could feel the first micro-signals that I was outgrowing my current business model.
Fast forward to our planned return to the U.S., and those feelings lingered. But work poured in, and in this economy, who was I to turn anything down?!?
But by January of this year, I knew I needed to pare things down so I had more mental space to think about how I want my business to complement my personal growth, values, and interests as a newly 40-year-old woman.
So, I hit the .5x speed button.
Which, by the way, is incredibly hard to do when everyone else in your space wears working on 2.5x speed like a badge of honor, so I’ll wait for your applause…
Thank you.
Now, that I’ve had a slow 6 months to process things, I think it’s totally normal to run a business for 7 years, turn 40 years old, attend your 20th high school reunion, move your family internationally and then back again, get latent diagnoses for symptoms you can’t treat with “youth” anymore, be and do absolutely everything for a 6 and 9 year old, and feel the emotional release of supporting a spouse through a very tenuous academic job market, and find yourself in a moment where you wonder: is the path in front of me the one I still want to walk?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I stopped actively promoting anything other than client work and focused solely on my 1:1 work. Nothing else.
Which is incredibly hard to do when everyone else in your space wears 5 revenue streams like a badge of honor, so I’ll wait for your applause…
Thank you.
I knew I had the means to take things slower, but my favorite flavor of self-harm is whole-assing everything I do. So I needed to remove anything that would get in the way of my slow season.
Here’s what I rolled back to lighten my load but still keep the lights on:
- 👩💻I put my C3 Copywriting Cohort Course in the shop as an on-demand DIY Copy Kit with section-by-section web copy video tutorials.
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🏁 I created the (free!) Choose Your Own Adventure copy series! Each track is curated for a specific stage of the DIY copywriting journey:
- 📅 I switched from a bi-weekly to a monthly cadence for Letters From Your Editor. (Again, a hard thing to do when “weekly” is touted as email marketing gospel, so, yes, thank you for your applause.)
- 🥁I’m continuing to follow my Relationships Rhythms regimen à la my coach/mentor/friend Jessica Lackey to stay top of mind and generate new business through referrals and existing clients.
- 🕰️ I increased my project timelines so I had more time to noodle with my work, rebuild my cognitive capacity after long writing sessions, and give my clients more time to review and submit feedback. A win-win for everybody.
- 🤸♀️ I joined my kids in after-school activities on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, purposely limiting the # of working hours I had available. (And forcing me to live a life outside my business during the week...a fucking novel idea.)
Now here’s the part where you’re expecting me to say that slowing down increased my revenue, and that I’ve got a new workshop all about how you can too!
You can unclench your buttcheeks, because I’m happy to report my revenue is way down compared to this time last year.
And I couldn’t care less. I’ll wait for your applause…
Now, I am an advanced degree-holding, dual-income, white girl with a high-yield savings account. I am aware that my telling you about how taking advantage of my privilege to slow down and evaluate my purpose is hella annoying.
I fully recognize this.
But if you want to hear the rest of this story, I will tell you that de-prioritizing making more money than last year (as is the late-stage capitalist entrepreneurial Girl Boss way) has resulted in a more regulated nervous system and some of my best client copy.
I’ve always been a writer—not a perfect one, but a committed one—and it’s nice to return to that title without all the other commas that usually come after it.
Sometimes, when you present yourself as the expert, the educator, coach, mentor, and manager, you forget why you’re drawn to what you do in the first place.
☀️ I’ve learned that I love the process of creating a brand using words.
☀️ I’ve learned that I love thinking about copy as a design element, and refusing to stay in my lane.
☀️ I’ve learned that my favorite clients are the ones who view our work as a collaboration, not a transactional agreement, and that any deviation from this dynamic should be avoided at all costs. 🚩🚩🚩🚩
☀️ I’ve learned that I love getting shit done and having the autonomy to do so.
☀️ I’ve learned that no matter what “copywriting” looks like in the future, the process is the point for me.
Which parts of the process I’m ready to move on from, however, is something I’m still trying to figure out.
I’ll wait for your applause…