Why every successful copywriter needs a mentor.
Why does every successful copywriter need a mentor?
I can answer that question in one quick sentence:
In retrospect, I made my success harder than it had to be.
Here’s how…
UNO! (Yea, I just got back from Guatemala, we’re in spanglish mode!)
I looked around and compared myself to others around me, asking myself “what do they have that I don’t?” Comparisonitis cocktail anyone? Also, while I consider myself wildly fortunate to know so many supportive and generous copywriting peers, the industry of solopreneurs itself can still feel super cutthroat. We were all after similar clients, weren’t we? So shouldn’t we be in competition?Today, I know better. There is PLENTY of work to go around, and there is an ever increasing need for excellent copywriters as the digital age expands. Today, I’m more interested in training writers to create their own success than I am in checking out what others are doing. And I know if I had a mentor along the way to remind me of that, it would have saved me countless hours of stress going down that dark rabbit hole.Cost to my business: 7 hours per week, minimum.At $100 per hour, that’s $700 per week of time wasted.TOTAL HIT: $36,400 per YEAR. OUCH!
DOS!
I struggled with time management and balancing doing the work with selling the work, marketing the work, tracking the work, and scheduling the work. Some days, I didn’t even want to get out of bed because the overwhelm was so strong. My email inbox was flooded, my project calendar was booked, and yet instead of feeling PUMPED that so much work was coming in, I felt like I was drowning. I DID hire help, and I DID build a team, BUT I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Figuring out what you really need to make your business run well is a challenge, and it can be an expensive challenge. Of course, it’s all a worthwhile investment in the grand scheme of business and life, but I believe that if I had a mentor to help me figure out a better business structure from the beginning, I could have saved myself about $45 - $60,000 on things I wanted to “try.” Now, I know where to put my money so that it actually pays off.Cost to my business: $45,000 on trying things without having the best strategies in place.TOTAL HIT: $45,000 per YEAR. OOF!
TRES!
I didn’t take enough risks, and frequently put my attention on the wrong tasks. After reading my previous paragraph and looking at my profit and loss, you might not necessarily believe that. You might think that I took tons of risks, invested lots of money, and maybe even in a way that was too bullish. But, you’d be wrong! I am a huge risk taker and I believe that your emotional capacity for risk MUST grow as your business grows - or else your business won’t grow at all! So while I DID take risks, there were also ones that I did not take because I was scared, or confused, or convinced that things HAD to be hard (yea, I have issues guys). If I did take those risks, the resulting changes could have led greater profits, faster. I don’t have regrets because I learned a TON, but I do wish that a mentor would have pushed me to take the risks and trust that I knew what I was doing. Because ultimately, I did.Cost to my business: $30,000 MINIMUM on not taking risks sooner.TOTAL HIT: $30,000 per YEAR. LOLz!TOTAL LOSS, due to learning via trial & error: $111,400 WOWZA!!!Now, I’m not selling myself short completely here (although I am frequently SUPER hard on myself). I invested smartly, I profited happily, and I worked with incredible focus and drive. That said, I could have grossed an extra 6 figures!!!!I truly believe that finding the right person to help you build both your trade skills and your overall business structure is critical. That’s why I created my mentorship program JUST for copywriters to get all the help they need. Registration closes in 2 days, so if you’ve been thinking about applying NOW is the time.Click here to get this party started.xo
