I run a writing agency, and seven years ago I started with nothing but $75 a hope and a
dream. And today we have the best client satisfaction rates that we've ever had, and
we just surpassed our biggest month in sales.
So how have I been able to do it in such a competitive industry?
Here's my story.
Everything started in my business back when I was 19.
I was in the middle of nursing school and I was failing miserably.
And one day I woke up and I asked myself, What do I love to do and how can I make money
doing it? And I knew what the answer was in my heart.
It was writing that went back all the way before I was 12.
I was always writing and by 12 I had a 200 page medieval fiction on a floppy disk.
And along with that I had early entrepreneurial roots.
I figured out how to make money using the Internet.
At 13, I was earning cash, doing surveys, and by 16 and I don't know where this idea
came from. It was just in my head.
One day I decided to go around the neighborhood and ask people if they needed
help using their computer.
And I posted ads in the grocery store, and within a few days I had several clients that
I was making up to $40 an hour at 16.
So at 19, when I found myself in the middle of college trying to get a degree that I
didn't even want, I decided I would just try to figure out online writing and make a
career out of it. And the next three months I taught myself how to write and I wrote
hundreds of articles for very cheap clients.
But that was how I honed my early writing skills.
I also started learning a lot of SEO and content marketing back then.
Before I knew it, I had more work than what I could handle, and my next logical thought
was, why not start a business?
And Express Writers was born.
And I had one goal back then when I started my company.
It was to find a group of writers who had passion in online writing and who I could
teach the elements of SEO content marketing to.
And we could learn and progress as a whole.
I notice a phenomenon.
Back then, a lot of so called writers didn't know the standards of how to write for SEO or
the reader. So I started my business with that one goal, and clients began to trust me
and to look to me for SEO and content marketing advice.
And that's when I also started blogging rarely on my site.
Express Writers dot com.
But the story is not complete without sharing a personal story.
I grew up in a religiously suppressed environment.
My dad was the pastor of a church and at 21 I found myself locked up in my room by my
parents and given a letter for my birthday that said I was a disgrace to the family.
We were not allowed to lead normal lives and my business was looked down on.
So when I got that letter, even though that environment was the only thing I knew, I knew
that it wasn't normal and I had to get out.
So six months later, my sister and I made the decision to leave in the middle of the
night. And we did.
And it was very hard.
But I had the opportunity to go follow what I love to do and chase my dreams and chase my
passions. Once I got out of that environment and I did that and completely bootstrapped
without any outside funding.
We grew 200% in the next few years.
The first year was 50,000, and then in a few short years we hit 300,000.
And last year we just surpassed 650,000.
As an entrepreneur, you often hear that failure precedes success.
And that's not just a quote or a fun thing.
It's the truth.
Early last year, I found out that two trusted managers in my staff were embezzling
and I had to fire them and rebuild the team.
And that took five months of hard work.
And I learned that with a supportive environment, ongoing accountability for your
staff and most importantly, the right people, there is no limits to what you can do
as a business.
That experience taught me what it means to create a great company culture and to serve
our clients with the best customer service.
The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, said that the secret to successful hiring is this
Find the people that want to change the world.
And for me, that was finding people that shared my goal, a gigantic goal of creating
the best copywriting agency on the planet and giving our clients the best content that
they've ever gotten.
But in the five months of rebuilding, it was the hardest thing in the world to find the
right people. And one of my biggest lessons was that it's not about the roles in your
company, it's about the environment and how your staff support each other.
So when we were rebuilding our company culture that year and with a goal to give our
clients the best customer service we possibly could.
I decided to let our commission sales rep go and it was scary because she was getting us
sales, but she was chasing the sale instead of the relationship with our customers.
So I literally replaced the commission sales rep with an expert to do the consultation and
the selling at Express Writers.
And I was honored to find an industry content marketing expert and hire her and
bring her into the team.
And after she was working here for a week, I went to one of our clients and I was very
straight up and I asked, Could you rate the difference in experience between the
commission sales rep and our expert?
And he said that the difference was 100 times better and I knew we were on the right
track. So last year, even though we went through a lot and it took five months to find
the right people when we found them, there is no limit now to what we can do as a
company because we are able to learn and progress together.
Our team is large, but it's small enough to be able to do that, which gives our clients
the best service.
So we're seeing the highest rider retention rates.
We're able to provide full time jobs for the riders that we have, and we're also seeing
the highest client satisfaction rates that we've ever had as well.
Everything changes when you find the right team, when you find the right people to work
right next to you. In the daily grind, work becomes delightful because you support each
other. I'm so honored today to lead in my staff full time a group of women that all
share the same goal to serve our clients best and to evolve and progress with the
industry. I encourage communication in my team.
Even though we're remote, we're so close knit, we have daily Skype threads that
address the different topics that we all talk about.
In the trenches of failure.
Success is often born.
Failure is really hard to go through.
It's not fun.
It's not easy.
But I believe that it's one of the greatest ways to learn the lessons that will teach you
growth. And the last thing, success is a progression.
It's not something you hit and you plateau at.
It's a continual progression, something you work very hard at every day.
So this summer, a big goal of mine is to launch a course and I'm launching a contest
strategist certification course.
So I'm going to certify in content strategy.
And I'm putting together everything I've learned in the last seven years of finding
the right keywords for your niche, what tools to use, how to use them to get your
best content opportunities, how to find trending topics, how to put together an
editorial calendar, which is what we get paid to do daily for our clients.
So all of that is going in a course that will be out this summer.
If you want to sign up to get notified.
The link will be in the description of this video.
Thank you so much for watching.
You can follow me at Julia McCoy on Facebook and Twitter for more and subscribe to me on
YouTube at Express Writers.