How To Scale Your Ghostwriting Business (Before You Hire)

I think that, you know, the thing that I harp on over and over again is this should be everyone's ideal scenario, is you want 5 clients. That's like roughly the capacity that you can handle as a one-person ghostwriter running your own business. This is your ideal scenario. Okay. And you really shouldn't worry about hiring or doing anything until you are here, and $3,000 per project per month is the minimum, okay? Once you have 5 client slots and the game is you're one person, how do I maximize 5 client slots and how do I maximize price per client? And before you maximize those two things, it is not worth even thinking about hiring or doing anything. The ideal is if you could get up to like this. Like 5 client slots, each person paying you $5,000, you're making $25,000 a month. Like, that's— that is an absolute home run outcome. And there really is no— like, this is important to internalize— there really is no difference between this and charging $3,000 a month or per project. It's really the same service, it's the same skill level, it's the same everything. It's just you have to get more comfortable charging more and you have to get more comfortable reaching out to more people. When you get here or close to here, Rebecca, and you're like, I want to grow, I think it's really important to anchor in to yourself and go, I am making this decision not like— if you grow successfully, will you make more money? Yes. But if you grow beyond this point, you will go through more risk, more volatility, and maybe even periods where you make less than what you would have made because you now you're hiring people, right? So you're eating into your margin. And so as you grow, what happens is like you sort of peak and then you hire people and then you valley a bit and then you peak and then you hire more people and you valley a bit. And so I think it's important to go, okay, if I, if I want to do that, your motivation can't be money alone. Your motivation has to be, I am choosing to do this because I want to build new skills. I want to, I want to build the skills of managing people. I want to build the skills of raising my own standard. That, that has to be the motivation because it is going to cost you money and it's going to cost you time and it's going to cost you a lot of other things. So first is like, do you, you know, do you want to go on that journey? And if so, I would still tell you, you wanna try to get as close to here as possible because as you add people or as you add new levels of risk, you wanna do it from a place of abundance rather than from a place of like, okay, yeah, I'm like right above $10,000 a month and I like sort of have my systems and I'm like sort of, you know, and if you start to scale that, then all that happens is you're taking that existing situation and duplicating it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So like, you have to know you need— you want to grow to bring other people on. I get that you want to have this financial milestone before bringing someone on. But I remember you talking to, like, one of the agencies, NPGA, and they kept using this word like content quality, you know, and like, we're trying to get our writers to like care about content quality and have a consistent content quality. And it kind of became clear to me that it's like there's two sides to like bringing people on, and one side is like the finances, but the other side is like being able to articulate what they actually need to do. And maybe at this level with the 5 clients that like maxed out, or at 5K, that will have sorted itself out by then. But I, I guess I'm thinking from the content systems perspective, like, what am I aiming for? Because honestly, if I 100% knew exactly what I wanted and could articulate that perfectly, like, I would just use AI to do that. But if you bring someone in, like, they also have, uh, you know, some critical thinking ability to kind of look and maybe add in, like, here are your instructions, here's the missing 10% you didn't tell me that I think we need. So yeah, I guess that's what I'm looking for, is like not just the finance side, but what's the— what's the sign from a content systems perspective that like you're ready to actually delegate this task, the writing task?

Yeah, so okay, this is an extremely multifaceted question because there's a lot of different variables. So for everyone here, I'm going to dig into it because I think it is very helpful. I saw someone drop in the chat like, I wish I had your problems, Rebecca. But it's like, remember, remember, like a year ago, you know, you're like, how am I ever going to make more than $7,000 a month? You know? And here you are. This is just— this is how the game goes, everyone. Like the problems you have, you always are like, Well, these suck. I wish I had those problems. And then you go and have those problems and then you're like, well, actually these are just as hard. They're just different, you know? So I do want to dig into this because I think it would be helpful. So first of all, the reality is when it comes to hiring and training people, you literally will never be ready. Ever. It's one of those trial by fire things where the only way to learn how to do it is to do it. And so that's, that's why I said you want to, you want to start down that journey from as much abundance as you can, because the moment you hire someone, you are paying down lots of different types of debt. You're paying down organizational debt, you're paying down systems debt, you're paying down management debt, you're paying down personality, like dealing with another volatile human being debt. You're paying financial debt, right? And so there's, there's sort of no way around it. You just kind of got to sign yourself up for the journey and go, I'm going to build the plane as it's taking off. I would say first, for you and for everyone here, if at any point you think, okay, I want to increase capacity or I want to scale, I think I need to hire someone. We have now officially entered the age where you should try and ask, how can I help me do 50 to 80% of this before I involve a human. That's not to say that you can't or shouldn't hire people. We have a huge team, but like, you should try to push the technology first. And then the way to think about it is realizing that hiring people and delegating tasks is not so binary. It's not like you currently work with all 5 clients and then you hire someone and then they work with all 5 clients. There it, you know, hiring and delegation exists on a spectrum. And so the way to think about this is let's pretend you have 5 clients. Let's just use this as the example. The way to think about this is you would have one client that's like very easy, very easy content and never gives feedback, like literally the easiest client, right? And then you have another client that's like Easy content, minimal feedback. And then you have like medium content, medium like challenge content and minimal feedback. And then you have medium content, lots of feedback all the time, very annoying. And then you have complicated content, medium feedback. The reason it's really— it's— I would encourage everyone here to literally make a bulleted list of your client roster with these 3 variables. It's like, who is the client? How much are they paying you? And how easy is the content? And how difficult or easy are they to work with? And the reason that that is so helpful, and I ran into this in our agency, is we would have, you know, because we ended up scaling to 7 or 8 different teams of writer and editor, and each writer and editor was responsible for 10 clients. And we would have one team that was like incredibly productive and very profitable, and then we would have another team that was like the opposite and barely breaking even. And after a while I was like, okay, what are the differences? And you start to look at the roster and it's like, well, The first team has clients that are writing about, like, productivity and leadership, and then the next team is writing about, like, advanced biomedical innovations. Two completely different levels of, like, easy versus hard types of content, right? And so also, as you scale or before you scale, first of all, you yourself, the question is, How do I get a roster of people paying me the most money possible, writing the easiest type of content possible, like for you, based on your information advantage, and are the easiest to work with? And you actually want to try to get as much of that in your one-person business, and then delegation just goes, okay, so Rebecca, which one of these 5 clients do we think we're gonna delegate first?

Yeah, first one.

Yeah, we're gonna get— we're gonna delegate the first one. We're gonna be like, okay, we're gonna start you here, and then we're gonna add this one. And then over time, you know, you're gonna slowly work up to this one. And then right around there, because the content gets a little harder, you're probably gonna start to notice. You're like, okay, so what types of feedback am I giving this person? You know, is it voice feedback? Is it, uh, research feedback? Like the answers will reveal themselves to you, and then you're building the training assets as you're realizing the problems. But that's an easier journey when you're like, okay, let's start simple and let's work our way. You're not going to give this client away day one, right? You're not going to give this client away day one. Does that make sense?

Yeah, 100%. Um, I'm a little troubled. I, I totally get what you're saying, but when you say like it should— ideally you have, um, the easiest type of content that you're, you're responsible for, because I think part of what I have leaned into is like the hard topics, which is more like thought leadership content Or ClimateTech, which is more like research-based, research-heavy, like we're citing stats, that kind of thing. We're getting more into the science. So—

But that's okay. That's okay. The nuance there isn't on the content side. The nuance there is how do you work with and fire easy clients versus hard clients? Like, I vividly remember we had— I remember we had two clients in the same industry. They were both in very advanced biotech. One, literally anything we wrote, he was like, "Sounds good, ship it." The other, 7 drafts back and forth before we finally posted, and then we would post it, and then he would come back and be like, "I actually hated it," and take it down, and I want to redo it. It was the same content, it was the same industry, but two completely different personalities. And I think this is a lever that a lot of writers don't realize because so many start from this place of freelancer scarcity, take whatever you can get. And this is like an invisible lever that you don't realize you have control over, is your roster is not just about how do I get more clients, and it's not just about How do I get more clients to pay me more money? But it's also, and how do I continuously fire the people that are clearly like perfectionists and really difficult to work with and really frugal and really afraid of putting themselves out there, right? That's a lever. How do I get rid of those people and attract more of the people that are like, "Yeah, sounds good." And so this lever is really important, and that's why Like so many times when I'll have scaling conversations with people, I'm like, I know the impulse is hire someone or grow or like move forward. But actually the right answer is often how do I continue to maximize my existing situation? And you don't even sort of realize that you have these different levers that you can push and pull.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Totally. So the variable you're like Bringing up is it's not just about like the systems, but it's about your actual client roster that you have.

Yeah, it's people.

And how easy or difficult they are to work with. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, you're dealing with human beings, you know? And that's why at our agency, when I was done and I was like, you know, I had made every mistake and I was super burned out and we were like, let's just fire everybody and kind of start over. Me and my co-founder held on to— it was something like 8 clients. We literally, in one day, we fired 20 employees and 70 clients. In one day. It was like literally the worst day of my life. We went out and got super drunk after because it was just so painful. And we held on to 8 clients. Does anyone want to guess which 8 clients we chose to hold on to? We held on to the ones that were paying us the most money and were the easiest to work with. And in some cases, one of the clients or two of the clients that we kept, it wasn't even that they were paying us the highest rate. It was that they were so unbelievably easy to work with. Like, literally anything I wrote, they were like, that's amazing, ship it. One of those clients we worked with for 3 and a half years, and I could write her articles in 11 minutes. I know 'cause I started timing myself 'cause it was fun. So this is an invisible lever that's really important in your business. And so for you, Rebecca, it's like, you know, before you worry about delegation, how do you max out that 5th slot? How do you get all 5 slots as profitable as possible? And even when you get to that point, it's like, alright, now let's do another audit. This person, yeah, they're paying me $5,000 a month, but they're really difficult to work with. Let's fire them. Let's swap them out. Let's go find someone who's twice as easy. Instant upgrade, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Okay, I got my marching orders. Good. Super good stuff.

Good. I'm glad. Great question. Thanks for asking it. This is why I enjoy PGA so much, because I, I'm not exaggerating when I say I made all these mistakes, and I didn't just make them once. I made them like 50 times over and over and over again. I had to deal with very painful outcomes because of my decisions. And so it's really fun for me to be able to look at your situation or different people's situations and go, I've, I've been here. I promise I've moved this chess piece from this square to this square 50 times, and 50 out of 50 times it was the wrong move. So I'm telling you, don't move your little chess piece over to this square. Instead, move it this way, you know, and that just comes from a lot of, a lot of pattern recognition. Hey, by the way, if you're brand new to the world of ghostwriting, maybe you've heard the term but aren't really sure what it is or how it's different from copywriting or content writing, check out premiumghostwritingblueprint.com. It's in the description below. Okay, this is a free masterclass that I've put together for writers who who want to monetize their skills and love for writing with ghostwriting. This is what I did, and ghostwriting completely changed my life. It's how I quit my job. It's how I quadrupled the amount of money I was making. It's how I've gotten to work with so many smart, amazing people, but also have time for my own writing, like writing this book, The Art and Business of Ghostwriting. Anyways, check it out. If you're at all interested in making money from your writing, I would really encourage you to get into ghostwriting, and this free premium ghostwriting blueprint in the description below is the best place to start.