Case Study: How The 2X Project Helped Janice Hughes Strengthen Her Market Positioning, Land More Lucrative Clients and Increase the Quality and Quantity of Client Leads Hey, Janice. Thank you so much for talking with me today. Ed, thanks so much. I'm delighted to be here to talk to you. Before we get to the questions, why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Your business, what kind of work you do, what types of clients you work for. Sure. I specialize in helping business to business, software as a service (SaaS) and tech companies turn prospects into customers through audience-focused content, specifically content marketing and marketing collateral. It's a great market, isn't it? It is a great market. It's a hot market for sure. Yeah. Cool. By the way, I think you've been focused in that market for a while now, right? I have. I kind of wandered into it. Once I realized what a booming market it is and how lucrative the work can be I definitely chose to shift my focus. I was a B2B generalist for a long time. Once I got my foot in the door with tech, I definitely knew that that was the direction I wanted to go. How long have you been freelancing altogether, roughly speaking? I have been freelancing for 8 years.
Okay. Excellent. Let's talk a little bit about when you first came into this program, into the 2X Project. I'm curious to hear where you were in your writing business, what kind of challenges you were facing. Just to have some context for why you made the decision to join me. Sure. I was about 7 years into freelancing and I had started my copywriting career at an advertising agency. I started my career in publishing, but I started copywriting at an agency. When I left to go freelance I was able to take advantage of a lot of my agency network and had a lot of word of mouth referrals from that. It sustained me for quite some time. By about 7 years in, a few opportunities had pretty much run their course. I was feeling a little stalled in my business. I wasn't really sure where I wanted to go and I really wasn't sure where I could go. I was really excited and intrigued by the idea of being able to handpick clients because at that point I had been working with some... A majority of word of mouth referrals. I would, in an attempt to build a freelance portfolio, I was taking a lot of that work. I had never been in a position where I could start attracting and qualifying potential clients in a way that would allow me to really work with the people I wanted to. When I came across Project 2X, a lot of the things you talked about were about building your business, but also... Things that you emphasize and other resources that you offer is the ability to attract and pick the clients you want to work with. Also, get paid what you think you're willing to... What you want to see come in the door. I thought those were all really interesting ideas and something that I was eager to look into at that point. Excellent. Yeah, that was a different paradigm than what you were used to is what it sounds like, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was definitely in that... It's so funny that you would say that because that is absolutely true. I would say for the first 6, 7 years I was still in that freelance business building mindset where you almost take anything that comes across your desk because you need the work and you need the money. The idea about being able to sit back and say, "Okay, who do I really want to work with and what projects really get me going?" It is. It's a paradigm changer. I'm curious what made you decide to enroll in the program. After 6, 7 years of a certain paradigm, people kind of get used to that view of the world, right? That becomes their reality, but it sounds like there was something in you that told you that's not necessarily reality. I'm curious what shifted your thinking.
What I would actually say is that one of my first experiences with you and your resources was actually the Warm Email Prospecting program. That was the first place where I actually learned how to go out and prospect, to reach out to people that I wanted to work with versus waiting for things to come to me. That was such a good experience for me that I felt like that really opened the door for me to consider joining 2X. Warm email processing is something I still use weekly. It's this amazing program. I can't talk enough about it. I knew that 2X encompassed some of that material, but it also added so much more. I knew that if warm email prospecting could change my attitude about how to go about getting and working with clients that 2X was likely to do something more fundamental, which was change the way I was approaching my business overall. I have to say that the thing that really got me to say "yes" to it was that I felt after 7 years, being a B2B generalist, that my positioning wasn't quite right. In 2X you were offering one-on-one sessions. I knew that on top of all of the value in your program and getting to do live Q&A, the ability to talk with you one-on-one and to really hone my positioning, which was for me a big change, going from being a B2B generalist to focusing on tech, would be a huge value to me. That's really what helped me pull the trigger. That makes sense. In terms of how it's helped you and actual results... By this point it's been almost a year I think since we stopped working together. How has it helped you? What benefits have you realized as a result of working through the 2X Project? I think the most powerful one for me is that when I'm not writing, when I'm not doing billable work, I know exactly what I should be doing to build my business. That, to me, is pretty powerful. I don't know if you're familiar with the book The E-Myth Revisited. Oh, yeah. It's a great book. The book. Oh, yeah. I wondered. I figured you were. What I love about that whole thing is as an entrepreneur you... The small business, you wear 3 hats. You're a technician, you're an entrepreneur and a manager. I would say that a lot of people... I'm speaking for myself. I'm going to make hopefully not a gross generalization, but a generalization here that a lot of people that do professional services like this, especially creative services, we're very good technicians. We focus a lot on our craft. We really want to hone it. We really want to be up on what's going on and what we produce matters to us.
Also, the ability to wear a hat as an entrepreneur, which is to have that big vision for your business. Then wear a second hat as a manager, which is to manage the details and the day-to-day. A lot of that, I can speak for myself, I didn't really have that kind of ability. I focused primarily on my craft and figured if I am good at what I do that is enough. That's not really the case. It's actually about being really great at what you do and also being really great at business. This is a particular kind of business. There's not a lot of books and resources that are specifically geared towards those step-by-step what happens next in this kind of a business. What 2X does is it actually gives... It kind of appeals to both the entrepreneur and the manager. You set us up with the big vision and you set us up with changing the mindset of how we approach our business. Then you give us all of the details that we need, right down to the kind of search you do on Linkedin to find a prospect's potential email address. You go all the way down into the stuff that those of us who identify as primarily technicians really need and may not have the capacity to do on our own. That's what was really, really valuable about 2X for me. More specifically, some benefits that I got. I have a much more solid understanding about how to prospect. I feel 100% about my value proposition. Your feedback was immensely helpful in getting me to a place where I felt like I'm totally confident about going out there and marketing myself in this way. I completely redid my website. I have started blogging most recently and I'm increasing my social media presence. I'm getting inbound, highly qualified inbound prospects, as you know, from it. That's been amazing. It feels like magic. Oh, wow. That's great. Yeah, it's great. I know exactly how to qualify prospects when they come in the door, to make sure that I'm not getting myself in a situation. Everyone's had the experience where you've taken on a client and thought, 'Oh, there's a red flag here, but I'm going to go with it because I'm sure it's not going to really be a problem,' and then it becomes a huge problem. I love being able to qualify people and feel confident about that process. They seem appreciate that back and forth as well. It's kind of a getting to know you scenario early on that kind of builds rapport early on. I'm getting higher quality inbound leads and I am able to get, to look, to find leads that I'm targeting more effectively as well. I'm able to really identify who I want to work with. That's fantastic. You're not alone. I hear this from a lot of people. It seemed like before they had no systematic way of approaching these critical functions. When they did land clients it was almost an accident that they landed the right kind of
client. What I'm hearing is you now have a very specific way to bring clients in the door, either attract them to you or go out and find the right ones. Then filter out the bad ones, the ones that are not a good fit for you, and just work with the ones who are a good fit. So I'm curious. Do you feel that going through this program had led to new clients, either directly or indirectly? It has definitely led directly to new clients. The value prop that we worked out has made me so much more confident about reaching out to companies that I would love to work with and making headway in those relationships. Like I said, inbound prospects are also amazing. I'm loving that aspect of things, but it's definitely made a huge difference overall in the quality of my clients, in the quality of work that I get to do. Even my satisfaction for the technician side of me has increased because I'm working with people that appreciate and value what I do and pay me appropriately for it. That's great. That's great. You recently wrote me an email about a huge win, at least in terms of you got a great prospect who came to you, I believe. The way you were able to handle all the interactions and how happy you were that this is... Before you would have stumbled through all this. I'm curious. How did that turn out? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. We are actually working together. This is a software as a service company that reached out to me. They have a new product, they needed a website. They had been talking with some other copywriters as well, but they found me probably due to my blogging efforts through an organic search, and reached out to me. We had a conversation. When he contacted me, he was asking me directly for rates, which is really common. In the past, before 2X, I probably would have tried to scrounge around and figure out what rates look like or look at past projects to try and nail down a number for him before I even asked, got more detail about the project. When we sat down to have this conversation, I went through 2X. I printed out... I'm a writer. I like tangible things, so I printed out all the 2X resources and I flipped through the binder. I'm like, where? I turned exactly to the right spot. I used the "wishbone" technique. I reviewed it for inbound prospects, which is really helpful. I was delighted that you had broken down for inbound versus outbound. When I sat down to talk with him, he loved and commented on my value proposition. He's like, "We're a software as a service and it's really exciting to find someone else who is identifying themselves as a writer for software as a
service because it means that we can get off the ground and running with you immediately." Basically he parroted back my value proposition to me. Oh, wow. I was floored. I've never really had that happen before. That was kind of amazing. We sat down, we talked through his project, I asked questions based on the qualifying questions that you recommend. Then I gave him a ballpark, which he was really happy with. Promptly he turned around and said, "Okay, let's get this going." The great thing about it is the company is really excited, they're really pulled together and there's a potential for more work on the horizon. It looks like it could be a pretty big win for me. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like just a couple of the opportunities that you have had come in, partly as a result from our work together, have definitely given you a significant ROI (return on investment). Is that what I'm hearing? Yes. Absolutely. I think what's amazing about the program is the short-term and the long-term. In 2X, you set up the vision and then you have things that people can do now to take control, take the reigns on their business. Then you have things that you can start to consider as you get mechanisms in place to do regular prospecting, and things that just you have to happen, not in a regular basis. You're like, "Okay. Now think about incorporating something like this or something like this." People get a menu and they can pick and choose. It's not just about what you're going to do tomorrow, but it's about what you're going to do today, tomorrow and then 6, 12, 24 months down the road. It really provides an idea about the direction you can take your business in and that's been really helpful for me. Like I said, there aren't a lot of resources out there for people like us. No, there aren't. I hear that a lot. I think it's people recognize that this business is different enough that you can get some help that's generic and certainly would be valuable. It's almost the kind of thing, look, if you're going to invest the money, you want it to be as specific as possible so that you get the maximum impact. Yes. At least that's been the feedback that I've gotten from a lot of folks. I totally agree. That's one of the things that I love about your resources. I know it's geared directly toward my business. Directly toward my business. I'm really
appreciative of that. I believe in professional development. I have worked with other people who are claiming to do what you do and I have never, never worked with anyone that had given me so much continued value from their resources as I have with International Freelancers Academy. It's been really, really amazing. I feel like almost everything that I have ever... Even your free calls. You put amazing amounts of value in your free calls. It's phenomenal the kind of work that you're doing. It's one of the reasons why I definitely wanted to reach out to you when I had... I got contacted by that prospect. I just wanted to let you know that the stuff that you're doing is amazing and incredibly valuable to those of us who are desperate for that kind of information. Not a lot of people are doing it, or if they are they're not doing it as successfully as you are. Well, I definitely appreciate that. That's why I do what I do. When I get feedback like this it reinforces the fact that I need to continue doing this work because it's having an impact on people. At the end of the day, that's my mission. And this is a good segue into my last question for you. A lot of people who are going to be reading this, listening to it, depending on what they're doing, they're going to be on the fence. They're listening to this because they're trying to make a final decision. It's a big investment of both time, money, resources, attention. All those things that we all have a limited supply of. They're trying to decide is this the right thing for them. If it was somebody like that, of course assuming you don't really know much about them, but everything else being equal... what would you tell them? What would you suggest they consider if they're on the fence as to whether or not to enroll? I think I would be inclined to ask them some questions based on my experience and where I was when I walked into the 2X Program. Questions like, do you know where you want to take your business? Do you feel like you have a winning value proposition that you could go out and market yourself and you feel confident about? Do you feel good about prospecting? Do you have something in place where you're reaching out to prospective clients on a regular basis in a way that you feel good about? I think a lot of us struggle with feeling authentic in marketing because no one, even marketers, want to be marketed to. Do you have a prospecting plan in place that you feel represents you in an authentic way that you don't feel like you're bothering or hassling or asking unethically in some way? Do you like the clients that you work with? Do you have an inbound strategy that you dig, that you like doing, and that you feel is sustainable for you?
Are you earning what you want on every project? Are you earning the kind of income you want every year? Are you making the most of your built-in network? Do you know what you should be doing when you are not writing to build your business? I think that would be the big question for me because my answer was no. That's a great question. If you answer no to even one of these things, Project 2X can help that. Fundamentally, if you don't know what you need to be doing to build your business when you're not billing a client, Project 2X is for you. Well, this has been fantastic, Janice. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this candidly. It's awkward for me sometimes to hear this just because I know I'm putting you on the spot. It really means a lot that you being so honest and forthright about it, and that you came to me. For folks who don't know, you came to me with an unsolicited email just letting me know about some of the things that it's done for you. It means a lot to hear. I appreciate you sharing it with others. Absolutely. It's definitely my pleasure and I continue to appreciate the resources and value that you are creating for people like me.