Creative and technical copywriters
Niki and Ewan run a communications agency from their farm in the Nelson Lakes region.
Niki is hands down one of the best writers I know. She can bring tears to your eyes or make you laugh until you pee. This is an actual thing.
Ewan is a multi-talented technical wizard, who decided to follow a career in engineering with learning to farm and working in the wine industry, before rebooting his technical writing skills.
Together, they offer creative content and technical writing.
This may not sound like an obvious match, but it’s working for them, and to quote the masters, “a creative strategy is doomed without process and workflow.”
As a recovering creative strategist, I’d like to say a big hell yeah, and amen to that sentiment.
I’ve known Niki and Ewan for years, because I have the extraordinary good fortune to be not-married to Niki’s brother.
At least once a year we load vast quantities of wine into the mobile compost heap that masquerades as our car and drive north from Ōtautahi to Saint Arnaud.
There we admire their spectacular vistas, drink the wine, dance in the kitchen, and stay up far too late talking crap and generally setting the world to rights.
Last time we visited I begged them to let me interview them about their business.
So, tell us what you do?
EWAN: I’m a technical writer and I specialise in documenting processes and procedures for the wine industry. I rewrite processes wineries already have to make them more readable and relatable and I help them map their procedures from scratch. While I mainly work with wineries, I can help any business that has processes they want to record and refine.
NIKI: I’m a creative copywriter, so I write content and create strategies for established SMEs looking to take their businesses to the next level. That can mean tweaking their messaging or exploring a new direction and I do everything from web content to award entries.
I work with the business owners of established, successful SMEs. But I work across industry sectors, because clients who like working with me are a certain type of person. We’re talking business owners who are super passionate and invested in their business. They’re all about making their customers’ lives better, whether through an amazing experience or a brilliant product. They genuinely love other human beings or want to help them.
Because they have all this passion swirling around inside them, they’re looking for someone who gets them. They want someone to look inside them, see that passion and articulate it for them. If I nail that for them, often they cry because someone saw them finally.
My clients tend to be really loyal. They’re often difficult and demanding, and we have sometimes tumultuous but amazing relationships. I do my best work for these people because they inspire me.
When Ewan and Niki aren’t writing they sit in fields with a tractor and 50,000,000 sandflies.
What pain points do you solve for your clients?
NIKI: What served them previously, no longer serves them. They’ve outgrown their communication strategy and their key messaging, and they need something new, but they don’t know how to lift their communication game to achieve that change.
EWAN: It’s about quality, safety, and training. If you capture winemaking processes accurately you can make sure they’re done the same way every time and train other people. Plus, you can identify hazards and put controls in place to make the process safe. And if something does go wrong, you can go back and analyse how the accident happened.
Sometimes wineries hire me because they’re about to be audited. Certain food certifications, like the ISO9000, require the winemaking the process to be documented.
Every year wineries massively increase their workforce for vintage. So they have a lot of people to train and they need good processes to do that. And when our borders are open, seasonal vintage workers often don’t speak English as their first language, so clear processes become even more important.
Also, wineries must comply with the health and safety at work act. They’re subject to audit by Worksafe if somebody has an accident, and wineries can be a high-risk environment. So best practice is to document health and safety procedures.
Recording your processes is also a form of insurance. A lot of the smaller wineries don’t think about the risk of having all their knowledge locked up in the heads of a few key people. Could your winery continue to run if you had an accident or got ill?
Ultimately, the wineries all know that they need to have their processes and procedures written down. How can you guarantee a consistent quality product if you do it differently every time because you’re not following a written procedure?
What is stopping your clients fixing the problems you solve by themselves?
NIKI: The biggest thing that holds most businesses back is not understanding their market. Or if they do know their market, not knowing how to reach them. Not knowing what platforms to use. Not knowing how to communicate with them, or how to speak their language. And usually, my clients are business owners or key decision makers, so they may not have the time or the expertise to do their own writing.
EWAN: Nobody wants to document processes and procedures. That’s the number one reason. No one wants to be given the job, so no one has time.
Tell me a bit more about the services that you provide? Are you offering just your classic done for you consultant services or are you packaging and selling your IP as well?
EWAN: Everything is bespoke for me at present. A winery hires me to write X number of procedures, and I give them a price. But packaging my own processes is the way to go. Most smaller wineries can’t afford to hire me to document their procedures, so I plan to create templates and course to help them to do that by themselves.
NIKI: I teach creative writing and I offer training and workshops to businesses. For example, I’ve just done a social media workshop for a group of community conservation project coordinators, and next week I’ll be doing a media relations workshop with the same group.
It’s definitely my intention to package my knowledge. I want to offer a combination of more affordable self-paced courses, group coaching, and higher ticket experiences where people get more one-on-one time. I have two courses planned. The first will be a six-week course on how to make your business writing sexier.
Why would people want to make their business writing sexier?
NIKI: Because there’s a lot of bad business content out there. Businesses are afraid to have a strong individual voice, so they make their content bland and unappetizing.
They might want to stand out from the crowd, but they don’t know how far they can go and in what direction to push it. They don’t know how to engage with their audience, or how to define their voice to be authentic and individual.
Also, some companies don’t think that they can create interesting content because they’ve got a product that they don’t think is very sexy. It’s my mission to show people how they can tell creative engaging stories even if they have an uninspiring product or service.
Niki musing on sexy business writing in the orchard.
Why do your clients choose you?
EWAN: Because I know the wine industry, and because I take away that horrible job that’s been nagging at the back of their mind.
NIKI: Because I get them, and they want to be seen and understood. And 95% of my business comes from referrals.
Would you say that you’re in start-up mode?
NIKI: Bold Communications is still in start-up, but I’ve been working as a copywriter for eight years. So, I don’t feel that I’m still in start-up mode.
You’ve said interesting things to me in the past about how even though you’ve had your own copywriting business for eight years, that for a while you had your handbrake on.
NIKI: It took me a long time to understand this about myself, but I had quite a deep-seated belief that business was somehow dirty and that people who were in business for themselves were greedy and unprincipled. I don’t know where I got that idea from. But it was in there.
EWAN: You’ve said before that it may have come from the fact that your father was a dance teacher and followed his passion instead of making money.
NIKI: Yeah. I had it in my mind that following your passion was more noble than being successful in business. So, it took eight years and a year when I nearly ran my business into the ground, before I got desperate enough to question these attitudes that were sabotaging me. It was almost like being successful was an admission that I had somehow sold out. Once I realised it, I was able to deal with it. But I tell you, expelling that big clot of shit took a while.
You had a year where you nearly ran your business into the ground. What happened?
NIKI: I got passionate about a voluntary project and put my time into that instead of my business. It satisfied this thing in me that felt like I needed to be doing something noble.
EWAN: Unfortunately, the project was toxic.
NIKI: It was. And in that year my income halved. I needed to dig myself out of a hole. And I thought, I really need to learn more about business instead of judging it. So, I got a mentor. I needed somebody objective to help me learn more about how business works and how to structure my finances and that sort of thing. I was still sole trading then.
Ewan and the coos.
Mr Brown, the Bold Communications rooster.
What do you think you’ve got right in your business?
NIKI: I know my ideal clients well enough now to be able to give them what they need and add real value. I know who I really want to work with and who I’m not a good fit for. And I’m learning to say no to the projects that don’t fit.
I’m still trying to focus on the thing that I do that is most important to my clients. I’m looking for that clarity, but I’m keeping my options open while I learn more about what energises me.
EWAN: I get really good feedback from my clients, they like what I do for them. And there has been good buy in from the people using the procedures. Once I’ve written a process, we go through it line by line together, and agree that it’s accurate and exactly the way they want it.
Even although I’m no salesman, the initial meetings with my clients go well. I’ve been coming out of cold meetings with work because what I say resonate with what wineries want.
And I believe in the importance of what I do. I want every winery in the country to have a set of working procedures, so that the New Zealand wine industry can document the great procedures that go hand in hand with our quality wine.
It’s about extracting the knowledge from the brilliant people who make some of the best wine in the world. Our processes are our human terroir.
What have you learned the hard way?
EWAN: Your network is everything. In a small country like NZ, it’s often not what you know, it’s who you know and it’s hard to get through the door if you don’t know anybody.
Also have clear payment terms to make sure people pay their bills on time, because it’s a pain chasing them when they don’t.
NIKI: Don’t try and make a bad fit into a good fit. Saying no is just as important as saying yes. Planning is vital. And working with your partner can be interesting. We’re good at problem solving together. But we’re not good when one is telling the other what to do.
EWAN: Even when one of us knows more about something, if we tell the other person what to do it doesn’t work very well. Although we’re getting better at it.
NIKI: And don’t run your business into the ground. Don’t neglect it. It’s hard to claw your way back. Like anything, a business needs to be fed and maintained and cared for. It won’t tick over by itself. It’s quite a personal development journey having a business. And it calls for a certain degree of grit. You can’t just walk away from your livelihood when you’re having a bad day.
EWAN: Living here has made life difficult because you can’t just catch up with a client for coffee. Now we’ve got the connectivity we need, we can do a lot more than we could when we got here. But Niki had a very isolated existence for the first seven or eight years. Plus, we’ve been learning how to farm at the same time.
Our heros looking intrepid in a field.
Tell me more about that balance between your farm and your business.
NIKI: The whole idea behind Ewan and I working together in Bold Communications was the realisation that we couldn’t separate things out. It was about integrating all the areas of our life. For a long time, I thought that living here was a major disadvantage for my business. I was isolated and I had clients in Nelson who wanted me to go and see them all the time. But I didn’t want to do that because we came here to learn how to live more sustainably, not to be commuting all the time
Then one day I thought, there are people who would give their right arm to live here and have this lifestyle in this beautiful place. It’s not a disadvantage. It’s us living our dream.
Bold was born as a declaration that this is us being successful. We live on our own terms and our business is the visible face of that success. Our business feeds our farm and our farm feeds us, we all feed each other. It’s an integrated entity.
EWAN: It’s not a work life balance. It’s all life.
NIKI: That’s it! It was staring us in the face all the time. But we had to go through all those struggle years to get to that point of realization. Ewan was spendig two hours commuting into Blenheim everyday.
EWAN: I did that three days a week for four years. But it’s all about timing because I couldn’t have started writing procedures for wineries until I had four years’ experience in a winery.
What would you like to go back in time and tell yourself when you were starting your business?
EWAN: Document my process as I go, so I can sell that to people. And make more phone calls to feed my new business pipeline. I’m not good at that.
To be perfectly honest I wouldn’t have spent so much money on website and graphics. Because I don’t think we’ve got any return on that yet, or not enough to pay for it. More than half of our start-up costs went on that and none of it has come back. And maybe it’s because we’re not posting often enough to get people to go to the website. It’s possible that’s it too.
NIKI: I’d say to myself that entrenched attitudes and beliefs are going to make the difference between succeeding or not, or even the degree to which I could succeed. The rest is discipline and good management. That’s the most important thing for me.
Another lesson learned for me is to keep up the momentum, because once you fall into a slump it’s hard to get out. I can go like an energiser bunny if I’m busy. And the last thing for me would be making working on the business as much of a priority as working in it.
Ewan and Jack the dog surveying the policies.
Do you have a revenue target for your business?
NIKI: When we set up the business in 2018, our goal was to grow the business to a turnover of $400,000 and sell in seven years.
EWAN: That came from our mentor. I don’t want to sell my business. That’s not my aim. It’s to make enough money while we’re doing it and have some left to save. Because given that our business is us, what are we going to sell? If we have a list of clients, we can sell some good will, but unless someone has the same skills and ethics as us, what are we selling? I know that’s what start-ups do, you come up with an idea, you develop it, and then you sell it to somebody else and move onto the next idea. But we don’t have another idea. This is our idea.
NIKI: Our target for our first year (financial year 2018-19) was to hit $77,000, and we hit $56,000, but Ewan didn’t get his first work until October 2019. Our target for this year is $137,800 but it’s unlikely we’re going to hit that. It’s more realistic we’ll do $75,000 if things carry on the way they are now.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know my slump months. Pre-Christmas is busy, and I have plenty of work in January. Historically my low billing months have been May and August, and then September goes crazy and its like that for the rest of the calendar year.
Thank you for being candid. That sort of information is valuable for other consultants. What’s your ultimate revenue target? What does revenue success look like to you?
NIKI: We don’t want to work every hour God sends, because we have the farm. I would love to have the business healthy and the farm healthy and for us to have enough time to be able to do those things well. So, for us it’s not about making tons of money.
EWAN. Both of us billing 20 hours a week and earning $100K a year.
How do you attract new clients?
NIKI: Not properly. Here’s where we have an epic fail.
EWAN: We wrote a business plan and a marketing plan which we haven’t really looked at since. We started off with a hiss and a roar when we had weekly meetings with each other which lasted a couple of months.
NIKI: I get new clients from referrals and that’s enough to keep me busy, so I’m not doing any outbound marketing. And I’m not doing any inbound marketing either, because I’m not creating any content at the moment.
EWAN: We’re not the greatest self-promotors.
Has there been a successful business development strategy that you have used?
EWAN: Using my contacts in the wine industry has opened doors. And personal referrals work. Being able to ring somebody up and say, hey Steve gave me your number, this is the service that I’m offering, would you be up for a chat? That gets me in the door.
NIKI: We wrote you a script for sales calls. Not a word-by-word script, but a direction.
EWAN: That helped. I’m a fluffer on the phone. If I don’t know what I’m supposed to be saying I’ll blurt out any old thing so having that really helped me, particularly when calls went straight to answer phone.
NIKI: The only thing that’s worked for me, not on a major scale, but it has brought me in more work, is when I’ve gone and talked to groups on marketing as a guest expert speaker. Last year I experimented with boosting blog posts on Facebook. And it worked, in terms of getting clicks through to the website, but it didn’t bring in any business.
Last question. Any words of advice to other consultants.
NIKI: Know your offering well. Know your ideal client and what you do that’s most valuable to them. And don’t hesitate to get help when you’re stuck. Your superpower is your superpower, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be super at every aspect of your business. And that’s ok. I might be a brilliant writer, but it doesn’t mean I’m brilliant at other aspects of the business. I’m clearly not.
EWAN: Take advice. Talk to people. But most of all believe in yourself.
Work with Niki & Ewan
Niki helps business owners take their communications to the next level with superb strategy and copy, while Ewan helps businesses doocument their processes, so they can improve their operations, train staff and manage risk. Check out more of Niki and Ewan’s work at boldcommunications.co.nz.
For more insights on marketing and business growth from New Zealand consultants and coaches, sign up for my e-newsletter below.
The beech forest up the back of Bold Communications HQ. That’s some proper serenity that is.