We recently connected with Jon Spurling and have shared our conversation below.

Jon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I love this question because I’ve fluctuated between the two more than once in my life and still ponder the question often… Is it better to have a “regular job” (whatever that means these days), or to be independent, forge your own path, etc.

My personal journey, in brief, involved leaving school and going straight into a full time sales role, where I had job security, a steady paycheck, and very few unknowns in life. After a few years of making an average of 50 phone calls per day selling car insurance to people, I decided there was probably more to life, so I quit my job and moved to London to pursue acting and modeling. For the next seven years, I hustled! I took every audition, I did any job that came up (including some that were nothing to do with acting and yet somehow were booked through my agent… but that’s another story). I was constantly fighting to pay rent, often resorting to taking short term bank loans and longer term loans from my unimpressed parents.

Eventually, I couldn’t take this manic lifestyle anymore, so I swung the other way again and accepted a full time position at a marketing agency. For two years, I worked an average of 50 hours per week, during which time I progressed from Head of Business Development, to President of the agency. Life was grand! Money coming in, trips to far away lands to schmooze with clients, the obligatory sports car on the drive of my penthouse… What more could I want?

Creativity. And not in the form of yet another marketing proposal.

Feeling like my soul was dying, I quit the agency. But this time, I had a plan. Rather than swinging to one extreme or the other, I would build a hybrid lifestyle. I would put myself out there as a freelance marketing consultant, taking on enough clients to afford a decent lifestyle, while leaving myself plenty of time to pursue my creative goals.

I’m happy to say that I still enjoy this lifestyle today, some seven years later. I love my role as a consultant. I love the time I get to spend writing, producing, developing, and making my podcast. It’s the best of both worlds.

What’s the takeaway here?

Build your own life. You don’t have to pick one option or the other. You can almost always do both. In this case, build the security of having a regular job in a way that gives you the time and energy you need to let your creative self shine. That way, you get the perfect combination of stability and the opportunity to strengthen your skills and talents.

A bird doesn’t land on a branch because it knows it won’t break. It lands on a branch because it knows that, if the branch does break, it can fly.

Build your own life. Be the bird that knows it can fly. You can’t get more free and more secure than that.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I like to joke that I’ve been an entrepreneur since before it became a buzz word. Many a true word spoken in jest, as they say. As a teenager, I was figuring out ways to make money from my friends and even family sometimes! All in a nice way, of course. I was resourceful and imaginative; two qualities that have stayed with me. I’m good at seeing problems and creating solutions, which is the essence of being an entrepreneur, in my opinion.

I’ve worked in a variety of industries including sales, marketing, tech, fitness, wellness, and education. My passion though, has always been the entertainment industry. I was initially involved as an actor, before transitioning into screenwriting and producing (though I’m always happy to jump in front of the camera again and play pretend I’m still an actor).

My company, Write in the Head, is the combination of my love of entertainment (specifically screenwriting) and my love of wellness. As a former life coach, I enjoy few things more than sharing insights into the inner workings of the human mind and body. What better target audience than screenwriters? We constantly face procrastination, uncertainty, self-doubt, not to mention the endless rejection.

It’s a simple concept. We have a free community for screenwriters. We meet once per month on Zoom. We do a weekly podcast. We do a weekly newsletter. In each of these things, we communicate the messages screenwriters often need to hear to not just stay in the game but to have fun doing it. After all, if we’re not enjoying being screenwriters, what are we doing this for? It ain’t for the job security!

If you’re a screenwriter and you’d like to learn more and join the community, head to www.writeinthehead.org

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Something I used to take great pride in was being an experienced, high functioning marketer, who could literally build a website and a corresponding marketing funnel and launch a product in a weekend. I actually did it in a single day once. The issue with this approach is that it plays into the “get rich quick” mentality many younger entrepreneurs have. If I can build and launch in a day, surely millions of dollars are winging their way to me as we speak? Early retirement, here we come!

The rather painful reality I had to learn is that if you want to build real sustainable success, it’s not a sprint. It’s not even a marathon. It’s a lifestyle. It never stops. Building and launching in a weekend is fun but what happens on Monday morning? You’ve done the hard part right? Absolutely not. The hard part is building your audience, building brand loyalty, making actual sales, etc. And guess what? You’re exhausted from pushing so hard all weekend.

The “lesson” I had to unlearn is that success can be achieved quickly. It seems strange to even count that as a lesson because you might ask “Who’s teaching that!?!” The answer is unfortunately, many people. It’s in the majority of online courses about marketing, it’s hinted at in the whole “laptop lifestyle” craze, it’s even suggested in the gig economy.

The truth is — and I’ll never get tired of saying this because it’s the truth — success is the result of doing the work, consistently, over a prolonged period of time.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I’m speaking here as someone with a background in marketing, not as someone who owns a business, because my business is very young and we have a very defined target audience, hence we’re still building our following on social media slowly but surely.

From the perspective of a marketing consultant, you have three options when it comes to building a following on social media:

Option 1: Go Wide, Figure It Out Later
This option is what most influencers use. They don’t have a super defined target audience to begin with, so they focus on clickbait/splashy content, designed to please the algorithm and grab attention. Nothing wrong with this strategy at all. It can be highly effective, especially with Tok-Tok’s algorithm, which can explode content from even newer users with smaller follower counts. The challenge with this approach is that, while you’ll grow an audience faster, they won’t be a particularly loyal audience. You’ll struggle to retain them (as other, even more flashy content comes out), and you’ll struggle to convert them to paying customers.

Option 2: Go Narrow, Find Your People
Conversely, if you have the patience for it, you can put out content that is far from flashy but will appeal to your target audience. You’ll build a following MUCH slower but those followers will be truly interested in your brand. They’ll stay engaged, develop brand loyalty, and eventually click through to your funnel and purchase your products and services.

Option 3: The Hybrid Model
This is what many businesses are doing on social media today, as it combines the best of both worlds. Businesses who can create splashy content to build a following, while also creating targeted content for their audience, will do well. The splashy content tends to remain on brand in some way. For example, it’s not just a video of an adorable puppy playing with a kitten – it’s an adorable puppy playing with a kitten in a kitchen that was just remodeled by your interior design company. Flashy? For sure. On brand? Yep! Finding a way to combine the sizzle and the steak is usually the best way forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.writeinthehead.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonpaulspurling/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonpaulspurling/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jonpaulspurling