We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brittany McBean a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany, appreciate you joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

My biggest weaknesses (there were many) when I first started my business were project management, time management, structure, and organization. I didn’t know how to implement repeatable systems and processes in my business. I was missing client deadlines, frustrated with client communication, and incapable of setting boundaries or expectations….it was a mess. But I also knew I was good at what I did and wanted to continue to do it and do it well,

I have ADHD (see above), as well as depression and anxiety, and working the way I was was taking a serious toll on my mental health, so in a last-ditch effort to see if I could make my business work, I hired a systems specialist for a few hours a week to help me set up some automated systems and build out some workflows that I could use to deliver my client work. It was a slow and painful process of creating templates, fighting with tech, trying failing, and trying again, optimizing, adjusting, and going back to the drawing board. But eventually, we started to find some things that worked.

It allowed me to start serving my clients at a higher level and deliver a higher-quality product. I found that as we improved our systems, my client’s conversion rates and sales were beginning to rise. Once the admin and ops systems were taken care of, I was able to focus on finding the creative process that gave our clients maximum results. A process that I could repeat again and again with consistent results.

Once we began to grow beyond my capacity, I was able to bring in a full-time employee to act as an account manager and lead copywriter so I could step into the CEO and lead strategist role. This allowed us to serve more clients, provide white-glove service, charge premium prices, and write million-dollar funnels for our clients.

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

Brittany McBean is a launch strategist & conversion copywriter who specializes in anti-sleazy, ethical, high-converting copy for online course creators & educators.

Through her research-based messaging strategy and copy, she helps her clients generate multi 6 & 7 figure revenue with their launches and funnels through empathy-based messaging and ethical marketing practices.

She’s worked with industry leaders such as Rick Mulready, Lattice Hudson, and Brandi Mowles.

She believes that Black lives matter now and always, marketing needs to help, not harm, and that it’s our responsibility to use our platforms to build up, magnify, and support historically and systemically marginalized people.

When she’s not trying to redistribute wealth in the world and dismantle the system by eliminating harmful marketing practices steeped in privilege & manipulation…

You’ll find her chasing her child around the house screaming, “Stop eating that!”

Her love languages are pizza, sarcasm & naps.

She believes in the Oxford comma and will fight you on it.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

At every parent/teacher conference, my parents were told (within my earshot), “Brittany just doesn’t live up to her potential.” I was a B student, surrounded by A+ students, and always fell short.

My entire life, I’ve felt less than and certainly less intelligent. I carried that narrative into my business and, more importantly, into leadership.

I took “being the dumbest one in the room” to the extreme. I believe in hiring people smarter than you and letting them do their job. But since I didn’t believe in my own abilities or intelligence, I didn’t believe in my abilities to lead those people who were smarter than me. So for years, I had a team that was self-managed and self-led…and one day, I turned around and had a business with no vision, no direction, and no cohesion. Because it had no leader.

An adult ADHD diagnosis at age 34 helped me finally put some of the puzzle pieces together. I realized that I was never stupid or average. And there was no potential to live up to. I just had a learning disability. The truth is, I am unbelievably intelligent. It’s why I’m so good at what I do. My intelligence simply looks different. And I’m incredibly capable. Also, leadership is a skill to be learned, not a talent you’re born with or without.

Unlearning 34 years’ worth of a public school narrative and the Get Out of CEO Free card I gave myself has been painful, uncomfortable, and has come at a cost. Leading a team and a business is challenging, but I’m up for the challenge. Never again will I walk through the world believing I’m not capable of stepping up to every single challenge and learning the skills I need to learn to accomplish the things I want to accomplish.

It’s easy for people who were socialized as women to fall into a damsel in distress role, even when they’re running a business. I will never let my daughter see me weaponize my own incompetence or fall victim to someone else’s narrative of my abilities.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Experience. Results. Visibility.

I consistently have clients passing on my name to their peers before we had ever turned in a word of copy because of the experience we created for them. Communicate is clear, thorough and seamless. Every last detail has been carefully considered and optimized. Every question has been answered before they know to ask it. They get weekly updates, deadlines are never missed. We have just enough meetings to get done what we needed to, but not so much that I waste their time. And I give them valuable information on their audience, their products, and their message that they could use for other areas of their marketing and advertising outside of just our project. This is all before they have copy in their hands.

I don’t believe I would be able to get continued work without the client experience we provide, but our client’s results speak for themselves. After working together, our clients are typically seeing conversion rates anywhere from 2-10 times the industry average and will double or triple the conversion rates they had prior to working with us. Of course, I never guarantee ROI when we’re working with a new client, and I always focus on our process together over the results, but we do consistently see our client’s launches and funnels outperforming their peers, even those with bigger ads budgets and audiences.

And the truth is, in the online marketing industry, if you’re everywhere, people start to take notice. I personally think that we need to think more critically and do our research because visibility does not equal credibility, but for many people, it does. For the first few years of my business, I focused on getting visible by speaking on podcasts, stages, teaching inside free and paid communities, virtual events, you name it. It’s still my favorite way to spend my time. I love teaching and connecting with new people and new communities. You can’t grow a business by staying in your little bubble, and networking has never felt right for me. So the more I can collaborate with others and share what I know, the better.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.brittanymcbean.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/brittanylmcbean
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanymcbean/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/brittanymcbean