We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Jefferson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren below.

Alright, Lauren thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea?

As much as I wish I came up with the actual idea of FocusCopy first, I didn’t. My dad and co-founder, Stuart Broderick, had dreamed of launching a copywriting company because most of a company’s problems come down to its communications. Stuart shared the business plan with me in July of 2019, and within 20 days, we launched FocusCopy.

While launching a company sounds easy, it wasn’t. Before launch, we entered into a discovery process. We looked at every part of the business – sales, marketing, operations, finance, and legal – to mark our vision and goals. We identified action steps that needed to be taken, and our final checklist had over 200+ items on it. We divided and conquered the tasks based on our unique skills. We presented our business plan to mentors like Dave Cook, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston, and many other influential people in our lives. We welcomed feedback to identify areas that needed additional refinement.

After the bulk of the business was set up, we redirected our attention to the copy. If FocusCopy was going to be the premier copywriting firm in Houston, we better have copy that is above reproach. I personally wrote 30+ landing pages that had different messaging, offers, and goals. While that may be a little overboard for most start up businesses, I had to showcase that although we are a new entity, we have over 40 years of copywriting experience between myself and my co-founder.

While producing the copy, we built out the first iteration of our copywriting process. This helped us identify what roles we needed to fill within the company and what resources we needed to deliver to our clients.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’m Lauren Jefferson, the Co-Founder and CEO of FocusCopy. We are a copywriting and content writing firm that caffeinates your brand messaging so it energizes your target audience to take action.

No one wakes up and dreams of being a copywriter (or at least that’s what we’re told). But one of my entrepreneurship professors, Jim Wilkinson, hired me as his marketing intern in 2015. My first task: build the online portion of his business. Everything that touched the Internet was my domain – website development, blogging, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, sales, product development, and copywriting. I learned very early on that if I did not spend enough time on the copy, it didn’t matter what else I did… The campaign or strategy would fall flat. Copy is everything.

Since August of 2019, we have written for 75+ brands in 4 different countries in just about every industry – aviation appraisal and valuation, narcissist abuse recovery, college consulting, coffee, IV therapy, and health and wellness coaching.

At FocusCopy, we always start with our client’s brand voice. We don’t want to write using our voice when we’re not in the day-to-day communicating with our client’s customers. So we created a process – the Fundamentals – that allows us to capture our client’s brand voice and customer profiles so that we provide continuity in the business’s communications.

Then we dive into a number of copy deliverables – website copy, email copy, blog copy, and sales copy. We have also been known to develop courses, write internal documentation, and produce other writing projects for clients.

What really sets us apart from other copywriters or copywriting teams is that we position ourselves as our client’s strategic partner. If they have a problem or need to connect with another provider, we have a solution for them. We love working directly alongside them to help them meet their goals.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for closing new clients is to approach the conversation relationally, not transactionally.

In 2021, I experienced some severe burnout where I stopped selling for about 3 months. I freaked out and started grasping for any sales. Because I wanted transactions, I was attracting the wrong clients, and the clients I did want weren’t closing.

It wasn’t until I went back to FocusCopy’s DNA that I realized that we weren’t treating those prospects as strategic partners. They were just another number to add to our client roster.

As soon as I shifted my mindset to relational, I started closing the clients I wanted immediately.

What does this look like? Approach the conversation without any expectations. Add as much value in that conversation as possible, like giving away free marketing tips. Listen without distractions. Be vulnerable with them.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

As an introvert, I loathe networking events. However, I’ve found one-on-one networking has been extremely effective for me and my business. Each networking meeting, I try to connect with another business owner. I ask for an update on their business, who they are targeting for clients, and who their referral partners are. In those meetings, I try to immediately identify people I can connect them with.

Because I lead with a heart of “no expectations” and “let’s connect you with people who can grow your business”, people trust me more not only with their business but their client’s business.

Now, I’m known as a connector and an entrepreneur who wants to see you succeed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://focuscopy.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/focuscopyllc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FocusCopyLLC/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/focuscopy
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/focuscopyllc
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTZQ0UGsBcykHtlS_noOaw
• Other: To schedule a discovery call, click here: https://focuscopy.com/schedule

Image Credits
@emilygayephoto