Federico Jorge’s career as a copywriter started in creative agencies. Like many creative workers he moved from one agency to another before deciding he’d gained enough experience to work for himself. He set up his own agency in his small town in Argentina and soon found that business thrived. He served small businesses with simple needs, delivering the copy they required to build their companies.
But the work was also limiting. Unable to reach the large clients and the challenging projects he wanted, Jorge closed the agency and became a full-time freelancer.
He focused on SaaS companies, and began taking on clients from around the world.
Writing on StarterStory, Jorge explained that his clients kept asking him to create comparison pages—copy that posits the client’s product against a rival’s to demonstrate the differences between them. Over time, Jorge generated a process that enabled him to quickly complete the research, write effective copy and even produce a design though he himself isn’t a designer.
That, he said, is when “the lightbulb went off” in his head. He could package the process and specialize in writing comparison pages.
One option would have been to create another agency, but clients expect creative agencies to offer a broad range of different services and to be able to take on a variety of different projects. They want to be able to park their marketing needs with one company and know that the agency can take care of most of their requirements, from Web copy through print ads to placement.
Jorge wanted to stay with SaaS clients. He also wanted to continue with the copywriting projects he did best but focus entirely on comparison pages. He established himself as a freelancer with a very specific niche.
His business, StackAgainst, offers three packages of comparison pages. A single package costs $3,000 and includes an SEO report, competitor research and a landing page. A triple package costs twice as much and adds two more comparison landing pages. A full package for $8,000 adds a blog article, fifteen social media images and three responsive Google ads. Clients can also pay more to include design, bringing the price of a full package to $12,000.
The idea worked. Word spread that for any SaaS business that needed comparison pages, Jorge was the place to turn. Early clients included FreshBooks, ProcessKit, and Cloudways. He launched in early 2021 and by November 2022 was making $12,000 a month in sales. Those are all one-off sales though, so there’s still plenty of room for further growth by adding recurring services to the offer.
As interest in Jorge’s comparison pages grew, it wasn’t long before his freelance business encountered the same problem that every successful freelance business encounters: how to scale.
A freelance service thrives on the talents and skills of the freelancer. It’s a personal service that an individual professional provides to a client. But individuals can’t clone themselves and they can’t add more hours to the day. Once you’ve worked late, destroyed the weekend, and booked work months in advance, there’s nothing left to do but turn down interesting work that pays well.
While an agency grows by employing people who can deliver services that other members of the company can’t—a designer to complement the copywriter or a marketing expert to bring in more clients—a niched freelance service can only grow by adding people who work in exactly the same way and have the same knowledge as the freelancer.
That was the challenge Jorge faced as he tried to grow his service.
“All the know-how to get our clients’ comparison pages done was inside my head,” he explained. “As we grew, I couldn’t keep up with doing it all and had to start delegating parts of the process.”
How to Xerox Yourself
He began by pulling the know-how out of his head. He wrote standard operating procedures for each part of the process of creating comparison pages. He produced documentation and even made hour-long training videos explaining what he did and exactly how he did it.
“Documentation has been critical in getting the know-how locked in my brain and making it available for anyone else that joined our team,” he said. “We mostly work with contractors at Stack Against so there’s not a lot of time for onboarding and training. Having solid standard operating procedures speeds up onboarding for new contractors while ensuring a similar level of quality in all that we do, no matter who we hire to do the work.”
So while freelancers can’t Xerox themselves, they can copy their knowledge by writing it all down and using that documentation to train new employees or other freelancers to work in the same way as them.
But there is a limit to that approach. Jorge had hoped that standard operating procedures and the repetitive nature of the work the company was creating meant he could hire low-cost freelancers and virtual assistants. They would perform tasks that ranged from admin and research to client communication, guided by the documentation he’d produced. As a boot-strapped company, the detailed documentation would supplement the missing experience and training of his low-cost helpers, saving him money on more experienced—and more expensive—employees.
Despite the detailed instructions though, Jorge says he still became too involved in execution and spent too much time micromanaging the work of others. Instead of leaving his duplicated Jorges to complete their work, leaving him to focus on growth and strategy, he was losing too many hours to teaching, training and checking.
He found he couldn’t hire a jack-of-all-trades to do an expert’s job no matter how carefully he laid out their tasks. And hiring professionals brought benefits that added to the value of the know-how he was contributing.
“The right talent makes a huge difference. They see things others miss and are equipped with the contextual knowledge to challenge your SOPs and your standard way of doing things, if they feel it would benefit the work,” he says.
Those experienced contractors are more expensive and switching to higher-cost talent raised a different set of problems. Creative workers don’t want to be bound by strict procedures. Their strength is that they can generate novel solutions and think outside the box. For the work they were doing—the copywriting and design of the comparison pages— to be effective, the creative workers Jorge hired needed to have enough freedom to both explore their ideas and feel confident enough to execute them.
The documentation he’d created became less important.
“We still rely on documentation and best practices to do our work, but now we hire people with the right background to handle each part of our projects.”
Create Documentation, But Don’t Rely On It
Jorge’s experience suggests that attempting duplicate your freelance skills by passing your knowledge to low-cost helpers is a dead-end. A better approach to scaling a freelance business is the same as the approach to building an agency: find talented, experienced people and pay them what they need. But Jorge doesn’t see the documentation process he went through as a mistake.
“Having a process and documenting how you do the work you do is always helpful. It saves time, it removes guessing and it ensures you’re always delivering up to a certain standard,” he says. “The simple practice of mapping out how you do the work will help you discover gaps and elements to get rid of.”
Any process that repeats should have a process, he recommends. Templates, checklists, product integrations and video tutorials all help to build systems that can scale both with the freelancer and without them.
So scaling should begin with documentation, but those documents should provide insights into the processes and reveal areas of improvements rather than act as a rigid training manual for new, inexperienced staff.
A harder question is whether you want to scale in the first place. Jorge points out that scaling doesn’t always mean more money and more freedom. As you build the business, you’re actually trading time spent working for time spent finding the right talent to do the work, documenting processes and managing people, a task that not everyone enjoys or does well.
“You might end up with less money and less freedom as you try to scale,” warns Jorge. “If you move forward, you have to feel comfortable with getting out of the day-to-day and into the uncomfortableness of learning a new role and the pains that come with it.”
That’s not something every copywriter—or any creative worker—wants to do. Many are happy to continue churning out copy every day, helping clients directly with their skill and their talent without training staff or managing teams. Some people want to build agencies and other people want to be employed by those agencies. Some people want to be freelancers and others want to be entrepreneurs.
The first step in scaling a freelance business is to know which of those roles suits you best. And the second is to write down what you know so that the rest of the team can build on it.
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