851 Lyndsay Cambridge:

Melinda Wittstock:

Lyndsay, welcome to Wings.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Hi. Thank you so much for having me. So excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I love talking about all things content and so what a better person to talk to about this. I want to start with your why. What was it about content and how it helps people grow their businesses, grow their brand and whatnot, that really was the spark that led you to create a business around it?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, it’s a really weird story actually of how we got into content because originally, I actually ran a web design agency, and at first when we first started out, we didn’t know many people, so we were really struggling for clients. So, we read quite a few books. I read so many books on content marketing and I was like, okay, I’m going to give this content marketing thing a go. And it worked incredibly well. After three months, we were getting so many kind of phone calls, so many emails coming through with people wanting to work with us just because we’d started creating content on our blog, and this was 2016 around that time. So that was amazing. But unfortunately, we were kind of getting in lots and lots of clients and some of them weren’t the right fit. Some people would want proposals from us that took forever to write and then just ghost us.

Some people got us on calls and again, just ghosted us. And some people became clients and weren’t the right fit at all, so they wanted to treat me an employee in their business. They wanted to kind of boss me around or me be at the beck and call on Saturday evenings and all that kind of thing. And it got to a point that I really, really started to really dislike my business, and so we had this weird idea that we could create content to kind of prevent those clients from getting in touch with us. So we created our first piece of content and it was something like, reasons you shouldn’t work with us. We kind of got so sick and tired of working with these people and it just worked brilliantly. Every single time we had a problem in our business, a difficult client or perhaps a missed page or something wasn’t as smooth as it could be, we just created content around it and we ended up attracting the best clients and we absolutely loved working with them all just through this kind of content strategy of making it very, very clear who we did and didn’t want to work with, and now we do it for other people.

So it’s a bit of a weird story how it all happened, and at one point I wanted to give up the business because it became so stressful, but I’m really glad we kind of figured out a way through it and sort of found a way now to help other people that are struggling with the same thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, give me an example of why someone shouldn’t work with you.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

So one of the things should be, if you want replies to emails at weekends because that’s the time with my family. So I’m not going to reply to you at weekends. It might be something like if you are a brand new business, so we say we don’t work with brand new businesses just because we don’t want to take someone’s money when they haven’t figured out their audience yet, they haven’t figured out their services quite right, they haven’t figured out their brand and their tone of voice and all those kind of things. We want someone to be in a right place before they invest money in us. So those would be probably two good examples there.

Melinda Wittstock:

So the content that you were doing before I am going to imagine was about content. You were creating content about why you need a content marketing strategy or whatever. It was just helpful content. Is that right?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, so when we actually ran a web design agency, it was very much how much does a website cost or reasons you should invest in a website. Those kinds of things are very generic, broad content that was aiming to just everyone and anyone who would read it. And it did work. It wasn’t that it didn’t work. We did get rankings and traffic to a website and as I said, the phone started going and started getting lots of emails in, and that is good content. We’d never say to people, don’t create that kind of content, especially ones that’s good for SEO, but make sure you also have that barrier in place to prevent you from wasting too much time with the wrong clients.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, exactly. So, do you still do all of that helpful stuff in between the posts about here’s why you shouldn’t work with us?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yes. So yeah, most of it is the helpful stuff. Most of the content we create, I think probably about, I’d say four out of five pieces of content that we create, it’s going to be more helpful. But then one of those pieces will be either what we call repelling content, which is aimed at repelling people from working with you.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

I think a lot of people think that it sounds scary, but actually it’s really not because what happens is when you repel people, you actually attract the right kind of clients, which is absolutely amazing because what you’re telling people is when you say, I don’t work with this set of people, you are saying I’m not right for everyone. I’m not just out to make a quick buck out of anybody and everybody, I’m actually selective over who I work with. And if you fit in the right category, if you read my content or listen to it and it sounds like we are the perfect match, then you are going to be more excited about working with me because you know that I’m not out to get everyone’s money.

Melinda Wittstock:

So this presupposes that the type of people you want to work with, and a lot of businesses when they start out, they don’t. And in fact, it drives me nuts when I hear people say, oh, we are for everybody because nobody is for everybody. So, tell me about the process that you went through to figure out, okay, so who did you want to work with and who didn’t you want to work with and why?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, it’s a really good question actually, because I do think it’s quite difficult to figure that out. And I think some of the questions that you can ask yourself of who you don’t and who you do want to work with is how do you want to be treated? What’s your ideal client and how would they speak to you? What would they want from you? How would you want to communicate with them? What kind of phrases or things do clients or potential clients say that really rub you up the wrong way? So for me that would be, oh, this will just take you five minutes. We know when anyone ever says that it’s going to take an hour and when people say things like that. So start jotting down the things that you like and dislike about the clients that you work with and really paying attention to the things that maybe annoy you and the things that you could potentially change.

Because I think people don’t realize, and there was this expectation when I started out in business that the client is always right and I always have the client says, jump, and I say, how high? And I always have to do whatever they say. But actually when you start putting these barriers in place, you gain more respect. Unfortunately, it is that way. You gain more respect and more authority from doing this and you end up working with much, much better people. And now the clients that we have are amazing. So I think it’s just about being very, very self-aware when you’re working with a client and if something doesn’t feel right, examine why that’s happening and think about how you can prevent that from happening again. That’s key because you can’t always predict who you’re going to get as a client or who’s going to try and get in contact with you. So when the problem happens once, that might be on the client, but if it happens again, that’s on you, because have to prevent that from happening again by putting the communication in place, by putting content in place that helps communicate, okay, these are my boundaries, this is what I will do, this is what I won’t do.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is really important and sometimes you don’t know this at the very beginning, especially if you’re a new entrepreneur because it takes a while to find that kind of product market fit. It takes a while to find that product market fit, let alone figuring out your processes for how you’re going to qualify a client. So, take me through that qualification process. You’ve got all this content out there that’s hopefully done most of the legwork for you, that you’ve sort of pre-qualified, so you’re incoming is going to be better. But once you have those people and you’re on a discovery call or whatever, what are some of the things that you ask them to figure out whether they’re going to be a good fit for you?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, it’s a really good question actually because we try and pre-qualify clients before they get on a discovery call with us. So we like to call them content dodgers. So the people that perhaps don’t consume our content and want to book a call or ring you up and spend an hour on the phone with you or speak to you for an hour on Zoom, they may not know everything about you, they probably haven’t read all your content. So it’s up to us to put that in place before we spend our time with them. So what we do is if someone books a call with us on Zoom, the first thing that I do is I say, “Hey, it’s great that we get to speak to you and find out more about your business, just before our call so we’re both on the same page and you’re still happy to go ahead, here are prices, here is our process, here is who we are the right fit for and who we aren’t the right fit for.”

Now that is the point when we’ve pre-qualified people usually because then they either reply and say, “Oh my God, I’m even more excited than I was originally, because I absolutely want to work with you now and I really appreciate that content because you’ve been so open and transparent and honest with me.” Or they don’t reply and they don’t want to book the call, in which case that’s fine, they haven’t wasted their time, I haven’t wasted my time and everybody’s happy. And that’s probably the easiest way of pre-qualifying a client. And then on the call, our sales calls are actually very, very fast usually because we’ve produced a lot of content, so people already know so much about us. So generally our sales calls are usually about 20 minutes and people will be clarifying a question that they have that’s very detailed, but we won’t be doing long sales calls and then long proposals and then waiting ages for people’s answers and those kind of things because they’re already there, they’re already ready to buy. So that’s kind of how the process works.

Melinda Wittstock:

It sounds like you obviously have very defined products. The fact that you have your pricing, your pricing is, it sounds kind of immovable, this is what you get and here’s what you have and all that stuff. In the beginning though, did it take you a while to figure out what that pricing was going to be?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yes, and I think a lot of people have this battle over whether to publicize their prices or not. At first, we didn’t and then we did, and then we didn’t. We found it a lot, lot better actually publicizing it. But yeah, I think the pricing situation, it always is quite tricky to price your products, but if you are in a kind of scenario where you’re delivering services to clients and the price can vary, at least having content out there that says prices from or the price can go from this to this or a large project might look like this, a smaller project would look like this. There are always ways to tackle it without being exact. So you don’t have to say, this is my exact pricing. We do kind of productize our service so it is exact, but you certainly don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. And there’s a way of talking about it in your content, so you make sure you don’t get the kind of tire kickers spending time on your Zoom calls or your phone calls that haven’t perhaps got the budget to work with you.

Melinda Wittstock:

That makes a lot of sense. So how long did it take you to get this process really working? Because so many of the best businesses really do productize. The more they can productize it, obviously the higher the margins, the better the planning, exactly what kind of team members you need to fulfill. It has so many benefits to the good old SOP and just knowing your systems. So how long did it take you to really get that in place in reality from the time that you had this epiphany and you started putting out that content to really locking it down?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, that’s a great question actually, because I really wish I’d have productized my services so much earlier. We actually only started our content. We ran a web design agency for a while and then we moved over the content about 18 months ago and it’s boomed since then. It was moving over to content that we decided to productize the service completely. I wish I’d have done it sooner because it makes things, like you said, your standard operating procedures, you know what teams to hire, you can forecast financially. When we ran a web design agency one month it would be feast and the next month it would be famine. And it was really, really difficult to manage and figure things out for the future. You think, well, do I hire or don’t I hire because I don’t know. Next month, I could have nothing come in. So it’s something I wish I’d have done sooner. It just made sense at the time when we moved over to content to think, okay, I think this makes sense with…

We kind of got sick of actually having that unpredictability in our business, so we really wanted to make sure that we had that and I can forecast the next six, 12 months even quite confidently and know what money’s going to come in and then I can invest in building my team. It makes it so much better.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how big is your team now?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

We have six members on our team. We’ve got a videographer and a content manager, content writer, administrator, and myself and Martin, who’s my business partner and also husband as well. So it’s a nice little team actually. It’s really nice.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how many clients can you serve with that size team?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

It’s around about eight to 10 clients every single month. So we do kind of monthly packages. So that’s usually around about that depending on how much work they need. So yeah, it’s round about that. So it’s a nice amount really for all of us. It’s something that I never wanted to do. I never wanted to kind of stack them high, sell them cheap kind of business. So we wanted to make sure that we gave our clients a lot of attention and care. So we kind of limit it. So often for our SEO content writing service, we will close the doors to that service when we feel like we’re getting to capacity and put a wait list up so that we don’t kind of get over capacity so the team isn’t too stressed and overworked and we are not too stressed and overworked because that’s the last thing we want, so we make sure that we don’t kind of hit overall workload.

Melinda Wittstock:

How much content do you actually put out about your business? How that’s managed and how frequently, just that whole system that you have for your own content.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, well, I cheat. So I usually write a blog post usually once a week or once every two weeks. And then I will repurpose that post usually into about six to eight LinkedIn posts. So that’s where I cheat because I like to use one really good piece of content and then break it up and use it in many, many different places. So the blog post goes to our email list and then it goes on LinkedIn. Martin, my husband, he does usually videos out of the blog posts as well, so he’ll use ChatGPT and he’ll take the blog post, copy it, paste it into ChatGPT and say, can you make video scripts out of this? And it does a pretty good job of that. So everything comes from one piece of blog content and that’s what makes it so much easier when you are creating content because I think people think, oh, I need something specifically for that platform and that platform and something for my blog or something for my video channel. Actually, if you’ve just got one piece of content and then you can split it up and get it to fuel all your other platforms, that makes things so, so much easier.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s super, super smart. It sounds like you have a real systems thinking brain, Lyndsay.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

I wouldn’t have said so before we started a business, but I think it’s actually, it’s quite addictive building these systems and seeing them work. It’s not something that I find particularly easy, but once I’ve kind of figured it out, it really, really does help and really does work. Even if you haven’t got a systems brain or you don’t think you’ve got a systems brain, I think it’s definitely worth spending the time or hiring someone to help you figure that out if you can, even someone to bounce off whether you figure it out together. Me and my VA actually came up with our system for our clients, how they go from basically I was doing onboarding them all the way to publishing their content. I figured that out with another person and it’s made a huge, huge difference to our business because it just speeds things up and makes it better for the client as well because they know the exact process, which is always really good for them.

Melinda Wittstock:

As you look at your business going forward in the future and things like scale, are you going to continue the same size or do you have aspirations to make it even bigger and what’s your vision for where you’re going?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, it would be good to make it even bigger. All the systems are in place now and it has been quite a quick, we’ve only been doing content for 18 months, so it has been very, very quick to get to the point that we’re at now, which is nice. But yes, so we’ve got the systems in place, we’ve got the people in place and we know how everything works. So now it’s just a case of okay, if we reach that client threshold and we get more clients, then we get more people in our team, and it just continues from there really.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so you mentioned one of the big challenges early on that I think a lot of people have, they start something because they love to do it and then they quickly get kind of overwhelmed. They have the wrong clients. They’re doing everything and then their love for what they do disappears. This is a common thing in entrepreneurship. What have been some of the other challenges? I mean, I think as entrepreneurs we all have these heart stopping moments. Things we couldn’t control or didn’t foresee. What have been some of yours?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

I think the biggest challenge for me has probably been money mindset. And if you’d had told me a couple of years ago, if you’d have said it’s mindset that can be a big issue, I probably would’ve rolled my eyes because if I hear the word mindset, that’s how my attitude used to be. I used to be very kind of, I want the pragmatic tactics to grow my business, but actually I think undercharging and not aiming high enough in terms of the money that we need has probably been the biggest mistake that we’ve made in business. And something that if I could go back to my twenties and kind of shake myself and say, you need to think bigger than this, that would be it. Because I remember having a conversation with my business partner and husband Martin, and we were like, can we charge 500 pounds for a website, which is probably about $600. Is that possible? And obviously now looking back it seems really strange because we kept thinking to ourselves, okay, well we earned this much when we had jobs, so we just have to earn the exact same as self-employed. And as you know, it’s entirely different. You need a lot more money coming in and you need to be a lot bolder, I think, or certainly I did, with your pricing, definitely.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. This is a regular thing that I think a lot of women have struggling with underpricing and over-delivering and just even being afraid of even asking for the sale and all those things are mindset issues because they come back down to subconsciously how much do we actually value ourselves and our contribution. So talk to me about that money mindset journey. What did you go through to gain a more conscious approach, I suppose, to tackling that particular issue?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, I think it’s firstly understanding the return on investment that you give to clients. And when you are charging 500 pound per website and your client is earning 50,000 pound a month and you’re thinking this isn’t right. And I think that you do have to rather than think about it, okay, this is the work that I’m putting in and this is my hourly rate, think about the value that your clients are getting and how much are they getting out of it? So we are a kind of a B2B business, so how much would it cost for your client to get a return on investment? For using the website example, if they only need one customer to basically break even on the website, then that’s a really good deal and you just have to think about it, well, what’s the value that I give and how much do I actually help people and how much do I give them back?

And even if it’s something that you’re saving people time, well, don’t say what’s 10 hours of my time worth? Ask yourself what’s 10 hours of their time worth? What’s that 10 hours of my client’s time worth? If they’re a CEO of a big company and you are saving them 10 hours a week, that’s worth a lot.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. That’s worth a huge amount and being conscious of that because I think when you look at the before and the after, so say as a result of working with you, this business or brand is going to increase their sales by X percent. So what’s that going to mean to them? What is the before and after? And even walking them through that I find in a consultative sales process is really interesting. And I learned that lesson also retroactively looking back in any of the five businesses that I’ve built along the way when it’s been a business model of that kind of service thing and you realize you’ve priced it and I don’t know, call it $50,000 for an engagement, but meanwhile the client made a million dollars or more a result of your work and you’re like, wait a minute.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

I delivered way more. And so this is such an important, important lesson. And I’ve found with some of those bigger, longer-term kind of consultative things like yearlong engagements where you’re doing something really pretty big or all-inclusive for a client is really taking them through that. What would it mean, here you are now, but what would it mean if you were here? What would be the value to you? And getting them to really understand that really helps, I guess, with the sale as well.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Definitely. Yeah, I think it’s so true, and I think it is just getting out of that mindset where, well, what’s my time worth? And it’s actually, well, what’s it worth to your client? And those two are usually very different in our minds. And if you just reframe that to the latter one, you’ll easily charge more.

Melinda Wittstock:

We talked a little bit around your ideal client in terms of who you like to work with and why and what it’s like to work with them. But who are they in terms of the type of business that they are? And I ask because there could be a lot of people listening to this show that could say, “Hey, you know what? I am in the market. I need somebody to do my content for me.” Who’s your ideal client?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

it’s usually personal brand entrepreneurs who want to be the go-to people in their industry. So they want to be the most well-known and sought after people in their industry, and they’re kind of getting there and they’ve built their team and they’re delivering an amazing service, but they’re probably noticing that some other people get more attention than them. Some other people get more speaking opportunities and podcast invites and get a bit more share of the customer pie than they do, even though they’re amazing at what they do. So we help those kind of entrepreneurs really push themselves and get themselves out there and stand out and get seen and get heard.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you’re actually creating their blog posts or their videos or just all their stuff and just basically just taking that off their plate for the most part?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, pretty much all of it. We take most of it off their plate, so we can save them about between usually five and 16 hours a week depending on how much they want to work with us of actual content marketing work and promotion. So yeah, it’s video blog, and we also repurpose to social media as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s great. I run a podcast app and we’ve got 6 million podcasts. And I think all those podcasters really struggle to be able to get discovered, get found, but there’s two things you said. It’s like the podcast is a great opportunity to repurpose content from that, but they just don’t have the time. They’re in complete overwhelm. Do you work with podcasters?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yes. Yeah, we do work with podcasters. Yes, because we work with them creating blog posts out of the podcast because that’s a great way of when you transform a podcast script into a blog post, that’s a great way to get search engine rankings and more website traffic rather than just putting the script up there. Or what some people do is they lightly edit the script, but that doesn’t get the results that you want. And then yes, then from there, transforming it into LinkedIn posts or even carousels for Instagram.

Melinda Wittstock:

And you’re also an SEO expert, and of course the whole SEO world is likely changing pretty fast as a result of AI, and you’ve got all these generative tools and whatnot. Talk to me about that, because the SEO can be very overwhelming for people, and it seems like we’re at this precipice right now where everything is changing with content because of AI. What’s your perspective on that? I noticed that you did mention that you do use things like ChatGPT and such. What’s your take on how the industry is going to transform and what that’s going to mean for your business?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yeah, and I did this blog post as a piece of content to tell people how we work, but it was actually, we hired someone to help us repurpose our client’s content using AI. So for us, it’s enabled us to deliver even more to our clients. So that’s a really, really good thing. In terms of the impact it’ll have on the industry, I think a lot of people are panicking, but if you create the kind of content that really does stand out and is different, so if it’s a regurgitation of the content that’s already out there, you see it all the time, 10 top tips to do whatever a thing it is, and then someone does 11 top tips and they’ve just mixed up the order and added one, that kind of content is going to perform badly, but that already was before AI was coming out anyway.

But that’s the kind of content that AI can create because AI just takes its content from content that already exists. Whereas if you create content that includes your stories, your experiences, even things like if you include templates that people can use in your content or things that are different and that are uniquely yours, the case studies from your clients and content that’s directly about your products and services. So this is the content that we really help our clients create because we really focus on that. We call it bottom of the funnel, but essentially content just about your products and services that no one else is going to have created because why would they create it about your products and services? But that is the stuff that really does convert.

So we are not too worried because the kind of content we create isn’t in existence anyway. So I think for a lot of content it will be, or a lot of content agencies or SEO agencies, there might be a bit of worry if they are creating content that’s very standardized or very much like everything else out there already. But for us, it’s not so much of a worry, it’s more of an opportunity.

Melinda Wittstock:

You and your husband wrote a book called Content Fortress, and this is a go-to really to help business owners from everything we’ve been talking about this just stress of trying to find their dream clients. And how much do you, I guess, repurpose that book?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Book repurposing is also something that we do quite a lot. And yes, I do repurpose that book quite a lot. So yeah, it came out in December 2020, so we wrote it during lockdown with a toddler, so that was fun. But yeah, so that’s when it came out. It’s been amazing kind of journey since then, it coming out. And the idea of it is really the fortress is what I was talking about, that kind of making sure that you prevent the bad fits, the wrong clients coming in into your business and making sure you bring the right clients in through your content. And so yeah, that’s pretty much the story of that one.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, I want to make sure people know how to find you and work with you. Where is the best place they should go first?

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Jammydigital.com. That’s our website. And you can have a look at our blog and have a look at all our content. And then if you can connect me on LinkedIn as well, that’s Lyndsay Cambridge.

Melinda Wittstock:

And you also have an SEO quiz they can take as well.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Yes. Yeah, we do. So that’s jammydigital.com/quiz.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, Lyndsay, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Lyndsay Cambridge:

Thank you so much. Absolutely loved it.