“Put your blinders on. Because I think if you spend way too much time looking in the periphery of what everybody else is doing, you will grind to a halt. Watching everybody else’s highlight reel is probably the most demotivating thing that you can possibly do because you can’t help doing comparisons, and the problem is that we never compare apples with apples.”
– Estelle Fallon
If you’ve just started out as a copywriter, it can be intimidating.
Dang, even after a few years you’re still looking around thinking ‘why is this working for everyone else but not me?’.
You need to polish your processes and pricing, raise your profile and work out how to really put yourself out there.
But good things take time. Like a lump of coal turning into a sparkly diamond, sometimes they also take a little pressure.
Today, specialist tender writer Estelle Fallon talks about her journey towards finding her true copywriting self, building her confidence and giving herself time to embrace her skill set.
Tune in to learn:
- How Estelle got started in copywriting
- What tender writing is
- Why managing people is so important
- How Estelle prices her tenders
- How Estelle deals with the pressure
- How she’s managed to be patient with her business
- Estelle’s number one tip for copywriters
- Why Estelle believes it takes time to form a great copywriter
Listen to the podcast
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And big thanks to Midget. from Australia for this review:
“Laughs & wisdom
Looking forward to Kates new podcast. With words like “bottom warming stories” you know it’s going to be classic Kate, full of laughs & wisdom.”
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About Estelle Fallon
Estelle is a specialist tender and SEO copywriter for the civil construction industry with a deep love of turning complex engineering into simple English.
She has fun mining coal-face words produced under the pressure of a tender deadline and crafting them into diamond content that can be used across multiple channels – websites, award submissions and internal communications.
An inaugural member of DMC and TCCS’s 2020 Member of the Year, she can’t resist a good tagline brainstorm and loves solving puzzles of all kinds.
Fun fact: Estelle doesn’t believe in astrology, but says she’s a Virgo through and through.
Connect with Estelle Fallon
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Transcript
Kate Toon:
Hello, my name is Kate Toon and I’m the head copy beast at the Clever Copyrighting School, an online community and teaching hub for all things related to copywriting, and today I am blessed and honoured to be talking to Estelle Fallon. Hello.
Estelle Fallon:
Hello everybody, how are you?
Kate Toon:
They don’t know, they can’t see you. She’s waving, people. I called you Estelle Fallon, sometimes I-
Estelle Fallon:
We’re getting there.
Kate Toon:
Call you Estelle Fallon, but it’s actually Estelle Fallon, isn’t it? There you go.
Estelle Fallon:
Or Fallon, depending on… Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Depending on what?
Estelle Fallon:
Who I’m talking to.
Kate Toon:
I like it. Estelle is a specialist tender and SEO copywriter for the civil construction industry with a deep love of turning complex engineering into simple English. She has fun mining cold face words produced under the pressure of a tendered deadline and crafting them into diamond content that can be used across multiple channels, websites, awards submissions, and internal communications. An inaugural member of the DMC and TCCS 2020 member of the year, she can’t resist a good tagline, brainstorm and loves solving puzzles of all kinds. Sorry, I stumbled over that bio because it was so good. She has fun mining cold face diamond. What? I love-
Estelle Fallon:
I know. It took me a while to get it there, but I live in Perth and so we’ve got to do the whole mining and engineering and who doesn’t love it? A little bit of diamond content.
Kate Toon:
I love that. You’ve been working on that USP for about 72 years. It’s taken longer for you to form that USP than it does to form a real diamond, it’s really good.
Estelle Fallon:
Thank you. I had a bit of help.
Kate Toon:
And also you used the word inaugural, which is one of my pet hate words, because I don’t really understand it and it’s really hard to say, and it sounds like some kind of disease of bile, that’s what I think. ‘I’m suffering with inaugurals’, I don’t know what-
Estelle Fallon:
Oh, okay.
Kate Toon:
Yeah
Estelle Fallon:
We’ll scratch that one from the list, we’ll put that one on the Kate Toon list of words we don’t like.
Kate Toon:
Let’s go plain English and say you’re an original, can we say original? I don’t know if that’s the swap.
Estelle Fallon:
An early adopter.
Kate Toon:
Apparently you believe in astrology and you’re a Virgo through and through, what does that mean?
Estelle Fallon:
I don’t believe in astrology.
Kate Toon:
Oh, you don’t believe in it?
Estelle Fallon:
I think it’s a load of toss pot.
Kate Toon:
Wait, you’ve just lost half our listeners, thanks very much for insulting them, but yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
But, I am a Virgo through and through.
Kate Toon:
What’s a Virgo?
Estelle Fallon:
Oh, in-
Kate Toon:
The naked lady with the boobs?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. There we go.
Estelle Fallon:
Naked lady with the boobs, that is me. And she’s the handmaiden, she’s of service, but she is incredibly organised and she is incredibly process driven and yeah, people make fun of me, of how Virgo I am.
Kate Toon:
Well, I’m a Gemini and I know not what that means, but apparently I think it’s something about having a split personality, but whatever.
Estelle Fallon:
No, I don’t think it’s a split personality and I don’t really know because I don’t believe in it, but I think-
Kate Toon:
Well, you sound like you do. Listen to you.
Estelle Fallon:
No. My copy buddy is a Gemini as well and we laugh that we just… I never know who I’m going to speak to on that day because depending on where she is in her life and what she’s up to-
Kate Toon:
Oh, I hear you.
Estelle Fallon:
Depends on the person that you’re going to get.
Kate Toon:
It’s funny, my son made me do one of those ENFJP tests or whatever they call-
Estelle Fallon:
Alphabet letter, yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And I’m really anti-label, I’m like, I don’t want to be labelled a Gemini or an ENFJP or whatever it was. I don’t like any of it. I don’t like quizzes. It’s like those quizzes you used to do in magazines where it’s like, meet your ideal boyfriend and you had to check the boxes. I don’t know, I don’t like being defined, Estelle. Anyway, let’s-
Estelle Fallon:
Let’s not put you in a box.
Kate Toon:
Don’t put me in a box. Okay. But let’s go back, go back to a younger you. Tell me in five points or less, yeah, we don’t want your life story here, but tell me how you became a copywriter. What were some of the core steps towards bringing you towards the copywriting career?
Estelle Fallon:
I wasn’t actually a copywriter until I came across you and the Clever Copywriting School because I didn’t know that copywriting existed, what I was and what I always called myself was a tender writer because that’s how I got my start. When I was in child labour as a youngster, over 20 years ago, my first proper writing job was working for the sales and admin team of a large recruitment firm. So I was putting together their tenders and proposals, and from there I moved to various organisations, but always had, including education and transport and whatever, but I always had some part of the tender process as part of my jobs, whether or not it was reviewing tenders or writing them or reading submissions that come in and help evaluate them. So yeah, it wasn’t until I met you that I actually realised that copy was a thing that existed and I could take those skills and transfer them into a different career path.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. You-
Estelle Fallon:
Because I didn’t want to be a tender writer forever.
Kate Toon:
Well, I think something important we should do right now is define what a tender is. Because when you say you’re a tender copywriter, it just makes me think you’re really nice, which is really soft and gentle. So what is a tender in its simplest form?
Estelle Fallon:
Tender is basically it’s a document that organisations will put out in order to get a competitive bid for a major project.
Kate Toon:
So is it like a… It’s like a proposal, it’s like a bid?
Estelle Fallon:
It is. Yeah, it is a bid. And my love of doing them really came about when I moved into engineering construction and working for large construction companies and pulling together bids for major road jobs or bridge jobs or whatever, and there’s nothing quite like the buzz of winning one of those and finding out that you’d be going up against four big companies and you were the one that they chose. They like me, they like it, they like our price, but they also like the works because there’s two parts to it as well, you have to write something that’s conforming and ticks all the boxes and gets a high score and then you have to make sure that the price is right as well. So when you actually merge those two together and you find out that you find then it’s fabulous and then when it doesn’t happen and you find out that you’ve lost, it is the worst feeling in the world as well, because then you have to go back to the drawing board and go, shit. Sorry, where did we go wrong?
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
So it’s a constant evaluation as well, so even when you win them, you find out okay, what did we do that was well? And so that becomes part of your process.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I’ll be honest with you, it sounds incredibly boring. And we’ve had this discussion before.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
It sounds like my worst nightmare, ticking boxes, conforming. I’ve just said it, don’t put me in a box and don’t make me tick them either. And what strikes me about you, for anybody who knows Estelle, it’s a shame if you don’t because she’s glorious, she’s quite a fun human, quite funny, vivacious, and you don’t seem like the kind of copywriter who would enjoy that. So how do you bring fun into it? Is there an element of tenders where you can express your personality, your values, your niche? Can you have a giggle or does most of your giggling and enjoyment come from the client relationship? Because it seems like dry copy, to be honest.
Estelle Fallon:
The copy is dry. It’s getting a lot better in that you can put personality into some tenders these days, which is good. And I always think as well, you’ve got to think of the poor person that’s got to review these things on the other side, so if you can write in order to make their life easier, then it’s just subconsciously you get a few extra points even without realising it. But the joy in it comes in pulling teams together and working with teams and just… And you do it under enormous amounts of stress as well, there’s millions of dollars riding on these things, so it’s a really stressful environment.
And as the tender writer, you are one of the central people, you’re telling people what you need, you’re organising. Yeah, there’s project managers and big managers and those sorts of things, but you are the person that is ultimately responsible for how that thing all comes together and getting it in on time. And I think you have to do it with a lot of… You have to do it with a lot of love, you have to do it with humour because if you don’t, your job would just be miserable on a day to day basis. And I think it’s one of those things, if you enjoy what you’re doing, it makes it so much easier. And I love the learning, but I love the learning aspect of what I do as well, because every single job is different.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. There’s some curiosity there and that engagement, but sounds to me like you have to be quite a people person, which again, will give a lot of copywriters the heebie-jeebies, because one of the reasons they become a copywriter is so they can hide in their living room and never have to talk to anybody. But it sounds to me like you are being a bit of a diplomat, a team maker, is that a big part of the role?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. When you’re working in house it is, and even working in a freelance roles now absolutely. I love the client negotiation side of things, I’m not the copywriter that can sit in an office and not speak to a client, I’ve got to see the whites of their eyes and I’ve got to know the tone of their voice, and I have to have that conversation with them right up front to see whether or not we can work together.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
Because if you are going to be dry and boring, I’m probably not the copywriter for you either. I can find you somebody that will work with you, but I need the process to be fun, because it should be fun.
Kate Toon:
And that’s it, because I’m guessing that the process is fairly long. How long does it take to write a tender and pull one together?
Estelle Fallon:
Sometimes you can be working on them for two or three months.
Kate Toon:
Yes, I was going to say, so that client relationship is even more important. And I think often underestimated as copywriters, something I’ve said on the show before, that I think being a great freelance copywriter is 50% about being a good writer and 50% about being able to have a good relationship with the client because they’ll remember the relationship with you, they’ll also remember whether they won or lost and it’s a bit of a… That pressure would be overwhelming for a lot of people, how do you handle the pressure?
Estelle Fallon:
You have to start separating yourself from what you do as well, and I think my job, whether or not it’s writing tenders or writing awards, because they’re actually the same… The different sides of the same coin, because usually you’ll write a tender, win the job and then at the end of the job, when it’s all finished, you enter it into all these awards. So both of them are addressed in selection criteria, and so my job is to make sure that the words that we submit address what the client is asking for. And that’s no different if you’re doing a web job or a capability statement or whatever, I don’t have any control over the pricing, all I can do is give a hundred percent to making sure that the words that we put on the page address what the client is asking for in a way that they enjoy reading it.
Kate Toon:
Right. So if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re writing your tender and you think they’re not going to win this, they haven’t got enough going on. And how would you handle? Would you actually be brave enough to say that to the client?
Estelle Fallon:
I do these days, I turn around and I say to them, from my experience from what I know, you don’t have either enough experience in your business, you haven’t partnered with the right person, you have the information that we need. Because you need to have some background information ready to go to make life easy, so therefore you need to make a choice as to what you want to do with this tender, do you want to submit it so that we can work on the process together. And this is how we work and then we can see where the gaps are when we continue this relationship. Do you want to submit it just as a, hey, let’s do it. Let’s throw a hat in the ring and see and then get the feedback afterwards, which is usually everything that I’ve told them beforehand. Or do you want to just stop, regroup and have a think about it?
Kate Toon:
I love that, I love those three options. And so you do get to close the loop, the people who you submit these tenders, do you come back and say, you did not win because we didn’t see this, this, this, and this or your price wasn’t compatible or whatever. So you get that feedback loop, so it’s maybe sometimes worth doing it just to get that feedback loop. And obviously every time you do one for the same business it gets easier, so it’s like award submissions. Once you’ve gone through that legwork of gathering the examples and the core answers and working out your values and done the first award submission, they’re all pretty similar. And so the next time you are augmenting it, improving it, tweaking it, but you’re not doing that horrendous gathering part again, you’ve done most of the hard work.
Estelle Fallon:
You have. And then the more that you work with clients as well, the more that they begin to realise what information you are looking for and so they become very conscious of collecting it for you. So they might do a project in say 2022, and knowing that we are going to submit it for an award in 2023. So they start collecting the photos, they start collecting the statistics, they’re really aware of what information is being asked and so they just hand it to me in a little pack and go ‘here’.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So they get used to what they need to prepare and it makes life easier, so even that is part of the educational process, is a big education piece there. So people skills are important, project management and managing pressure is important. Now, you’ve talked about money and how these can be big money earners. Where does pricing come in? How do you price these? Because I’m saying you should be doing it on commission, every time you win one, you get 10%. No, how does it work?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah, you can do. Depending on the size of it, you can negotiate with your client that you do it on commission. Most of the time it’s for me, it’s either on a day rate or a weekly rate. I know we talk a lot about freelancing and not doing things on a per project basis and not trading dollars for hours, but I think if you go down the path of tendering, sometimes that is just the easiest way because you also don’t know how involved you are going to be until you are in the midst of it. And depending on how many subject matter experts are coming in, sometimes if it’s a consortium you’ve got three, two or three main companies coming together and then they have sub-specialties well, so you’re searching information from them.
So I find that yeah, if I do it as an hourly rate, but it’s making sure that that hourly rate covers you as well and that is representative of what value you can bring to that team. Now, when I’m doing a tender, I will work until 10, 11, 12, 1 o’clock at night, but that also then can mean that I need to take a week off or two weeks off afterwards. So making sure that your hourly rate can allow for you to have that downtime to recharge, because they are draining, is really, really important and work in industries that appreciate it as well.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. The value of the process and value it. And I guess, so you’re saying price in such a way that it’s not necessarily rush hours or you’re paying a premium for the pressure, but you are pricing at such a rate you can afford to deal with the pressure and then have the downtime at the same time. The question I would have there though is, as a client, you’re saying, oh, hour rate, daily rate, weekly rate. I don’t know how long it’s going to take you, so you must have to give some indication of okay, here’s my weekly rate and I think it’s going to roughly take two weeks. They must need that upfront ballpark, or do they not? If I was approaching and I’m not in the industry, but I want my tender written, I’d much prefer you to come back and say, “Well, for a small business like yours, or a business of your size, it usually costs between eight to $15,000.” So that’s when I need some kind of ballpark.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. We do that.
Kate Toon:
Oh, you do do that. Okay, great.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. Yeah. So if it’s somebody that I’ve never worked with before, and the other thing as well is that I am particularly niche, I don’t do tenders outside of engineering construction because I can’t add value to it. But then I also know roughly how long things take me to write and who I need to talk to and the questions that I need to ask in order to be able to get the answers that I need as well. So if they’re new and they’re a smaller business I’ll go to them and I’ll say, “Yeah. Ballpark figure based on the information that you’ve sent me, this is what we are looking at.”
Kate Toon:
Right.
Estelle Fallon:
Okay? And then there’s a couple of ways that you can do it, and usually it’s a case of, you budget for this much, I’ll work my little butt off right at the very beginning to give you as much, and then when we get close to filling that budget or using all of that budget, we have this conversation as to do you want me to continue? Where do you want me to focus? Because they might say that their budget is $5,000, we get to that fairly quickly because they don’t have anything in place, and then nine times out of 10 they’ll turn around and say, “No, no. You’re doing a great job, we just want you to finish it now.” And I go, “Great.” But sometimes they’ll turn around and go, “You know what? I think we can handle it from here.” And I go, “Okay, that’s fine.”
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So that having that flexibility and I can hear from your voice that also that takes a degree of confidence in your skills and your ability to be able to let go, to be able to have that kind of open ended pricing and to be able to renegotiate when you hit the budget, so you have to have a degree of confidence. To the listener it might sound super niche, not only have you niched into tenders, but then you’ve niched even further down into only construction and engineering tenders. As an outsider you’d think, well, how many of those are there? But I guess because of the high price, you don’t need to have a million clients, you just need to have a set amount of clients and also they’ll be returning as well. But how does the financials work for you? If you don’t mind me asking. It seems so niche, how do you find enough clients?
Estelle Fallon:
It’s not, that’s the thing. One day I just went, okay, who could actually use my services in the engineering construction industry? And then you think about it and it’s, yeah, there’s big players out there, and we call them the tier one contractors, but they usually have their in-house, their own in-house team and will only ever come to you if it’s super big or they’re super stressed. And so then you go down to the lower level players and it’s everybody from the traffic management guys, it’s the guys that…
And it’s all the subcontractors, so the guys that put the asphalt on the roads, it’s designers, it’s even because I also come out of a HR background, I will work with HR people that recruit for the engineering construction industry, because I can help them with the ads because they know what they’re looking for. So I think if you’re going to sit down and niche, you sit there and you go, okay, this is the broadband, but who else uses my services? And then you can usually come up with some pretty definitive silos as far as subspecialties and other people that will actually go, “Oh, I need your expertise,” also because I want them to be my client.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I like that. So you niche right down, so you really narrow your focus, but then you explode it out again into all the variables. And also then also that’s the industry, but then tenders can be exploded out into all the bits that surround that as well. Proposals, bids, awards, all the things that go around that, that compliment each other.
Estelle Fallon:
Capability statements.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
Profiles, project sheets, case studies, you’ve got this document that you have to pull together, but you also have to have this back catalogue of information that is available and it needs to be kept up to date on a regular basis, because you can’t put your experience from 20 years ago in a project for today.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
So there’s always a constant updating of the information that needs to go in there.
Kate Toon:
And there’s all those supporting documents that you need to provide for the tender that need to be kept up to date, but then also there’s all the repurposing because what I often find is once you’ve gone to the effort of pulling together all this data, you’re like, we really should have a page on our website that reflects our timeline of every project we’ve done. We should take some of these case studies and turn them into blog content. So you can actually get the repurposing as well, I love that. But do you find that a lot of your clients are repeat, once they’ve gone through the heave-ho of working with you once, it’s going to be much easier to work with you again than go and find another tender writer. So do you find that you get that repeat business?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. I get a lot of repeat business now and I’ve got my favourite client is an awards… They’re a big organisation and I do their awards and he just rings me now and he goes, “This is what we’re entering, here’s the selection criteria, here’s the information that you need. Go.” I’m like, “Do you want to have a conversation about it?” He’s like, “No. Just do it.” And so for me building, they’re my favourite clients, the ones that you’ve built that rapport with and you almost… So the thing that I miss most about freelancing is being part of that team, and so I just ingratiate myself in to become a part of their team and they don’t even realise it.
Kate Toon:
They don’t know it’s happening, they don’t know what’s happening, they’re realising suddenly she’s there all the time. All right, I love all of this, this is amazing. I want to move over to talk a little bit about how you’ve managed, because this all sounds amazing.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
But as we said, it’s taken you a while to produce that diamond USP and it’s taken you a while to get to where you are, sounding so confident in doing all of that. What have been some of the challenges that you’ve had along the way as a copywriter? What has held you back from being the awesome Estelle Fallon that you are today?
Estelle Fallon:
I think one was shifting my head space to realise that even though my background was tenders, I can write web copy and I can produce blog posts and moving into other articles and those sorts of stuff. So that was a head- a bit of a shift for me. Personally, Words That Fit isn’t where it should be, and for the last three or four years, I’d had to put my business on hold and the growth of my business on hold because my mom was really sick and she took my priority, and being there for her. So for anybody that doesn’t know, my mum battled breast cancer for nine years, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer nine years ago and she passed away at the beginning of this year, so that was incredibly emotionally draining. And I didn’t realise how much so, and I always knew that I didn’t want to build the business up to then have to put it on hold for six months or whatever, I didn’t want to have that responsibility of having people working for me to then go, “Sorry, my priorities have shifted.”
And I think I know that I sound really, really confident now, but it has taken me a long time to know what it was that I wanted to put out to market as words that fit as well. So I, when I first met you, flipped and flopped about what it was I was going to do and did I want to do it for engineers? Did I just want to to tenders? Did I just want to do taglines? I didn’t know. And it wasn’t until I had the opportunity and I would grab everything and then realise that I wasn’t good at everything, and that killed a lot of my confidence for a while. And so I had to really regroup and go, what is it that I enjoy doing? Who can I help most of all?
Because for me, yeah, money is important and I’m really lucky that the industries that I am in have money to spend and they value it, but that’s not why I do it. I really like working for the smaller businesses whose wife is trying to run the books and do reception and do everything else and just going, you know what love? You just worry about what you’ve got to do and let me help you. And it wasn’t until I realised that that was okay, I didn’t have to go chasing the big dollars all the time, that I actually got more enjoyment out of helping smaller people and getting lots of those coming on board on a regular basis to go, yay. I’m happy now.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I think it’s so true in business that if you chase the money, often it’s very dissatisfying, and then really you have to find your love because that keeps you going on the dark days, money doesn’t keep you warm at night. And then the money comes probably anyway, it comes anyway if you choose the right niche. Or you work out how much money you actually want and need to live, rather than to keep up with the Joneses, it’s a complex thing. But the other thing I hear from that is patience, patience. It’s taken you time to… Often we have to try something before we realise it’s not for us, and so you have to vacillate, you have to flip and flop as you said, I flipped and flopped, look at me.
Estelle Fallon:
And you have to have failures.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Estelle Fallon:
You have to have some failures to go, this is so not what I want to do on a day to day basis. And it’s whether or not it’s, I don’t like the work that I’m doing, or I don’t like the industry that it’s in, or I don’t feel comfortable playing there. Sometimes you have to do that in order to just go, that is not for me and that’s not where I add value. And I think that’s the whole thing that you want to do as a copywriter, you want to add value to your clients, whether what you’re producing or in order to be able to help them.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And to come back to what you… Everyone always says in business you’ve got to go beyond your comfort zone, that’s where success is. And I’m a big disbeliever in that because I think a lot of true joy and enjoyment can come in your comfort zone. I mean, yes, once in a while, push yourself out. But 90% of the time can’t we be comfortable? Can’t we be doing work that satisfies us, that we enjoy and yes, it’s not as sparkly and sexy as what Bob over there is doing, but constantly pushing yourself into places where you don’t feel confident is…
It’s not a comfortable place to be all the time. You have to find that balance, don’t you? Between challenging yourself and also just letting it flow. And it sounds to me like you’ve ticked off a few things that you don’t want to do, you said you have to have some failures, but you’ve learned from your failures, but you’ve also learned from your wins and really found out, well, I’m good at this. And it may not be as sexy as what she’s doing over there, but it makes me money. I enjoy it, I add value, I’m helping people at all levels and that’s enough.
Estelle Fallon:
And that is really enough. Yeah. And I recognise that I am not the primary bread winner in my house, and I have a husband who is an engineer, so he is a great source of information and research. And so in some ways I’ve had that luxury to be able to step back and be able to analyse, but even without that, I think that just by the nature of what I do, and I think it comes down to knowing yourself as well, you get to that… I don’t know, maybe it’s because we’ve gone over that 40 years thing and we go, I’m not-
Kate Toon:
What are you saying? I’m 22. I shall eternally be 22. Yeah. You get older and wiser.
Estelle Fallon:
I’m not prepared to put up with the stuff that I would beforehand because I had used the enthusiasm on my side, it’s like, no, no, I got other things that I want to do. This is my nine to five or sometimes this is my nine until 2:00 AM, but I’ll push myself out of my comfort zone doing other things.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Estelle Fallon:
I don’t have to do it in my business.
Kate Toon:
Your business doesn’t have to be… It’s like having a relationship and thinking that that one person can deliver every aspect of what you need from humanity, you need different things to bring different elements into your life and your business doesn’t have to deliver everything. Satisfaction, money, thrills, challenges, everything, it can just deliver some of that. I love that. So we’ve talked about pricing, we’ve talked about people, we’ve talked about patience, let’s talk about passing on some tips to fellow copywriters. Now you’re making yourself sound like some aged copywriter on a hill who’s so wise and wearing beautiful red lipstick, but you sound like you’ve done some great self reflection. What would you almost say to Estelle four years ago now? What advice would you pass back to yourself and therefore other copywriters?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah, there’s a couple, there’s a couple of things. First is you have to learn to put your blinkers on, put your blinders on as if you’re a horse. Because I think if you spend way too much time looking in the periphery of what everybody else is doing it, you would just grind to a halt. Okay? Watching everybody else’s highlight reel is probably the most demotivating thing that you can possibly do because you can’t help but doing comparisons, and the problem is is that we never compare apples with apples, and you and I have had this conversation before and you know. Me two years in can’t compare to somebody 12 years in because your business is different, you are different as a person, the world changes. If you’re going to go down that path of checking out to see who else is doing, find people that not only have the business, the same amount of time as you, but are also living a similar life to you as well.
Kate Toon:
That is so important because you mentioned there, and you’re honest about it, that you are not the primary breadwinner. So the pressures upon you to earn money are different to somebody who’s maybe a single mom or who has a-
Estelle Fallon:
Absolutely.
Kate Toon:
Partner that doesn’t earn as much, it’s very different.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And also I do, and I think you notice this as well, it’s great to have community, we have a wonderful community in the Clever Copyright School, but it can become an echo chamber and you can find that you are following all the other copywriters on social media, they are following you, they are affirming your opinions, but equally it’s very hard to find a voice in an echo chamber because every time you go to post something, you’re like, did I think of this? Did I read it on someone else’s Instagram two days ago? And while you want to be supportive of your community, it can go a bit too far and it can actually hold you back a little bit. Not even comparisonitis, just accidental copying or emulating when you don’t even know you’re doing it, you lose your own voice a little bit. Don’t you think?
Estelle Fallon:
You do, you lose your own voice. And I have copywriters from the community that I am friends with on the various socials for whatever platform that would be, and they’re the ones that I draw inspiration from. I aspire to have a business like them, I’m really lucky that I’m friends with them on the site, but I’m not friends with every single copywriter out there for that reason. I don’t want to influence their voice and I don’t want them influencing mine. And I sit there as well and go, I’m six or seven years into my business journey, if somebody is in their twenties and they don’t have kids and they’re posting all this fabulous stuff, I’m going to be sitting there going, well, what the bloody hell am I doing with my life?
So I choose not to do that now, I make a conscious decision not to have everybody as my friends across those social platforms. In the community I will talk to anybody, I will hold your hand, I will love you like there is nobody’s business. But from a social aspect, I just can’t do it. And that’s that conversation that we had earlier about recognising in yourself and having that knowledge about yourself as well as to what you can and can’t do.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I love that.
Estelle Fallon:
And what you can and can’t cope with.
Kate Toon:
Exactly. You’ve got to know your boundaries and what triggers you and all that kind of stuff. Now, one of the things that triggers me in the Clever Copywriting School is when someone needs help with a tagline and you start commenting, so this is one of our favourite things to do. So in the community, often you’re working on a tagline and you’re working on a headline or you’re working just on an idea and you just… You’ve run out of juice. And in an agency world, there’d be six other people sitting around you who are graphic designers or copywriters or producers, and you could just go, “What do you think of this?” And they go, “It’s shit, what about this?” And we love doing that in the group, don’t we? And we try and one up each other. My favourite one was the Bonnie and Clyde hairdresser one, I don’t know if you remember that, it was years ago.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. I do. It was great fun, it was a nice little Friday afternoon.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. We should try and find that one again. But there’s such joy in that. And this is the, I guess the thing that we’ve talked about this a little bit already, but that creative, you obviously have a hugely creative element, you’re very good at coming up with daft lines and one liners and quips and puns, and I’m fearful that you don’t get to put those in the tenders. Do they go in the emails to the clients instead?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Okay.
Estelle Fallon:
I have those conversations with the clients, but doing that is still also process for me.
Kate Toon:
Coming up with the puns? Yes. It is a process, it is a process.
Estelle Fallon:
Coming up with it, and there’s just the logical way that my brain works in order to be able to come up with it. But yeah, I have lots of fun with my clients via email.
Kate Toon:
Okay. I’m going to stop accusing you of being boring, you’re not boring. It just doesn’t seem to fit, but it does fit, the words do fit, see what I did there?
Estelle Fallon:
I like it.
Kate Toon:
So when it comes to writing, I want to ask a little question at the end, because copywriters write in a different way, are you a laptop in a cafe writer or are you one of these people that has the star-ship enterprise, 17 computer screens in a row? How do you write? What’s your preferred way to write?
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah, I’m a two screen when I’m doing research, when I’m doing skeleton draughts, when I’ve got to pull everything together, I need to have two screens. I don’t understand how anybody could have two screens, I’m two screens and I’m still very paper based as well. I know, I’m sorry environmental people, but I need to have-
Kate Toon:
I’m just scribbling notes throughout this presentation.
Estelle Fallon:
Yes. I need to touch paper and write and scribble notes all over it. But then when it comes time to focus, I take my laptop and I’ll sit outside and there is no distractions and I turn everything off. Because as a little social beast-
Kate Toon:
Oh gosh.
Estelle Fallon:
I can get into TCCS and DMC and just sitting there all afternoon just-
Kate Toon:
And then you realise two hours have gone by and you’ve helped 17 people with your tagline and haven’t moved your project forward at all.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah. Now I have to work on the weekend.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I’m the same. I’ve got two screens. I must admit, I don’t really use this screen, I’m pointing at it like you can see it, but it’s nice and it’s there and I have… It means I can keep my main screen clean. I do use my pads, I just want to tell you an interesting story. These are my Kate Toon Clever Copywriting pads I’m showing you, I don’t know why because you’re listening to a podcast, that I got made in my second year of business and put the wrong phone number on. And today is the last pad and I’m down to nearly three pages, this is a momentous moment, because I could never use them. It’s a big moment.
Estelle Fallon:
History coming to an end.
Kate Toon:
I know. Look at my little branding, it was so cute. I had this woman pulling her hair out and a little brain at the bottom, look at that, look at that.
Estelle Fallon:
And is that when you got a professional proofreader on board as well?
Kate Toon:
Yeah, no, I never did that. So yeah, some poor podiatrist in my- woop woop, got my calls for a very long time and probably now is a very successful copywriter. Estelle, it is always a joy talking to you, you’re such a giggle and I think it’s really interesting to hear about an aspect of copywriting that I know nothing about. Tender writing is challenging, it’s one of the few templates we don’t have in the shop is a tender template because it’s a challenging one. We do have a capability statement template you can grab for the shop. And also Estelle was talking a little bit there about day rates and weekly rates, if you need to learn more about that, we have just updated our rate template in the shop. We now have a US version, a UK version and an AU version, so you can go and grab that free. But Estelle, if people want to find out more about you, where can they go? Where can they learn more about you?
Estelle Fallon:
Well, you can head over to www.wordsthatfit.com.au, and that’s about to actually have a rebrand.
Kate Toon:
Oh. It was a threat made there a long time ago.
Estelle Fallon:
So for those people that don’t know, I didn’t have a website for about the first four years of my business and Kate threatened me that she would do something unspeakable if I didn’t go and throw one up over a weekend, but it has served me really, really well. It’s-
Kate Toon:
It just goes to show, it goes to show you don’t need an all singing or dancing website when you’re starting out, and also since you’re building up your reputation by doing good work, something Amanda Vanelderen said, doing good work and then almost you get to the point. And sometimes I think it’s about three or four or five years in where you’re like, okay, now I know who I want to be in the copywriting world, so now I’m going to pay for my rebrand. But if you did it any earlier than that, you’d be like me, I redid my site six times before the one you see now because I was evolving, I was Madonna-ing, I was changing who I wanted to be. So I think that’s perfectly fine.
Estelle Fallon:
Yeah, absolutely. So no, you’ve got to be comfortable with the voice that you’re putting out into the world, which I know is a little bit woo, woo. But if you’re not, then it will be very much reflected in the conversations that you have with your clients as well.
Kate Toon:
I love it. What a beautiful tip to end on, thank you very much, Estelle.
Estelle Fallon:
You’re very welcome.
Kate Toon:
So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you want to grab more tips, head to the Clever Copywriting School website and as I said, don’t forget to sign up for your free pricing guide. Thanks to Estelle Fallon and thanks to Midget from Australia, their testimonial or review, whatever it’s called says, “Laughs and wisdom. Looking forward to Kate’s new podcast with words like bottom warming stories, you know it’s going to be classic Kate, full of laughs and wisdom.” Thank you very much, I think that’s quite apt for today’s podcast. And thanks to you for listening, if you have a minute to just quickly leave a review, we would be super grateful. You can leave a star rating or you can write something on the app that you’re using to listen to me right now and you’ll get a shout out on the show. Don’t forget to head to the Clever Copywriting School website where you’ll find more about Estelle, you can check out the useful links and leave a comment. So until next time, happy writing.
