Because they haven’t invented cloning yet.

I just launched the website for my wedding planning and copywriting business. Woo hoo! It took me two months to project manage and write copy for a client’s website. It took nine months to do my own.

As a wedding planner, I have always said that I will hire a producer for my own wedding. As magical as I find it to produce others’ weddings, when my time comes I want to sit back, sip champagne, and have someone I trust help with the heavy lifting. I want to enjoy it.

Websites, like weddings, are a lot of fun to plan. Make a mood board, choose color schemes, get photos taken. Both are also a lot of work to produce. Research the market, hire a team, manage a budget. Both are also super personal. When producing a wedding or a website, you have to get real clear on your values.

After six months of working on my own website, I, as a copywriter, hired someone to help write the copy for my own website. Why would I do that? Well, I have seven simple reasons.

1. When it is personal and public, get another perspective.

Everything I had to say seemed so important, so critical to my brand and even to who I am as a person. It was taking me too long to decide what to keep and what to cut.

A professor I had for a writing course warned my class against choosing too personal a subject on which to write. The attachment would show up in writing, and it wouldn’t be good. I ignored his suggestion and wrote about a relationship. It took me a very long time to write. When he returned the graded paper, he wrote at the top of the page, “Too Personal, Too Soon” and docked me a full letter grade.

In Short: We can have blind spots to our strengths and weaknesses. A trusted writing partner will highlight the best in you and edit what’s unnecessary.

2. A brand voice guide is essential. And boy, is it work.

A brand voice guide is a document that helps keep your copy consistent. Developing one helps articulate who you are and what you stand for. It clarifies what you say, to whom, and how you say it. A focused brand voice guide takes time to craft; it involves creativity and discipline to complete. And if I expect my clients to go through this process, I had better do it for myself.

I wrote an article for my leadership development client about how to hold a company-wide forum. The key to a successful forum is to create a safe space for the flow of ideas, then keep folks accountable to action items. Two people are needed: one person to facilitate the forum and one to take notes. One drives, inspires, and leads. The other documents, organizes, and owns the follow-up.

I am the visionary for my business. I need to keep the focus on that function. When creating my brand voice guide, I found someone to document my thoughts, reflect them back to me, and keep me accountable to them. This freed my brain up to ideate and create.

In short: A brand voice partner helps to hone your business’s vision, vocabulary, and syntax. To make the brand voice development process sustainable, get the right structure in place and people on your team.

3. I have imposter syndrome.

I have been planning events since I was nineteen, and I still get shy about the work that I’ve done. I didn’t want to put “Michelin-Starred” in front of the restaurants I worked for or include my big-named partners’ logos. I felt like I was bragging. And you know what? I should brag.

Getting the nudge to toot my own horn gave me the courage to say, I did these things, and I am damn proud. My brand voice guide now includes the line: A humblebrag is worse than a brag and even worse is no brag at all. You did the work. Show it off.

In short: Sometimes you need someone else to cheer you on before you are comfortable picking up the megaphone. At least I did.

4. I needed to walk the walk.

My commitments to myself were slipping. I needed to rethink how I ran my business. So I hired myself as a client. Since I was my own client now, I could take my own advice.

The majority of my clients are good writers; they just don’t have the time or energy to write for their business. I found myself in these very shoes. Hiring a copywriter doesn’t mean that you aren’t good at writing. It means that your highest and best use is running your business.

In short: I have never before hired someone to do something I could do myself. But my business is growing. To go somewhere I have never been, I had to do something I have never done.

5. Quality is queen.

When I took myself on as a client, my workload increased.

The project management triangle says that the timeline, budget, and scope of a project dictates the final product’s quality. When there is more on my plate than I have time to complete, I can either miss deadlines, let quality suffer, or can choose to increase my budget to gain more resources.

One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn as a business owner is that I can’t do it all by myself. Faced with the prospect of letting my client’s work suffer or hiring someone to help, I swallowed my pride and picked up the phone.

In short: The quality of my product is the best marketing tool that I have. When my time runs short, I don’t mind paying people I trust to help. I always get what I pay for.

6. I want to work to live, not live to work.

I live in Brooklyn, New York. Since the pandemic hit, my roommates and I all transitioned to work from home. So, I decided to go on a solo road trip while I was working on my website. As one does.

I thought the solitude would give me more time and space to focus on my website and client work. Ha. Driving is exhausting, and writing from the road is not always comfortable. I had an emotional breakdown in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There were no vehicle breakdowns, thank goodness.

I visited long lost relatives and my sisters and their children on this trip. I got zero work done during this family time—lots of love and memories, but no writing.

It was hard, and I learned a lot, and you know what? It was freaking awesome.

In short: The silver lining of my trip was that it forced me to realize my human limits. To live the life I want to live, I need to delegate.

7. I wanted to know what my clients go through when working with me.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know about my client’s experience when building a website. And now that I have the experience of building a website for my business and working with a copywriter, I came away with a fresh perspective.

I learned one way that a website is not like a wedding. With a wedding, every detail needs to be perfect. One take; that is all you get.

A website is a living, breathing thing. It is iterative. It evolves. It will never be done. You know what? My brand voice guide isn’t finished. And I am still working on my core values. Da Vinci said, “Art is never finished; it is abandoned.” At a certain point, I have to turn it over to the world.

I am gentler now when it comes to creating deadlines. I take it less personally when clients want to make changes. I know to take smaller chunks, one day at a time. My copywriting process is now more collaborative, more relaxed, and more joyful. It is progress, not perfection.

In short: Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. — Maya Angelou

When producing weddings and websites, hire some help. You still get to be involved, but with a professional on your team, this means that you can drive the vision and they can take care of the details. Just be emotionally prepared for when it is all over. Because with both weddings and websites, when the party is over, it really is just the beginning.

Tell us in the comments your own experience creating your website, planning your wedding, or any other career or personal milestones you are wan to brag about!

Stacy Danielle is an event producer and copywriter living mostly in Brooklyn, NY.

 

---

Inside the Blog Post

Blog Post Format: The Listicle

Listicles work best when my client is a subject matter expert and can candidly express their specific perspective. It is more “personal opinion” than hard-hitting facts, so the tone leans conversational.

Why use a Listicle (list + article) to convey an idea? Three simple reasons.

1. Studies show that people are more likely to read an article with numbers in the headline. Why? It feels specific. Specific feels safe.

2. People like how lists organize information.

3. It is a simple and effective “get to know you” tool that is more interesting, I believe, than a traditional profile.