After my first win, I spent a decade helping every small business I could find.
70+ clients. Every industry. One rule: understand the audience before you write a word.
When I went out on my own, I took that instinct and applied it to every small and medium business I could find. For half a decade, I worked with hundreds of businesses across the globe — through Liz Jones Media, Write Sell Win, and direct client relationships that started on platforms and grew into something longer. The work was everything: email funnels, websites, whitepapers, brand copy, content strategy, media kits, product launches. Whatever the business needed to connect with its audience, I figured out how to build it. This was the height of the email funnel era — 2013 to 2018 — and I was in the middle of it, writing sequences for businesses that had never had them, building automation for founders who didn't know it existed yet. I learned by doing, across industries I had no right to understand as quickly as I did. And I did understand them — because I made it a rule to understand the audience before I wrote a single word.
- Wrote copy for a fundraising app that turned buying a cheeseburger into contribution
- Walked B2B label manufacturing clients through press checks with warm, reassuring guides
- Rewrote a revenue cycle compliance company's voice from legal-threat to human
- Managed two writers; maintained quality across client relationships through maternity leave
A fundraising app trying to replace door-to-door sales with receipt photos — I wrote copy that made the mundane act of buying a cheeseburger feel like a contribution to something bigger. A B2B label manufacturer walking clients through a press check — I turned a technical process into a warm, reassuring guide that made a stressful day feel manageable. A revenue cycle compliance company that needed to stop sounding like a legal threat — I rewrote their entire voice from the ground up. Every client was different. Every audience required a different register. The skill I was building wasn't copywriting. It was the ability to inhabit someone else's world quickly enough to write from inside it. I managed two writers during this period — delegating work, maintaining quality across client relationships, keeping everything moving while I was on maternity leave. I ran the business, did the work, and kept clients coming back.
Off-platform client work expanded the reach significantly beyond logged hours.
Skills built before most of them had formal names or certification programs.
Charge more, earlier. I was building Director-level strategic value for small business prices because I didn't have the vocabulary yet to articulate what I was actually doing. The MBA gave me that vocabulary. I wish I'd had it sooner — not for the credential, but for the confidence to name the work correctly and price it accordingly.