A Purple Cow Approach Wins Again

by Susan Varty, Managing Partner

Sometimes you have to take a stand for your business – and not everyone is going to like it. When this happens, I think of this quote from Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow:

“as consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.” ~ Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

To solve problems, sometimes you have to change the system entirely.

Scaling a Writing Company?

Thanks to Seth and my own quest to solve problems, I became a prolific reader of business books (and podcasts today) to help our clients transform their bottom line.

I also knew that I had to help my own company.

We had a partner/law firm company structure to scale writing services but growth was stalled because of project-based work and a tradition of short-term, short relationships (in a gig economy).

What could I do that was different to solve headaches for my clients related to project and budget planning, negotiation, pricing and poor quality writing?

What could I do to create more demand with competition all around us?

The CaaS Backstory

Prior to reading Seth’s book, I worked in enterprise technology and financial services during the tech bubble and Y2K.

Shortly after, everyone was buzzing about a company called Salesforce and how they marketed a new model for doing business:  software-as-a-service or a “SaaS” business model.

Nowadays, people take this model for granted and understand the term even though they may not work in technology.

This is how we could scale – but how could I bring type of work to an industry like writing and editing?

I had to figure out how to give my clients simple, seamless writing services for one, predictable, recurring fee.

The Answer

Ultimately, I looked to the IT industry again and it has become our purple cow: the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

You can access data centres and software 24/7 but not human beings.

So, we created an unlimited writing and editing service, using an SLA, called Copy-as-a-Service. Now we can ensure quality delivery at scale.

Plus, we have standard turnaround times for each piece of writing under 800 words (which covers most items that marketers need, from social media posts, to blogs, to video scripts…)!

Our clients now define what they want and we help them execute. We simply pick up the phone to arrange custom delivery dates if they want more than one piece per day – that’s it.

It is a new way of working together that is gaining traction. We work with our clients long-term and we get to know them, their writing style, their audience(s) and their business strategy.

That’s how we BOTH win, according to Seth.

photo credit: raw pixel.com