Crystalee Beck has built a million-dollar copywriting business from her home within the Salt Lake City area while raising 4 children ages one, 4, seven and nine.
She is founder and CEO of Comma Copywriters, a copywriting agency that serves tech and real estate corporations. She also runs the Mama Ladder International, a community for mothers who want to start out and grow businesses. She shares what she has learned about the way to do all of it on videos on a her YouTube channel, from which you possibly can see one example below.
“I wouldn’t be a business owner without my babies because the motivation,” says Beck. “I wanted a lot to be there for them, and said I’m going to work out the way to do each.”
Beck is a component of an exciting trend: the rise of million-dollar, one-person businesses. In 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 43,012 businesses with no employees except the owners that brought in $1 million to $2.49 million in revenue, up from 41,666 in 2018. One other 2,553 hit $2.5 to $4.99 million in revenue, and 388 made to $5 million in revenue and beyond. There’s no telling what number of more of those businesses are prone to spring up, because of free and low-cost resources like cloud-based and artificial intelligence tools and robust freelance platforms for hiring talent.
She’s mastered lifestyle design to drag it off. Working 20-25 hours every week from Monday through Thursday, Beck relies on 47 freelancers in 20 states. She is expecting to rent her first payroll worker this 12 months.
Beck began developing the abilities that allowed her to create her successful business at her first jobs. Graduating from Brigham Young University in 2009, Baker got a job doing content development of in-flight training materials for flight attendants at SkyWest Airlines and have become a flight attendant herself.
Wanting to receives a commission to jot down, she earned a master’s degree in communication at Weber State University. Then, after two years as a contract features author at Deseret Digital Media, she worked as a company communications specialist at a world agency after which as a social community manager for Market Star, an outsourced direct sales organization.
After getting laid off, she began Comma Copywriters in 2016. “I had just a little little bit of warning it was coming,” says Beck, who had been freelancing on the side. She was juggling being the essential breadwinner with being the mother to a one-year-old, together with her husband in graduate school.
“I practically skipped out the door,” she recalls. “I used to be so excited to have some freedom to do with my day what I desired to do with it.”
She got serious about growing the business quickly. “I purchased myself a business license in February 2016,” she recalls. “I wrote in my journal ‘That is going to be a million-dollar business.’ I had no idea how I used to be going to get there.”
Certainly one of her early projects was writing Joyce’s Boy, a book that captures the lifetime of serial entrepreneur Alan Hall, who’d been the president of the agency where she worked.
Through her network, she won other clients. At first, Beck simply responded to what those clients requested. “I call those first couple of years my sandbox years,” she says. “I used to be playing the sandbox. I might just do what people were paying me to do.”
Soon Beck had more work than she could handle. Quite than attempt to do all of it herself, she recruited a couple of freelancers.
Beck pulled in $100,000 in 2017, her first full calendar 12 months in business. The business continued to grow, and by 2019 she rebranded it under the name Comma Copywriters.
Certainly one of Comma Copywriters’ selling points to clients has been that assignments are delivered on time or they’re “on the home.” Last 12 months, Beck says, the corporate delivered greater than 21,000 pieces of content, and 99.94% was on time.
She doesn’t worry about other agencies and freelance platforms clients may think about using “I don’t take into consideration competition,” she says. “I feel of them as options, moderately than competition. We’re a complement. It finally ends up being much cheaper for our clients to rent us than a full-time headcount author internally.”
As the corporate has scaled up, Beck has organized the corporate into three groups of writers based on the kinds of clients they serve: B2C (business to consumer), B2B (business to business), and agencies. “Team leads” manage each group. She also has a team support manager and a client success manager.
When recruiting writers, Beck has found she does well by on the lookout for individuals who match the corporate’s core values: Freedom, Accountability, Humility, Curiosity and Care. Many are women who appreciate the chance to be a part of a corporation that gives them regular work and skilled development while they’re managing household responsibilities. “I feel we actually have the perfect of each worlds for our writers, who want the pliability of being a freelancer and the support of a team,” says Beck.
To maintain her freelance team motivated and aligned, Beck offers bonuses for on-time work, holds monthly skilled development events and brings them together at a team retreat annually. After writers have been with the corporate for 3 years, Comma Copywriters gives them a $1,000 bonus to devote to ticking something off their bucket list. One woman invested in camping equipment. One other went to Disneyland.
Comma Copywriters leaves it as much as writers how much work they need to tackle. The team communicates about projects via Basecamp, a project management software. That’s allowed the corporate to maintain things running easily, regardless of what is happening. Last 12 months, when the corporate broke $1 million for the primary time, 4 out of seven members of its leadership team had latest babies.
A crucial focus of the business is giving back, particularly to women. A method is thru the Comma Cares program. For every client it really works with, Comma Copywriters sponsors a girls’ education through a nonprofit partner, Kurandza.
Beck also began a sister business, The Mama Ladder International, a 12 months after launching comma. It offers workshops and a retreat to assist women start and grow businesses, in response to demand. “I had all of those women coming to me and asking the way you start a business with little babies,” she says.
The Mama Ladder offers the HIGH FIVE Grant for Moms, which provides a $5,000 grant, together with several others, to moms who need to grow their businesses but lack access to capital. This 12 months, Lowe’s and Clean Easy Eats are sponsoring the grants for the primary time.
Beck knows from her own experience that raising children and achieving significant business success aren’t mutually exclusive. “There’s nothing a motivated mother can’t do,” she says.
