If you missed part one, it’s here: More Isn’t Better.
It’s no secret that custom work costs more. A unique cocktail. An original tattoo. A purpose-built software platform. If you’re the bartender, or the tattoo artist, or the developer, you’re aware that this increase in cost is primarily because it takes more time to do custom work. Sometimes you need special materials or additional helping hands, too.
Anyone who runs a business and wants to grow has heard the advice that you should standardize your offerings and mass produce those things to save time and money. This is nothing new; the industrial era and ensuing factories made it apparent that the fastest path to riches involves an assembly line.
I’m tempted to dive into the dubious morality of an assembly line but that’s far too big a topic to tackle here so I’ll bring you back to my story.
I used to write for a content farm (that’s what we called them, but content factory would’ve been the better term) when the internet first became a thing. Desperate, starving writers would create an account, log in, browse through a pool of available articles, claim them, write them, then get paid a couple days later. The pay was terrible — $15 an article if you were lucky — but there was already a built-in promise of scalability, no limit to the number you could write, so some potential for making maybe $30 an hour, or $45 if you were super fast. And at least I was doing something related to my college degree.
The most I wrote in a day was 10, for a grand total of $150. I bought Christmas presents for the people in my life and believed I’d made it as a “real” writer.
Fast forward about fifteen years. It’s 2021 and I’m running a mostly thriving writing business. However, I’m stuck at a plateau where I’m making enough money to pay my employees fairly and live mostly the way I want, but not really bringing in anything extra to grow. I keep wondering when I’m going to have enough to take a long vacation, or get set up to sell the business for millions. I’m hearing over and over that I should reject needy clients who want custom work if I really want to make my business take off. “Eliminate, automate, delegate” is the mantra, and it’s a catchy one.
So I take a razor to my business and cut, cut, cut. First the processes and tools that weren’t the most efficient. Then the clients that don’t fit my perfect mold. At some point, I realize the cost of having to sustain my handful of employees is my biggest drain on resources, so I hesitantly start replacing them with contractors. These writers do good work, but I don’t have as much of a human connection to them, and the spirit of my business starts to fade. I have trouble showing up to my own team meetings.
I don’t have a ton of regrets because I try to learn from my mistakes, but the day I let Nanushka go was probably the day my business died, and I do regret it, and especially the way I went about it.
Nanushka was my first full-time employee. She was my project manager, responsible for coordinating the completion of our writing and design projects, which involved a lot of moving parts. She did way more than was required of her, and all of this while caring for her VERY spirited toddler alone at home. She was a total badass and we became fast friends. After her, I added Scott and Anne, all of whom formed a rapport with each other, which was an incredible thing to see and be a part of. Having this team felt like the happy culmination of years of working in isolation, and also the start of something big.
Nanushka was the last person I let go. She knew I was struggling to make the business work financially, so she wasn’t totally in the dark, but I had always reassured her she’d be my right-hand person as we figured it out. I was so afraid to let her go that I took some bad advice from a colleague and actually did it over email instead of by phone — a choice that made me ultimately feel even worse about everything. She was professional but admitted she was surprised. Her tone was terribly formal. I felt like I’d suddenly thrown away over a year and a half of a real friendship in one moment, like the earth split open because of one email. This was the kind of thing other people did, not me. Who was I?
Post-Nanushka, my business was made up of trusted but distant contractors, all of whom I never spoke to on the phone. I did hire one more amazing (part-time) project manager after her, but never with the intention of committing to anything full-time again. That was way too painful.
What ended up happening: I worked 15 years to build a writing business that would keep me out of the content farms, only to build a fucking content farm for other people.
When growth and the bottom line becomes more important than people, why bother with any of it?
And I’d reckon there are plenty of people who don’t have those qualms, and many of them are sociopaths or psychopaths, and many of them run massive corporations.
But for me? This was a clue that for all my ambition, anything I achieved would always feel dampened if I had to treat people as expendable to get there. And while efficiency is great if it makes people’s work more rewarding (note: I say rewarding, not easier, because I doubt the self-checkout monitors at Walmart are pleased with how easy their work is), efficiency is not an end goal in itself. I closed my content farm in 2023, kept a couple of clients and did the work myself, and got hit with the reality that this wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do, alone in front of a screen.
I do still love writing. And I’d written a longform essay of sorts about a trip to Hawaii in December of 2023 that I wanted to publish. But because it was also thematically centered on my former abusive partner, I felt that trying to place it in a magazine, or pitch it to a publisher, or even self-publish it with the intention to mass produce it would take away my control about how the story was told.
It hit me — why not do all of it myself? Not just the writing and design, but the printing, binding, marketing, distribution? It was the antithesis of everything I’d learned in business. It was the opposite of “eliminate, automate, delegate.” Nothing about this would be fast, cost-effective, or easily repeatable. Not to mention how scary it felt putting a personal essay out in the world after years of analytical, non-revelatory writing.
And I didn’t know anything about bookmaking. My InDesign experience was limited to one college class. I knew this would be a complicated undertaking, but I love to do hard things, so why not?
Next up, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned from the six months it’s taken to complete The Hawaii Chapter.