Templates, the dirty solopreneur secret

I want to let you in on a dirty little secret of solopreneurship I’ll simply call “templates,” though first let’s understand the originality trap.

When I started my solo career as a freelance writer, I believed clients were paying me for my raw creativity or originality.

In my graduate creative writing program, the emphasis on originality bordered on obsession. To have one’s work described as derivative was an insult and dismissal:

“Yeah, she’s like a worse Mary Oliver. Too prosaic and plainspoken for my taste.”

“His novel reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien, only without the cosmology and scope of world-building or the mastery of languages. How many more stories about fey and beautiful elves does the world need?”

Heaven forbid your influences be obvious! For shame! Take away his pen and get him a job as a bank teller!

To avoid the pain of this type of ostracism, my colleagues pursued ever more transgressive subjects, and the word choice became ever more elaborate.

One professor confided, with a straight face, that the ghost of her dead mother had once spoken to her in her left arm. (Or maybe it was the right. I forget.)

One poet described her mother’s cancerous nipple as “snoutish,” and branded that image in my memory.

My childhood was much too Mayberry wholesome by comparison. My mom packed my lunch every day, and my dad drove us to school on his way to work. I remember thinking, “I’m not sure I’ve suffered enough to be in this program.”

Yet, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t susceptible, and the way I coped with my comparatively meager supply of trauma and armored up against imminent attacks from colleagues was to make my poems ever more cerebral.

One day, the “snoutish” poet said, with kindness, “Austin, I’d love to read a poem from you I can understand.”

One of the most impressive things about human beings is our adaptability. I took the shape of my creative writing program, and I retained some of that shape with me into my first job at a marketing agency.

Soon enough, I discovered that no one cared about my vocabulary. Occasionally, a spritzing of alliteration made a bit of copy better. A clever turn of phrase might make a tagline or become the linchpin of a campaign.

But clear trumped clever, and half the time, the client didn’t seem to care if the writing were lush or lyric. It had a job to do, and beyond that, my job was to finish a piece on time and within the allotted hours.

I came to see originality as a trap. It still cooed to my ego, to be sure, but the fact was, it had less application in branding and marketing than I would have guessed. Originality often didn’t work.

I explored this idea in Chapter 6 of Free Money. We can succeed as artists in pursuing a singular aesthetic vision and, at the same time, fail as freelancers because we didn’t help our clients achieve their goals.

We took their money and used it to make stuff that was beautifully useless to them.

In that respect, setting aside originality in favor of effectiveness represents a kind of liberation for freelancers. You don’t have to create all the tools to use them to get satisfying outcomes for clients.

Enter templates, yours or other people’s.

I share many templates with my Business Redesign coaching clients because they act as a career accelerant. If you haven’t sold strategy as a standalone offer, you can do it confidently much faster if you have the right set of questions and fill-in-the-blank roadmap template.

The same is true for everything from cold outreach emails to standard operation procedures to hiring a virtual assistant. Templates save time and often contribute to better outcomes for clients, too.

Would you prefer to work with a web designer who was making up new page layouts for each client or one who had, through working with a series of clients, arrived at proven frameworks, templates with best practices built in, templates that remove guesswork?

(A quick aside: Poets use templates, too. They just give them fancy names like “sonnet” or “sestina.” By narrowing the field of choices, you may be forced to be more creative, not less. Go figure.)

Templates bring order, efficiency, and sanity to my business, and they bring relief to my clients who want to graduate to the next level of selling strategy and advisory work but don’t yet have the toolkit.

Let me share 3 specific examples of templates, and explain how they came to be.

1. Content Strategy & Homepage Template for Freelancer/Consultant

I was writing some web copy for a business consultant. Each of those 6 pages needed its own content strategy, but having written content for consultants’ websites before, I already had a good starting point.

Instead of reinventing the wheel for the homepage, I reached for this template:

1. Hero Section (Headline focused on main problem + qualifying copy + call to action)
2. Short Value Proposition
3. Problem(s) I Solve
4. Brag Bar (with current and/or best client logos)
5. Testimonial Tiles (which link over to full case studies)
6. Juicy Offer + Main Benefits
7. Call to Action (e.g., Start the conversation →)
8. Footer

Whenever you land a new project, ask yourself, “What do I already have I could repurpose?” You can shave hours off the project this way and generate better outcomes too.

2. Short Service Offering Page Template for Freelancer/Consultant

Three of the other pages on the consultant’s website were focused on specific service offerings, and I didn’t already have a template for them.

What did I do?

I combed through a bunch of other consultants’ sites, took note of the choices they were making with their copy, and asked myself questions:

• Which of these choices do I like?
• Which ones strike me as strategic or fresh?
• Which ideas or content blocks are predictable, boring, or lazy?

For example, some consultants list their fees for productized services on their websites. Bespoke services obviously vary in price based on scope, timeline, and other factors, but they might still list the starting price to repel price shoppers—”Engagements starting at $15,000.”

After reviewing multiple service offering pages, I synthesized my notes into 3 different templates.

One of them was on the shorter side. Two were longer, and one of those included a detailed breakdown of all the process, logistics, and price. A reader who read all the way to the end would know exactly what the service was, how much it would cost, and how the consultant would deliver it.

Here’s the short service offering template I created:

• Quick overview
• Bullet point list of 3 primary benefits (benefit name + short 2-3 sentence explanation)
• Agitation (Transition + 5 questions that help the reader diagnose that she has the problem)
• Belief statement to introduce solution (e.g., “Getting new customers shouldn't feel like a heavy lift.”)
• Solution statement (“If it has for you, let’s develop a working hypothesis for product-market fit and conduct the rigorous market research required to validate it.”)
• Call to action (“Start the conversation here. →”)

I call this phase of my writing process as Ax Sharpening. Rather than hacking away at the tree posthaste, I sharpen my tool. That is, I develop the strategy then create the tool or template to go with it.

Ax Sharpening has 3 benefits:

1. Once I have a “sharper” tool, the actual hacking, or writing work, goes faster.
2. My choices are more defensible. When I explain to the client the rationale behind the content strategy and specific choices made during writing, I receive less pushback.
3. The templates travel with me to the next similar project and bring more efficiency, and therefore a higher effective hourly rate.

The trick is remembering to save templates like these along the way! I use Notion for that.

3. Email Template for Requesting Client Feedback

The worst thing you can say when submitting work for review is “Let me know what you think.”

Saying “Let me know what you think” invites opinions and requests you don’t really want. Most clients aren’t experts in your craft or discipline, but that doesn’t stop them from bird-crapping uninformed opinions and ill-advised changes on your clean work.

I made that mistake multiple times with everything from writing projects to identity design to websites.

Me: “Let me know what you think about these web page mockups.”

Client: “Hey, can you make the logo bigger?”

Me (privately, later, regretting my lack of a client feedback template): “Yeah, sure, let’s do that and ruin the whole composition, and while we’re add it, let’s ignore timeless design principles and pack all the pleasing, effective negative space with chintzy clutter. You know, jazz it up a little with design knickknacks.”

If we’ve gone to all the trouble to make strategic choices, we should, when requesting feedback and getting approval, ask strategic questions that highlight our incisive thinking.

We should also provide clear guidelines and help clients give meaningful feedback that actually moves the project forward and brings higher quality, not mediocrity.

Here’s the email template I now use when I’m asking for feedback on writing projects:

Hi {{FIRSTNAME}},

I think this turned out well: [link].

You’ll notice the content strategy outlined at the top of each page and how the specific blocks or pieces of content lead to the call to action you said was most important.

When you have a moment, give me some feedback along these lines:

- Does the content sound like you (tone, personality, word choice)?
- Now that we've got a first draft, do you notice any missing pieces, inaccuracies, or new opportunities to clarify and educate?
- Does anything on this page deserve more emphasis?

Thanks,
Austin

You can obviously go light or thorough with these feedback request templates, and this is the lighter version of mine.

As satisfying as originality can be for freelancers, we increase our effective hourly rate through efficiency. And we increase both our efficiency and effectiveness through templates and other forms of well-defined process.

Now that I’m 15 years in, my freelance library has dozens of templates and templated processes. If you’d like to add to your own, grab my Freelance Business Toolkit, which includes the following:

• 1-Page Website Content Strategy
• My 12 Go-To Follow-Up Emails
• Juicy Offers Worksheet
• 5 Critical Discovery Questions + Proposal Sections
• Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your
• Marketing Plan Template, including Step-by-Step Guide

You can get the whole toolkit, templates included, for $49.

When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make  6 figures as a freelancer.
3. Custom Business Roadmap. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Business Redesign. Raise your effective hourly rate, delegate with confidence, and free up 40 hours a month.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.