Read this before hiring a professional copywriter (how much should you pay?)

Quick story.

I’m currently working with Brian Kurtz at Boardroom/Bottom Line. We’re putting together the promotion and campaign strategy for an event called The Titans of Direct Response. (If you want an invite for the event, see the PS below!)

In case you don’t know of Boardroom or their Bottom Line brand, they’re a direct response company that’s been around since the 1970s, and one of the biggest direct mailers outside of the banking industry. They’ve mailed over 1.3 billion pieces of mail in the last two decades. At their peak, they were doing over $150 million annually in direct mail sales. They’ve also done hundreds of millions in infomercial volume, and done significant space advertising, online advertising, etc.

The late Marty Edelston, founder of Boardroom, Inc.

This coming event is to commemorate the life and career of the company’s founder, Marty Edelston, who passed away last October. It’s featuring a group of the most influential minds in direct response.

Anyway, Marty was known for hiring the best copywriters and consultants in the business.

The folks who built Reader’s Digest, Time Life Books, and others went on to work with Marty. Also, the copywriters he worked with often cost $25,000 – $100,000 just to write a single direct mail promotion. And he’d hire them two or three at a time to test their packages against each other. The winner would receive a $.05 per piece mailed royalty, which doesn’t seem like much until you realize that their top copywriters have been responsible for over 200 million pieces mailed, each, in the last couple decades. Some individual promotions mailed in the tens of millions (do the math).

Marty’s attitude about this all — which he considered to be one of his big secrets to building his business to $100 million and beyond — was that it wasn’t a good year unless he paid his top copywriters more in royalties than he earned for the year as the owner of the business.

That meant he was doing everything possible to build the business to everything it could be.

I understand that not every business person thinks this way (it’s actually very rare). And that not all businesses have the systems in place to make this happen right away.

But I’m most interested in continuing to build my business with clients who think this way, and who’ve built the systems to make it happen. When the relationship is any less, I feel like I end up doing the client a disservice. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but I recognize that it is.