Helping a Ghostwriter Scare Up More Clients

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Some stories close like a hand. They open wide, reach out, and only when the fingers fold do you finally see the shape they were making all along. This is one of those.

Two Chairs, One Circle

The ghostwriter who interviewed me — and the day the chairs swapped

 

A few years back I settled into a ghostwriter’s guest chair and let him ask me anything he liked about marketing, money, and the brutal arithmetic of running a business that actually pays the rent. Then the chairs swapped. Weeks later he came onto my own show, and I spent the longest episode I had ever recorded trying to do for him exactly what he’d invited me to do for his listeners — find the trouble, name it without flinching, and hand him a map out of it. A few months after that, he found the full-time work he’d been hungry for. He is a working grant writer and ghostwriter today, doing the very thing he loves.

Two conversations. One circle. Here is how it closed.

Part One: The Gospel, From the Guest Chair

Kyle Weckerly is a certified ghostwriter down in San Antonio, and when he had me on his Career Challenges podcast he wanted the unvarnished version — so that’s what he got. No soft soap, no salesman’s shine. Just the hard-won gospel of two decades spent dragging stubborn small businesses toward daylight.

It always starts at the mirror. Strip away the excuses — the “why would I pay for a website when I can get one for free,” the dilly-dallying, the someday-maybe — and you are left looking at the only person who can fix the thing. As I told Kyle, throw the excuses away and you’ve got nobody to blame but the person in the mirror. It’s real, it’s hard, and it’s brutal, and most owners would rather stare anywhere else.

From there it’s arithmetic. I think of an episode of The Profit, where Marcus Lemonis sits across from a business owner who won’t spend a dime on her sorry website, and tells her he’d gladly drop thirty thousand dollars on a great one — because he knows it would hand him sixty in return. That’s the whole secret hiding in plain sight: return on investment. Real businesses spend a dollar to make three. The struggling ones are too busy running the other way, racing each other to the bottom, convinced the cheapest option is the smart one.

It never is. Walk into a dollar store for your dinner and you’ll buy ten cardboard pizzas to fill one plate, swimming in sodium, and call it savings while you spend more than a real meal would have cost. Cut the corner and the corner cuts you back. The cheapest thing is the thing you pay for twice.

My favorite counterweight is an old Zig Ziglar story. As a boy he got a five-and-dime bicycle, and over a few years his folks paid for it three times over in flats and broken axles and loose handlebars — until his father finally said throw it away, we’re going to Schwinn. They paid real money once, and that bike lasted Ziglar the rest of his life. He oiled it, handed it to his son, who’d hand it to his. Three generations on a single honest investment. That is the long game most owners refuse to play.

And there’s a line I have to draw, because it took me years of skinned knuckles to learn it. I used to volunteer my skills to nonprofits whose causes broke my heart — a woman in Atlanta sheltering homeless single mothers, the kind of work nobody cold enough to ignore. I offered to ignite her cause for free, and she fought me over rotating logos and cartoon characters until I had to back away from a train wreck I’d climbed aboard willingly. So now I say it plainly: I can ignite your cause, but I will not do it for free. Every time I reached my hand out for nothing, it got knocked back. A heart that cares is not the same as a hand that works for scraps.

That was the hour Kyle drew out of me. You can hear all of it here:

 

Part Two: When the Chairs Swapped

Then the strangest, sweetest thing happened. The man who’d spent an hour drawing the gospel out of me sat down in my guest chair, on what was then the Blue Monday podcast — now Rebooting Business — and let me turn every word of it back on him. He was a gifted writer chasing the wrong clients, working himself ragged for people who didn’t value the work. So we went deep, longer than I’d ever gone with anyone.

Everything turned on a single word: need. Underline it, italicize it, set it in bold and say it out loud. People don’t act without it. Clients won’t buy without it. Kyle wouldn’t grow until he stopped courting the merely curious and started hunting the people who genuinely needed what he could do. I told him to chase what I call the holy-trinity client — rich, right, and ready. Able to pay, clear on what a ghostwriter actually is, and able to start inside the next month or two. Everyone else is dilly-dallying, and dilly-dallying will bleed you dry.

For the shape of a career, I held up Jon Taffer of Bar Rescue. The man tended bar, then managed bars and restaurants for twenty, thirty years, until he wasn’t just a manager anymore — he was the expert. Then he spoke at the industry conferences, got so animated nobody could doze through him, got spotted by a producer, landed the show, and then — only then — wrote the book. Then a second book. Then he’s speaking at Google. Expertise first, and the platform compounds on top of it like interest. That, I told Kyle, is the staircase.

So we built the lists. Not names first — types first. Agents and agencies and publishers. Marketers who need a writer they can lean on. Reality-TV figures and local celebrities hungry for sharper exposure. Politicians, every last one of whom needs a book, because the root of authority is author. Lawyers with their glowering billboard faces and money to burn. People who need what you do and can’t do it themselves — not the hobbyist, not the maybe-someday. And once you’ve found them, I said, go after them like a psycho with a switchblade. Focus so total that nothing else exists. It’s the most violent piece of advice I’ve ever given and the one I meant most.

Underneath it all ran cross-pollination — the quiet engine I believe in more than any ad. You already own the assets; use the slow days. A restaurant with a dark kitchen on a Monday night is sitting on a cooking class it refuses to teach. A ghostwriter who can’t take a marketing job knows a marketer who can, and trades the referral. Help flows outward and finds its way home. Which, looking back, is exactly the shape this whole story turned out to have.

You can sit in on the whole conversation here:

 

The Circle Closes

Here is the part that still makes me smile. Kyle took it to heart. Not all of it, not all at once — nobody ever does — but enough. A few months after we hung up, he found the full-time work he’d been chasing. He’s a grant writer and ghostwriter now, putting his gift to use every day, doing the thing he loved all along.

You can lead a horse to water and you cannot make him drink — I say it constantly — but every so often the horse drinks, and walks off stronger, and the help you gave dissolves quietly into a life made better. The favor flowed one way across two chairs, looped back around, and closed like a hand. That’s the whole story. I wouldn’t change a thing about how it ended.

More Conversations Worth Your Ear

Every thread that ran through these two talks has a fuller telling elsewhere on the site. If any of them caught at you, follow it down: