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How to Focus, Specialize, and Scale Without Burning Out - The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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How to Focus, Specialize, and Scale Without Burning Out

The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole

Wed Oct 22 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: Coffee With Cole: The Digital Writing Podcast

Episode: How to Focus, Specialize, and Scale Without Burning Out
Host: Nicolas Cole
Date: October 22, 2025

Main Theme & Purpose

This week’s live “hot seat” episode features deep, practical discussions with digital writers and ghostwriters at various stages of building their businesses. The focus: how to measure early success, learn and iterate without burning out, and productize your services to scale profitably and sustainably. Topics covered include metrics that matter, outreach realities, conference networking, time management, specializing, and avoiding the freelancer trap. The tone is candid, supportive, and intensely practical, with Cole guiding participants through mindset shifts around volume, patience, and simplifying your offer.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Success Metrics in Digital Writing Funnels

Guest (Makita) asked if she should be worried after a client’s new Email Education Campaign (EEC) only landed one booked call out of 280 opt-ins.
Cole’s response: The first and main measure of success is building and launching the EEC itself — “The client wasn’t doing it, now they are. That’s a win.” (06:00)
Industry-standard conversion rates are 0.5%–1.5%; one call from 200 opt-ins is within normal range.
Systems like EECs should be given a long-term view — “This could run for two years, not just two weeks.” (08:47)
Advice for improvement: run bottleneck analysis, improve or extend the follow-up sequence, add testimonials, and continue iterating.
Quote:

“You built the thing. You accomplished it. You achieved someone taking action over a relatively short period of time. The funnel’s working.”
— Cole (09:00)

2. Outreach Reality: Desensitizing to Volume and Embracing Repetition

Boris expressed concern about low response rates after 116 outreach messages.
Cole: Normalize the numbers — for every 100 DMs, expect 10 responses and 1 client. Many underestimate how much outreach is required.
Skills and context matter: some get faster results, but “it doesn’t mean the strategy is broken.”
Follow-up is critical (10 nudges or more!); treat prospects as friends who deserve reminders. Quotes:

“The number one thing I see people struggle with is doing the level of volume required.”
— Cole (21:00)
“Every person is a potential friend. Pretend you’re already friends, and you’d follow up until they got it.”
— Cole (20:00)

3. Conferences & In-Person Networking: When and How to Leverage

Derek worries about making a big investment for a first conference.
Cole’s advice:
- Shadow people already succeeding (ask to “tag along” at a conference and observe their approach).
- Medium-small events (50–150 attendees) are best — high-value networking and more depth.
- Big-ticket, ultra-targeted workshops can be worth it, but everyday big conferences (1,000+) are not always efficient.
- Specializing—even arbitrarily—helps you stand out and often attracts adjacent clients, not just your “niche.” Quotes:

“Just by saying you specialize makes you stand out and makes other people assume you can help them, too.”
— Cole (30:14)
“Simplicity is velocity.”
— Cole (1:00:00)

4. Productizing Services vs. Freelancer Trap

Andre asked how to justify building an EEC for clients without a social following or web traffic.
Cole: You are not responsible for solving every business problem. Focus on the piece you’re hired for — “specialize in one thing.”
Clients (and freelancers) often “round down to zero” when there’s “some” but not “a lot of” traffic. Even 1,500 monthly site visits is not zero.
Explain that your service (EEC, in this case) takes them from not collecting or leveraging leads/emails—to doing so, which is a huge shift. Quotes:

“The exact moment I started making real, real money... was the day I said, ‘I do nothing else but one thing.’”
— Cole (42:00)
“The more you specialize, the faster you move.”
— Cole (1:00:00)

5. Time Management, Prioritizing, and Avoiding Burnout

Roman struggles with balancing a legacy client retainer, outreach, family, and life.
Cole:
- Don’t sacrifice health, sleep or relationships if possible.
- Free up time from lowest-impact activities (TV, hobbies) or from old legacy clients who demand too much.
- The path to growth is specializing and moving towards productized premium services, not endless “retainer black boxes.”
- Letting go of legacy (retainer) clients is scary but often necessary to scale.
- Appetite for risk is personal: some fill new client roster before letting go; others cut the cord sooner and invest freed-up time. Quote:

“The problem you’re feeling now is a ball and chain you signed yourself up for in the past.”
— Cole (52:34)

6. Free Work: How and Why to Do It

Cole’s advice: Don’t feel compelled to do “a whole month” of free work.
- In social: offer one week’s content as a teaser.
- In EEC: write just Day 1 or outline the sequence to show quality and future possibilities.
- Always “future pace” — show them what they’re missing and offer to build the rest for pay. Quote:

“With free work, give them enough so they understand the value and can see the future. But don’t do it all.”
— Cole (57:00)

Timestamps for Notable Segments

00:00–02:05 | Introduction, overview of hot seat format, welcome to newcomers
02:05–11:30 | Makita’s EEC funnel: metrics, measuring success, and first conversions
11:53–21:49 | Boris’ outreach challenge: expectation-setting, volume, and follow-ups
23:21–31:50 | Derek’s conference dilemma: in-person strategy, event types, and specializing
32:37–46:36 | Andre’s “incomplete solutions,” selling EECs to low-traffic clients, and specialization
47:00–58:15 | Roman’s time management and letting go of old clients to scale
58:15–End | Lightning round of key takeaways from attendees

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“The first measure of success is... the client wasn’t doing it, now they are. That’s a win.” — Cole (06:00)
“For every 100 outreach messages you send, an amazing outcome is getting 10 responses and 1 client.” — Cole (15:00)
“Every person is a potential friend. Pretend you’re already friends, follow up until they get it.” — Cole (20:00)
“I started making real money the day I specialized and only did one thing.” — Cole (42:00)
“Simplicity is velocity.” — Cole (1:00:00)
“The path to growth is productized services, not endless retainer black boxes.” — Cole (52:34)

Participant Takeaways (Summary at End)

“There’s always a problem to solve.”
“Do one thing and one thing only—the more you specialize, the faster you move.”
“Now it’s all about the volume.”
“Don’t be a jack of all trades.”
“Measuring 0 to 1: you weren’t doing it, now you are.”
“Treat every client as a friend.”

Episode Tone & Final Thoughts

Candid and encouraging, Cole champions the long game, realistic expectations, and focusing on the “one thing” for sustainable success. He urges digital writers to embrace repetition, productize their offer, and focus on what only they can control—without falling into the trap of doing too much or expecting instant rewards. This is essential listening for anyone building a digital writing or ghostwriting business—rich with mindset shifts and actionable advice.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

All right, what's up, everyone? Happy Monday. Happy Monday. Drop in the chat, Anyone? Have a good weekend? Feeling good. I just, I guess I am out of espresso. I just instinctively went to grab my coffee. I realized I, I just, I just chugged it before this call. So we're. We must be good. We must be getting in good shape. All right, well, we have a bunch of really good hot seats today. I kind of want to just dive right in because I want to cover as many of them as possible. Real quick. Any. Any newcomers? Any, any first timers here? We got almost 100 people here. That's great to see. Love to see it. Anyone here for the first time? Hunter, welcome. Noah, great to have you. Rick, great. Dan, Becca, Sarah, David. Okay, awesome. We have, we have a bunch of first timers. All right, so if this is your first Monday hot seat, this is where students will submit questions. We've been doing this for, I mean, a couple years at this point. So we have a ton of questions inside of pga, inside the FAQ hubs, inside the replay hubs. So our goal is we always try and tackle new questions if we can on these, just to keep building that repository and always be creating new things for everyone inside pga. And then sometimes, you know, we'll go down tangents. We might talk about a little more advanced things, but that's okay. I always, even if you're at the very, very beginning, I always like kind of future pacing a little bit because even if things don't make sense today, hearing it once, twice, 10 times, 20 times is only going to accelerate your learning more. So thanks everyone for making the time. I know blocking an hour is. It can be a big ask, so I always appreciate when people show up and, and we get to do this live. 120 people here, so that's great. Okay, let's dive right in. Do we have Makita here? Yes.

B (2:05)

Good morning.

A (2:07)

Good morning, Makita. How are you?

B (2:08)

I'm great. How are you doing?

A (2:10)

Fantastic. All right, so you want to talk client EEC metrics. You want to, you want to tell me what they are? High level.

B (2:18)

Yes. So I did an EC for her. We launched it a couple of weeks ago. The interest has been really nice, but then her, not a lot of people. She only got one person who booked a call, so that kind of bummed me up a little bit. So just one.

A (2:33)

How many. How many people opted in?

B (2:35)

280.

C (2:37)

Okay.

A (6:09)

To take an action. If you, if, if you have, if you have a 1% conversion rate on an email list in general, that is fantastic. That is like industry standard. Great. Okay, so just like me looking at this going, all right, you captured 200 people, you have a very high open rate and you got someone to take an action. The funnel's working, the funnel's working. So, so then it becomes a question of, and I'm, I'm going to jump to something a little more advanced here for, for you and for everyone, okay? Once you have something built like this, the next step, which is the next thing that you could help the client do, because they, they, they didn't pay you to get them a hundred calls, right? They paid you to build this asset that now works for them for forever, right? So the next thing that you can help them with if they would like your help, is what we like to call bottleneck analysis. So bottleneck analysis is you built this little funnel. Okay, great. So now how do you improve it? How you improve it, you have different levers. You could either help them drive more traffic, which increases the opt ins, which will probably keep open rate relatively the same, which will probably mean more people take action because you have the thing built, right? The other thing you could help them with if you're not going to help them drive traffic, is you help them go, all right, look, out of our five day EEC and our three day FOMO sequence, we booked one call, what else could we do? You could improve the three day FOMO sequence. Maybe, maybe you need to speak to the value of the call a little bit more or a little bit better. Maybe you need to add in testimonials, maybe you need to add in screenshots of what they're actually going to get, right? You can improve the three day FOMO sequence. You could extend the FOMO sequence. Instead of 3 days, why not 7 days, why not 10 days, why not 30 days, right? You could plug the action more in the Eclipse. So maybe you put it as a PS at the end of every day. So these are all little things that you can do and upgrades that you can make in order to make this number go up. But just to level set, I mean like this, like you did it, you built the thing, you accomplished it, you achieved Someone taking action over a relatively short period of time. And you have to, you have to keep in mind that what everyone forgets is that the whole point is that you built this thing that now it doesn't, this doesn't just run for two weeks, this could run for two years. So if you extend the time horizon over two years, if they book 200 calls, that is a massive, that's a massive ROI. Right? It's just often we forget and we're like, wait, why didn't it happen in the first, you know, week? Does that make sense?

A (13:06)

Yeah, I mean, just I. I think outreach and things, things like outreach and EEC metrics, I think there, there can be a little bit of a learning curve in grounding yourself in what is an appropriate level of volume. Okay, so just to connect the dots from what we were just talking about, something I notice very often with reviewing EEC metrics is someone might say, you know, the EEC failed or the EEC isn't working very well because only 50 people opted in. I only got 50 opt inside. And I go, okay, well, how many people even visited the page? And they go, well, 100 people. Okay, so you got 50 people. That's a 50% conversion rate out of a hundred people. Right? And then deeper down the funnel, they're like, yeah. And then, you know, no one booked a call or no one bought a product or whatever. And I think there's this. Just to make it more of a broader lesson for everyone, you have to sort of desensitize yourself to how much volume is actually required in order to see certain things happen. Right? And the same is true with outreach. So here you said, altogether, I've sent 116 outreach DMS to these different leaks and faucets. I've received five responses. I've sent eight looms so far. Okay, now, maybe those numbers have changed or been updated, but we'll we'll just use those as the example. Right? Okay. Okay. So typically, typically just to level set for everyone, for every 100 outreach messages you send, an amazing outcome is getting 10 responses and is getting one client. This is like bare minimum baseline. If this happens, you have a. You have a win. Okay. Now sometimes, especially depending on the starting point of the person, right? Because some people start with maybe a couple more skills than the next person or a little more context than the next person. Right. That is the fundamental reason why with education, one person can take a strategy and see a result instantly, and another person can take a strategy and maybe it takes them a year because we start from different places. That's okay. It doesn't mean the strategy is broken. It means you have different skills that you might need to acquire. Right. One person might send 200 outreach messages and get 10 responses and one client. Does that mean that the strategy is broken? No, it just means that they have other skills that they need to acquire. I could send two outreach messages and get two clients. Right. So does that mean the strategy works, like, better for me than the next person? No, it's that I have more skills and I have, you know, 10 years of shit that I can use to my advantage. Right. So I think it's worth level setting here that you're. You're roughly around those numbers, right? You've sent around 100 messages, you've gotten five, give or take responses. We might want to find ways to bump that up. And then hopefully one of those leads to a client. Now, that might require more volume, but it's worth. First, I want to level set like this is completely normal.

A (25:24)

Yeah. Okay, so this is a good question for everyone here. This is definitely a little bit more of an advanced question because what, what I'm going to tell you, Derek, is not necessarily what I would tell someone day one on their journey. So we're going to future pace a little bit. Okay. So Derek first. A great mental model for getting really good at a new thing very quickly is watching other people do it. So I think you did, you did something great by talking to Nils and Thomas. They're. They're crushing it. I mean, they're like two of our biggest success stories out of pga. Like they're just. Oh yeah, demolishing. If I were you. And they're both really great guys. I'm sure they would, they would let you. But if I were you, I would ask them what is the next maybe not Mastermind, but what is the next conference that you're going to? And would you mind if I tagged along and just sort of like hung out with you guys and like got to shadow you a little bit? Because I. If you want to learn how to like in person, like making use of in person conferences and sales is. Yes, there's similarities, but there are also differences. And nothing will power level your knowledge more than literally getting to watch someone else do it. Right. Like what I would do is I would seriously just ask, can I just hang out with you and I'll buy your, I'll buy your dinners while I'm there or something. And yeah, I just follow you around the conference and just get to watch in person how they talk to people. That I think is the first big thing. The second. The second is if I was looking at conferences as a way of generating leads, what I would do is I would. I would prioritize Facebook events that are on the medium to smaller side. Big, big conferences are really challenging because everyone is sort of in a. I'm trying to take in as much as possible. It's like a. It's like very surface level with very little depth. And what I would do is I would try and find events that are like, maybe 250 people or smaller, you know?

A (33:28)

Well, there's a couple different ways of thinking about this. The first, which is the meta concept that I think is important, is oftentimes I notice that people feel this need to think they have to solve every problem inside someone's business. So I'll give you a more extreme example what you're asking. Imagine if, if I said, you know, like, how am I supposed to help someone with a newsletter when the call to action in that newsletter is to a product that I know isn't very good, I would need to, I would need to rebuild the product. And actually how they sell that product is over the phone and they don't do a very good job selling it, which, which means I would have to rewrite the sales script. And actually they're not even getting people to show up to the sales call. And so I would need to rebuild their entire tracking infrastructure system. And actually they're not reminding people enough. And so I would actually need to build their whole reminder sequence. Like, once the moment you pull on a single problem in a business, you realize that it is actually all connected. And so it is this. It's a faulty belief to think that because you start pulling that thread that you need to be the one who bears the responsibility to solve every problem. And in reality, that's not true. Inside our business, we, we hire people to do one very, very, very specific thing. Like we launched a new funnel, I don't know, a couple months ago, and we, we found someone to do nothing. We hired one person to do nothing but make the landing page of that funnel load faster. The only thing we hired that person to do, right? But we hired that person because they were like, all I do is specialize in making landing pages load faster, right? So the meta, the meta takeaway here is really recognizing that there are so many individual problems in a business that it actually is a mistake to think you need to solve all of them. Just focus on solving one. Okay, now the specific answer to what you asked is like, why would you sell someone an EEC who doesn't have social traffic? So there's two ways of thinking about this. One is the person, that person might not be the best person to pitch an EC to, right? Like, you have a gazillion people you could reach out to. So reach out to the people that you feel like you have the highest likelihood of helping. But the second way, which is the way that you maximize the most opportunity, is Realizing that what most people get wrong is they round down to zero. So I'll tell you what that means. Most people, they might have a LinkedIn profile and they go, I'm not very active on LinkedIn and they round down to zero. But when you look at their profile, you realize actually they're posting once a week or once every two weeks and actually their profile is getting like a hundred views a month just making up random numbers. Is that zero? Nope, it is not zero. Right. And so most, most people round down to zero not realizing that they're actually already is opportunity on the table. The even easier one than that is web traffic. Everyone rounds down to zero. They're like, I, oh, I'm not generating any traffic. Okay, is there, is their website actually zero? No, their website is, we get, you know, 1500 visitors a month. That's not zero, that's 1, 500 people. Right. And so oftentimes this question is, I, I notice tends to sit in the context of people thinking it's zero when it's actually not. Does that make sense?

A (38:53)

Well, yeah. So here's, here's what's ironic about selling services is that services fundamentally I want this to not get, to not get misunderstood. Services in many ways are incomplete solutions because, because they are connected to other things in the business that you don't have control over. Right. Like I could re, I could, I could create an EEC for anyone Here, and I could attract a shit ton of potential clients for you. But if you get on the call with the client and completely fumble it, I don't have control over that. And so every service fundamentally is in some way incomplete. So you have to recognize that, like, that's okay. Okay. But the second thing is that the. An eec, though, at the same time is a complete solution in the sense that once it is built, it works for them forever. So if you build an ec. So let's just walk through the hypothetical. Let's say you're pitching, I don't know, a marketing agency. They're really small, they're in Chicago, and they only get a thousand visitors to their website a month and they have no social traffic. You go, well, all you really need is one new client a month and that has a meaningful impact for your agency. Right? Yeah. Okay, so in order to get one client a month, don't you feel like, first we need to know who those people are, second, we need their email address, third, we need them opening the emails, and fourth, we need them educated on how you can help them. Do we agree with that? Yeah. Okay, great. So why don't we build an EEC that captures that web traffic and educates them so that you can have more elevated sales conversations with them. By the time they get on the phone, we'll prompt them to book a call with you. That in and of itself is, is a complete solution. Right, because right now they're not. That's why at the beginning of this hot seat, I said, like, one of the things that people misunderstand so much about services is that the measure for success for the vast majority of clients is you're not doing it. Now you're doing it. You're not capturing any web traffic now you're capturing web traffic. You're not educating people unless they're on the phone with you. Now you're educating people via email. That's the only thing you need to get them to understand.