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Founder@ Interview
Interview with Joanna Woodnutt
“I would say ‘take every opportunity to learn’. Go to that webinar, even if you aren’t sure if it’s what you need at this stage in your career. Ask for feedback at every opportunity. Find free courses online, or even pay for some. Not all of these experiences will be ‘aha’ moments, but they’ll all add something – and some might plant seeds that grow into something incredible..” – Joanna Woodnutt
Today we feature Joanna Woodnutt, the founder at The Veterinary Content Company. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
Hi! I’m Jo and I’m a content writer – I write content for blogs, websites, and magazines, as well as the occasional bit of copy for brochures and sales documents.
Although that’s the simple explanation, it’s not strictly true. Firstly, I may be a content writer but I am – first and foremost – a veterinarian. So, all the content and copy I write is about pets! The other thing that’s a bit different about me is that I don’t write full-time – full-time, I actually manage a whole team of veterinary content writers working under my business umbrella.
Whilst I try to write at least twice a week, the rest of my time is spent coordinating our team, discussing contracts with clients, editing people’s work, mentoring veterinary students considering this as a career, and a whole load of other things that don’t involve much writing on my part. What else do you need to know about me?
Well, I live in the British Channel Islands with my husband Ian and our terrier Pixie, who spends her days snuggled on my lap or at my feet. She’s my writing buddy! We’re also expecting our first child in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll soon have my hands full!
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
Looking back on how I ended up founding The Veterinary Content Company is strange. If we go right back to school, I loved writing and English and would have happily done it at university – but I also loved science, and science seemed like a more sensible career path. So, although I took English for fun, it was always just a hobby.
I wrote for the school magazine, I entered writing competitions, and when I went to university I became editor of the campus newspaper. Unfortunately I still didn’t get the universe’s hint, and carried on pursuing veterinary medicine as a career, even though I wasn’t sure it was for me. Even after graduation I bone-headedly stuck to my plan of being a vet. It took an old school friend in desperate need of an article writing for her magazine to wake me up.
I wrote the article – and realised how much fun I’d had.
I gradually dropped my hours in clinic, increasing the hours I spent writing. Eventually, we decided to move home to the Channel Islands, where I could no longer be a clinic vet.
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I bumped around supplementing my writing income with locum/relief work in bigger islands or teleconsulting work, but I had fallen out of love with veterinary medicine’s long, inflexible hours, and COVID finally put paid to my locum/relief shifts. As the writing work got more and more busy, I realised that I didn’t need any other income. And then as it got busier, I realised I couldn’t keep up with demand.
After getting a friend to help me out a couple of times, I decided to formalise the arrangement – and The Veterinary Content Company was born. I had no idea how much my life would change with this decision. At first I advertised for two people to write alongside me, but by the end of the first year I needed 20 vets to keep up with the amount of work we were winning!
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
The Veterinary Content Company is based in Alderney, Channel Islands. However, it’s a remote-working organisation. Most of my colleagues are in the UK, but we do have some in Australia. It doesn’t matter to me – we’re a modern company with modern working practices. My veterinary writers can work as much as they want, whenever they want, and from wherever they want.
We provide clinically correct articles about pets to clients based all over the world. Want to explain the advantages of your new joint supplement? The VCC can do that. Want to create keyword-laden content for your blog to increase your visibility on Google?
The VCC can help with that too. We’ve written over 1000 articles in the last year, they’re all over the internet. You won’t see our name on them though – each article is written by a vet-turned writer, and all of the credit goes to them.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
I’ve been extremely lucky to have stumbled across this niche. But I’ve also worked extremely hard over the last year. I took only one week off all year over the Christmas break last year, and worked many weekends. It’s definitely not the relaxed freelance/self-employed lifestyle I thought it would be!
My home support has been amazing. My husband is a director of a startup too, so we bounce ideas off one another all the time. I sometimes think I do half of what I do for me, and the other half to make him proud. He’s always telling me how amazing the company is doing even when we’re having a bad month – and this helps hugely because I can trust he’s telling me the truth!
The other thing that’s really helped us is that we’re unique. Whilst there are other veterinary writers out there, they’re all one-man bands. Getting together like we have at the VCC has meant we can cover each other’s holidays or even stop writing for several weeks without our clients noticing any drop in production.
Each individual writer also doesn’t have to chase for invoices or spend time trying to win work – I do all that, so they can concentrate on writing and being amazing vets. Balancing keeping the writers happy and the clients happy should have been difficult, but it’s been surprisingly easy and most of that is due to my amazing colleagues!
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
I think one of my major errors in this business was very early on. As a freelance writer, I wrote for a company not dissimilar to this. They paid me a certain amount, and at the time I felt like it was good pay. So when I started freelancing more widely, I charged my clients the same amount. And though I increased that slightly when I started the company, it wasn’t much and it left us with little to no margins to work with.
It took a long time to learn our worth and charge appropriately- I’m still working through those old clients and trying to bring their fees up in line with everybody else, but I haven’t managed it with everybody yet! I don’t think there’s anything I could have done differently, but that was a big problem right from the start.
I’m also learning the value of support staff. At first, it was just me and the writers. I was playing boss, editor, administration, finance department, and just about every other role in the company for nearly a year. It was one of my clients who persuaded me to get a professional proofreader when I admitted to editing articles in the bath.
And it was my impending maternity leave that forced me to get an admin assistant to help with the rest of the day-to-day admin of a businesses writing 100 articles a month. I’m still working all hours (is it just me, or does the amount of work grow to fill the time available to do it in?) but there’s a little less on my shoulders, and that’s a good thing!
I don’t think there’s anything about our processes that I regret trying – it’s been a learning curve but one mostly filled with moving forward and expanding rather than looking back on mistakes in frustration.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I never really intended to be an entrepreneur. I think my younger self would have liked the idea though. I think if I could tell my younger self one thing, it would be not to ignore the call of that love of English. I’d tell her to carry on doing what she loved, even if it was a strange combination of subjects. I’d tell her it’s ok to love English and Science, and not to worry – it’s an unusual combination that will help one day.
I’d also tell her to stop trying to fit into a veterinarian-shaped box. Yes, I needed to go to vet school. And yes, the experiences I’ve gained since are invaluable to my business. But it was ok to feel like I wasn’t quite in the right place, because it’s only now that I can look back that it all makes sense!
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
We’ve just moved to a cloud-based system (Google Drive) in order to improve the ease of access for all our remote workers. So far it’s working well, but it’s required quite a shift in how things are handed to clients and writers. We were using Microsoft Word before, and that was fine, but using Google means that our writers that don’t have Word on their computers can still join in.
For project management, we currently use an Excel spreadsheet (although I suppose it’s now technically a Google Sheets Doc) which tracks our client orders, writers, deadlines, and stage in the process. It’s been easy to adjust as the business grows and it also makes it easy to send invoices, as it’s all in the same format as my invoice book.
I’m interested in looking into an online project tool like Clickup or Trello in the future, but the spreadsheet does everything I need it to right now. And with things moving so fast for our little company, I need the familiarity!
Talking of invoice books, in future another thing we might look at is more automated invoicing. At the moment it can be a challenge to find the time to send all our invoices!
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
I don’t think there’s anything about our processes that I regret trying – it’s been a learning curve but one mostly filled with moving forward and expanding rather than looking back on mistakes in frustration.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
At the end of 2020, I set myself some business goals for 2021. The main one was to get a household name as a client – someone that my writers and my friends and even my family would recognise. In early February we had a socially-distanced beach walk with family and I was able to tell them my goal for 2021 was already complete! I was so incredibly proud of myself for building a business that had attracted such a high level of customers, and it’s still one of my finest moments.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
I’m taking some time out from the company for the beginning of 2022 – we’re expecting our first child at Christmas and I want to be able to be present as much as possible. I’ll consider it a great achievement if everything is as I left it when I return.
I’ll also consider it a great achievement if I manage to stay away and keep my involvement to a minimum – this interview has made me realise I’m a bit of a workaholic!
I’ve already set some business goals for the company for 2022, and I’m hoping to throw myself into business development when I get back from maternity leave in order to achieve these.
Long term? Well, I definitely want to do this for a few years – if it means I can support my family whilst working from home, it’s a dream come true for me. But I’d also like to get the company to a place where it’s sellable someday.
So that when I want to walk away from it and start something new (once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur!) I can pass it on to someone else, and have something to show for all those bank holiday calls with other countries, weekends spent writing, and late nights responding to urgent requests.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
I would say ‘take every opportunity to learn’. Go to that webinar, even if you aren’t sure if it’s what you need at this stage in your career. Ask for feedback at every opportunity. Find free courses online, or even pay for some. Not all of these experiences will be ‘aha’ moments, but they’ll all add something – and some might plant seeds that grow into something incredible.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and The Veterinary Content Company”
To learn more about The Veterinary Content Company Visit www.veterinarycontentcompany.co.uk
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