The Long Version (Story Time!)

What Matters Most

In reading what would become one of my favorite business books, Small Giants, author Bo Burlingham made this observation:

Having a great business is one way of making a better world.

I had an epiphany: in ghostwriting business books, I was fulfilling my lifelong dream of improving the economic situation of so many others. My clients’ books grease the hinges of the global economy. They impact people’s lives.

I’ve read reviews of The Introvert’s Edge from people in emerging economies saying how much of a godsend the book was. My Swedes’ book Redesigning Capex Strategy improves not only the financial viability of production assets on 6 continents but the economics of the hundreds of thousands of people affected by those multi-million dollar investment decisions…not to mention the inspiring sustainability measures that always come as a byproduct. If every capital-intensive industry were to adopt its methodology, our global consumption of energy, water, and raw materials would plummet while companies’ carbon footprints would diminish by staggering amounts. VS Parani’s book Golden Stripes is read by thousands of sailors and maritime professionals who ship the products and materials that make up global trade. My authors’ collective books aren’t about how the rich get richer but how to make better decisions at every level of the economy, in every industry, and in every sector. Dr. Karin Stumpf’s Leading Change aims to help change managers succeed in major transformation projects—an area that routinely costs the global economy untold billions upon billions of dollars every year.

Am I the economic development professional working in microfinance and poverty alleviation I’d envisioned for my life? No. Do my authors’ books improve the lives and economic well-being of people all over the world? Absolutely. From Chicago to the Congo, from India to Indiana. Other people may see a pile of business books. I see centuries’ worth of insights that are changing the economic courses of individuals’ lives, organizations’ success, and countries’ output.

So, Bo Burlingham, if you ever happen to come across this: Thank you. Your words connected my heartfelt desire to make the world a better place with the work I do. What an awesome, deeply gratifying realization. Again, thank you.

But you know whose lives my business has improved most? My family’s. My ghostwriting practice has allowed me to build a life around my family instead of having a family that revolves around my job. I've spent so much of my children's lives working from home—going to their school events, seeing them after school every day, being able to “commute” from my home office to the dinner table and back again later that night.

I've been able to work from my parents' home while my kids were on break. Before my daughter started school, we lived in a ski town in the Rockies just for fun. It has been a great life and a cool career, and I have people like you to thank for it.

Were it not for you—your expertise and the book you feel inside you—I wouldn't have had the means to live this life.

And for that, I am grateful.

Books, the Good Book, and Business

I have always loved books and business.

I grew up the only child on a timber farm in Louisiana's piney woods. Without a television in our Holiness household, I lived in books: Anne of Green Gables, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Fountainhead, 1984, Jane Eyre, The Handmaid’s Tale, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Tom Swift, Bruce Coville, and almost anything else I could get my hands on.

Whenever my cousin and I would play Hot Wheels or Micro Machines, he was always the mayor of the town, and I was always the small-town entrepreneur who owned a manufacturing plant, a coffee shop, a bookstore, and whatever other slice of Americana I fancied that day.

Throughout my childhood, my mother always encouraged me to read. My father always encouraged me to write. I loved writing and wrote several short stories and vignettes in high school, but I didn't think it was something you could do for a living. I thought I would have a conventional career, retire, and then maybe write a few novels.

Engineering → Economics

As a junior in high school, my family lived in Thailand for a brief period while my father worked as a project engineer for a plastics additives manufacturer, a company he retired from after forty-six years.

As a senior in high school, I visited a missionary family in southern Brazil, and Brother Brad Lambeth lent me his copy of Stanley Marcus's book Quest for the Best. It was the first time I'd ever read a business book, and I loved it. Until then, I didn't know the genre existed.

I went off to college at Louisiana Tech University and enrolled in industrial engineering. My father worked as an electrical engineer, and I enjoyed the fact that industrial engineering blended engineering and business.

While I enjoyed the engineering curriculum—and Louisiana Tech's was rigorous—my heart kept going back to the people and the plight of those in Thailand and Brazil. I remember coming off of a clover leaf from an interstate, and on the side of that relief was an entire shantytown. The walls of those people's homes were corrugated tin, the same kind we had stacked out behind our barn because it was too rusted to use. And here these people were making homes from it.

Compared to the shantytowns I saw in Bangkok and Porto Alegre, I realized I was incredibly rich in ways I had never understood. Over halfway through my undergraduate degree, I changed my major to economics. I decided to pursue a career in economic development because I genuinely wanted to improve the quality of life for other people in the world.

Discovering Dominican Loan Sharks

After graduating, I pursued a master's degree in Latin American economic development at the University of Florida.

My thesis was on micro-enterprises and access to microfinance. I conducted field research in a barrio in the Dominican Republic. By serendipity, I stumbled across prestamistas, a word usually translated as loan sharks.

My research discovered that calling them loan sharks is not only misleading, but it's downright harmful. These people are the lifeblood of informal credit. Whereas you or I might put a business expense on a credit card because we're going to get an invoice paid in the next week or two, micro-entrepreneurs don't have that option. After doing my admittedly qualitative research, I discovered that the interest rates that these "loan sharks" charge are not usurious but roughly on par or sometimes less than my own credit cards.

These micro-entrepreneurs in their own right have been unjustly excluded from the conversation of microfinance simply because of the stigma that comes with being a neighborhood lender. From the prestamistas that I interviewed, the micro-entrepreneurs that I interviewed, and all of the people working in the formal microfinance, not one had ever known an actual case of violence used to recoup nonpayment. No doubt those fringe cases exist, but no one that I interviewed ever personally knew of someone who had been at the wrong end of a Hollywood movie loan shark-type story.

Alas, my dream of improving the economic plight of others was shattered the moment I left the ivory tower of academia.

The Great Recession & The First Reinvention

After graduating, I tried to find a job in microfinance anywhere in the world. But I graduated at the cusp of the Great Recession. The job market collapsed. Hiring froze. Thousands were laid off. Suddenly, I was competing against people with my education plus twenty years of experience. I couldn't find a job to save my life.

My wife and I had our first child—the first grandchild on both sides—so we moved to Baton Rouge to be closer to family while I figured out what to do.

Eventually, I found work as an in-house consultant for a family group of local construction companies. The CEO discovered that I had an affinity for writing, and I soon became responsible for all the marketing copy: websites, brochures, sales letters, and the like.

A coworker and I caught the entrepreneurial bug and quit to start what's now known as a managed service provider—essentially an outsourced IT department for small businesses.

Things were tough.

That first winter, the inside unit of our home’s central air died. It was about twenty years old, so it was about time for it to give up the ghost. My wife and I went three months without central heat. Thankfully, I live so close to the Gulf of Mexico that our winters are quite mild. We had two space heaters—one in our room and one in our daughter's room. During the day, I rotated the heater into the bedroom I used as an office. With the doors shut on our bedrooms or the office, a space heater was enough to keep us warm. On the days I didn't need the space heater, I opened up the windows and let the beautiful breeze flow through the house.

To help put food on the table, I took odd jobs writing for a local newspaper and then a couple of local businesses. That's when I discovered that what I was doing had a name: I had accidentally become a copywriter. Before long, I was making more money writing than I was in IT. So, I fired myself from the company (which was one of the best things for the company, as it turned out: my partner grew the business and eventually sold it, and he and I remain steadfast friends) and began my freelance journey as a copywriter, writing blogs, website copy, and brochures.

Becoming a Ghostwriter: The Second Reinvention

One day I came across an online gig posting: someone wanted a business book written. In my naïveté, I thought, "A business book is really just a long blog post, right?"

Fortunately, my author Elizabeth Allen was patient, and I am a fast learner.

I discovered that, by my nature, I love ghostwriting far more than copywriting. With ghostwriting, I felt more fulfilled. I felt like I was creating something that mattered. I loved hearing Elizabeth's voice light up when she saw how I translated her ideas into great prose. I loved feeling like I was the catalyst for helping Elizabeth reach so many more people. She was on a mission to help people, especially those impacted by the Great Recession, and working with her made me feel like I was helping them too. I loved that instead of rushing through some writing just to post it online in the hopes of edging an SEO score higher, it felt like we were working on something that mattered.

I liked focusing deeply on one project instead of writing SEO blogs no one would ever read. I decided to stop taking copywriting jobs and focus solely on ghostwriting books.

(Note: A few years later while creating a course for would-be ghostwriters, I marked Step 1 as “Don’t quit your day job.” Learned that the hard way.)

That was sixteen years ago.

Adventures of a Ghostwriter

I have been blessed with mentors and coaches who helped me find my way:

I learned the craft of ghostwriting from Claudia Suzanne. I learned how to market my ghostwriting from Latham Shinder, and I learned how to sell ghostwriting from Matthew Pollard. I learned how to live as a ghostwriter from Tony Robino, Sally Collings, and John Kador.

Ghostwriting has taken me to Atlanta, Austin, Barcelona, Bern, Boston, Cincinnati, London, Malibu, Mallorca, Miami, Mexico City, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Paris, Pasadena, Philadelphia, Portland, Sarasota, St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), Toronto, and many points in between.

And what incredible people I’ve worked with!