How it all started. The story of the School of Valuable Content
Sonja and Sharon outside M-Shed in Bristol.
Our Valuable Content journey began over 12 years ago, helping businesses find their stories and communicate them to the world. While the work was rewarding and exciting, it was not scalable.
Only big businesses could afford to work with us, and we wanted more people to be able to get brilliant results from their content. We knew that people like us, running small expert businesses, were perfectly poised to do digital marketing well, if they just followed a few of the simple rules we’d uncovered. So we shared our knowledge and experience in a book, which opened more doors, and made more exciting things happen for the business. Transatlantic talks, fascinating projects, workshops for Google.
The big projects kept rolling in, but parts of our hearts were still locked in with the small business community. So we turned what we knew into a Content Marketing for Small Businesses course, which we taught in our local pub, and which naturally became Pub School. Part teaching, part group therapy, Pub School ran for a couple of happy years, before some major life explosions got in the way. (That’s another story)
Double life
So we lived a double life of big projects and group teaching, which was exciting, but, oh so tiring. Everything rested on our shoulders. We were teachers, marketers, sales people, facilitators, writers, speakers, agony aunts, and joint CEOs. Switching roles many times a day - often many times an hour - was exhausting. We went from elegantly managing this split personality business into not managing it at all.
The big projects stopped rolling in, we lost our confidence. With a slow dawning we realised that enough was enough. Sonja sidestepped into a corporate role, Sharon went freelance.
Reunited
A year working apart, and on a walk around the docks, we realised that we were both still using the ideas and methodology we’d created together. This valuable content thing was still proving invaluable when it came to helping businesses get clear on their messaging and communicate their story with the world. That had to mean something, and we didn’t want to let it go.
Brainstorming our way past the Matthew and M Shed we decided to leverage our expertise into The School of Valuable Content. We sketched out how to increase our revenue by teaching online.
Transformation through a focus on content
We worked hard to make it happen, built a new website and re-ignited the old Valuable Content newsletter list. Launched a course, and then another one. Started the Valuable Content Writing Club, which is going from strength to strength. And we’re poised to launch our first online product in the next few months.
That decision to focus on teaching online is a powerful example of how just ONE move can start the butterfly effect that changes everything in your business and your life.
What do you want to change? And what do you need to create to get you to the next level?
