Company: Bolt from the Blue Copywriting
Owners: Rachel Allen
Year Started: 2009
Employees: 1 – 10
Welcome to “An Agency Story,” a podcast that unravels the real-life experiences of marketing agency owners across the globe. In this vivid episode titled “Vivid,” host Russel Dubree invites Rachel Allen, the spirited owner of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting, to share her journey and insights. This episode not only explores the realms of copywriting and marketing but also delves into the life-altering decisions that shape a business.
Rachel’s narrative is a treasure trove of intriguing discussions ranging from the philosophical impacts of language to the practicalities of running a diverse and dynamic agency. Her agency, which serves a fascinating mix of clients from engineers to sex workers, showcases the universality and power of effective communication. Rachel’s transition from a hopeful journalist to a successful agency owner, including a spontaneous stint in Hong Kong, adds a layer of adventure and determination to her story.
A highlight of the episode is Rachel’s recounting of how words transformed her worldview and career path—she believes “words shape worlds,” a testament to her philosophy that the pen is mightier than the sword. Her humorous anecdotes, like the impracticality of working from a sandy beach, and powerful quotes, such as “words make worlds,” enrich the discussion, making it not only educational but deeply personal and relatable.
The episode also addresses contemporary issues like the impact of AI on creative industries, providing listeners with a thoughtful analysis of technology’s role in copywriting. Rachel’s critique of AI underscores the irreplaceable value of human creativity and empathy in storytelling.
As the conversation winds down, listeners are left contemplating the transformative power of language and the ongoing evolution of the marketing industry. Rachel’s journey encourages us to think about how we can leverage our own narratives to shape not just our careers but also the world around us.
If you’re intrigued by the intersection of creativity, business, and personal growth, “Vivid” from “An Agency Story” podcast is your must-listen. Tune in to be inspired, educated, and perhaps even see the world a little differently through the lens of a seasoned copywriter and agency owner.
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel. On this episode, we have Rachel Allen, owner of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting, a full service copywriting agency with roots based out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Words shape world, according to Rachel. From limitless boundaries of self-service copywriting to tales of international escapades, Rachel embodies the versatility and adaptability at the heart of word craft mastery. Whether it’s the pursuit of beauty in business or philosophical musings on the power of language, prepare to be educated, entertained, and emboldened. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Rachel Allen with Bolt from the Blue Copywriting with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show, Rachel.
Rachel:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to chat.
Russel:
Likewise. If you don’t mind, start us off. What does Bolt do and who do you do it for?
Rachel:
We are a full service copywriting agency, which means we do everything all the way up from the high level branding conversations through like fractional CMO work and outsource marketing departments, all the way right down to, will you post on Instagram for me? Because I don’t want to. We’ve worked with clients in 21 countries and counting. We do this for people in all sorts of industries. Engineers, lawyers, accountants, astrologers, spa people, sex workers, authors, influencers, basically anybody.
Russel:
That is a wide range. I’m guessing you learn a lot in that capacity when you are working with all those varied professions.
Rachel:
I know more about probiotics that I think any person reasonably should.
Russel:
Okay, good. Maybe we can get to some of that information. Were you born with a pen or a keyboard in your hand? Did young Rachel always think this is where she’d end up?
Rachel:
I always knew I was going to be writing somehow. I think I wrote my first, air quotes, book in kindergarten and it was like five pages in marker. I never thought I would do it for a living because I was convinced that people don’t pay for writing. I was like I’m going to get a grownup job and then I’ll write on the side.
Russel:
What was your first grownup job? How’d your career start out?
Rachel:
I never actually got there. I went to college for journalism because I was like, that’s the closest I can get. I can be a journalist and that’s, like it is writing and also people pay that pay for that supposedly. But I graduated in 2008 and as we all know, the market was having a little bit of a moment then. Nobody was hiring and they were especially not hiring journalists from rural Tennessee, which is where I was living. I sent out over 200 resumes and I got zero answers back. The only job I could get was unpacking boxes in the old Navy warehouse on the 5am shift with a bunch of other humanities grads.
Russel:
Okay. That’s doesn’t sound like fun. So you didn’t know you can get paid for writing. When did you figure that out? What did that look like?
Rachel:
I’m about six months into my warehouse job and I was like, this is not what I am. It’s not what I want to do. In my 22 year old brain, I was like, you know what? I bet they have jobs in Hong Kong and they do, but you need this little piece of paper called a work visa, which I did not get before I got on the plane and landed there with about 200 dollars in my bank account and had to make rent. I’m Googling how to make money online, no visa, and this content mill thing popped up and I didn’t even know that was what it was called, but it was this writing job and they’re like, we will pay you three dollars 25 cents to write a 600 word article about airplanes. I’m like, done. I started, I did this, and I was like, I can’t believe they actually paid me money. I thought it was a scam. But they paid me the three dollars and 25 cents, and I wrote the article, and then I was like, dang, I can like do this. I worked my way up from there. I did a whole lot of boring writing for very little money and then over the past 15 years, I’ve worked my way up to be able to do interesting writing for much more money.
Russel:
We can’t skip over this little bit that you said you went to Hong Kong. It sounds like maybe on somewhat of a whim, how long were you there? How many other exotic places have you been to over your career?
Rachel:
I studied abroad there, so I knew a little bit about it. I was there for two years after I went and my main reason was that it was about as far away from Tennessee as I could get. I was like, you know what? I have been in rural Appalachia my entire life. I want to see what else is out there. I went there and then I was a digital nomad for ten years after that. I basically worked my way back across the continent. I spent most of my time in and around Europe, so a lot of time in Greece, a lot of time in a couple Balkan countries, and then in the UK.
Russel:
Very fascinating. You’re probably living a lot of people’s dream on that alone. All right, then where do you want to get back to the most? What was your favorite?
Rachel:
Oh gosh. I love all of them for so many different reasons. With London, the weather is garbage as advertised, but the museums are incredible. The beaches in Greece are wonderful. I live on an Island called Naxos, which is across the Mediterranean near Turkey, was incredible. Bulgaria sounds scary, was excellent at the time, probably somewhat less so now. Spain is also one of my very favorites.
Russel:
I don’t know if this is a different answer to this question, but where’s the best place to write from? What maybe inspired you the most in terms of being a writer?
Rachel:
I can’t help it. It happens no matter where I am. I’ve enjoyed different things about it though. I will say, despite all of the Instagram posts that tell you about, live your best life, be an entrepreneur and type on your laptop at the beach. No, the beach is not a good place for writing. It’s a terrible place for writing. You get sand in the keyboard. It’s horrible.
Russel:
I could see that. Sounds like there’s a lot of awesome places, but maybe not rural Tennessee.
Rachel:
In different ways, yeah.
Russel:
Your first real endeavor as far as graduating outside of packing boxes. When did it become this, what maybe sounds like a little bit of a hustle to pay the bills and travel the world to a serious business where you’re actively getting clients and getting help and all that. When did that transition come?
Rachel:
I’m about three or four years into this. As you said, it was a side gig in my brain. I was like, this is temporary. I’m going to go be a real adult any second now. At the time I was living on access on this incredibly beautiful island and living the dream, working in the morning and sunbathing on the beach in the afternoons. I was panicking the entire time and absolutely miserable because I was like, this is not the plan. This is not what journalists do. I was going to be a journalist and here I am sitting on a beach. What has gone so terribly wrong for me? I had all of this mental turmoil before finally deciding that the fix for this was to get a master’s degree. Which I don’t use. I got a master’s degree in international relations. I used some of the research skills that I learned from that, but I don’t do anything in government or diplomacy now. That was my kind of last year of okay, the business is still going because I did the master’s degree simultaneously while growing this side hustle. Then I was like, you know what? They wanted me to stay on for a PhD and I could have. Being Dr. Rachel Allen sounds cool, but the business was more fun. I decided then that if I was going to do it for real then I had to actually make it a business and learn how to do it as a business, as opposed to a side hustle.
Russel:
I’m making a habit to ask this more now, but where did the name Bolt in the B lue come from?
Rachel:
I actually had the world’s worst business name before that. I think in the entirety of entrepreneurship, no one has ever made a cringier brand. My very first one was called The Revolution, but it had a W before the R, so like writing revolution. You can see, a very effective brand name. I had that for a year and a half, and I kept having people say, this name is garbage and I was like, yeah, you’re right. I read a bunch of things, stuff about branding and looked into a bunch of courses and stuff. I was actually sitting in bed one night and the name dropped into my head out of nowhere. I was like, oh, that’s it. That’s what good marketing does. It hits you like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. Nothing is ever the same afterwards.
Russel:
I don’t know. You could have stuck with it. You never know, it could have had a chance.
Rachel:
I might still own the domain name. I don’t know.
Russel:
That’s funny. Oh, the effort we put into a name. You mentioned some interesting industries there that you’ve worked with. There’s gotta be some funny, interesting, entertaining, maybe scary stories somewhere in there. What stands out in your mind as the most interesting project you feel like you’ve worked on?
Rachel:
Let me think about that for a second because we’ve worked with so many different ones. Ones that I’ve been excited about, we have a client who I’ve worked with for forever. They run a salon in the UK named Mimosa Beauty. This lady started running the salon when she was like 20 or something ridiculous. It now regularly comes in rankings under Harrods. It’s like the second best salon in the country. What’s cool about it is they’re also the UK’s only carbon neutral salon. She created this whole thing and I was like, okay, I’m writing your copy for you. Explain to me the connection here between here’s my salon and also we’re carbon neutral. She was like, beauty doesn’t stop at the salon door. We live in a beautiful world and beauty is what I do. It’s my job to make everything as beautiful as possible.
Russel:
That is not two things you would normally correlate. You said number two salon where?
Rachel:
In the United kingdom.
Russel:
The United Kingdom. Okay. I’ll have to remember that next time I’m over there and I need to get my hair did. What little hair I have. I imagine because you do focus on a wide variety of different types of industries that you have to get good at asking questions, maybe going back to those journalistic roots. Talk a little bit about your process and how you get the info you need to be able to write in that tone and voice and with that level of sophistication for some of those probably very unique industries.
Rachel:
It’s a lot of listening. Like you said, a lot of asking questions. As far as process, every person that comes into our agency, they talk to me first. We’ll do a little bit of pre-vetting with intake forms and stuff. Then we sit down and we have an hour long conversation where I get to know them as a person. I get to know their industry if it’s something that I don’t know a lot about. For instance, I didn’t know about accounting. I definitely didn’t know about probiotics. I didn’t know about luxury chocolate making, any of these things. Then I ask them about it, but then I ask them, why do you care about it? Of all the jobs in the world, you could do anything but you’ve chosen to make a business out of this thing. Why does that matter to you? A lot of times nobody’s ever asked them about that. They’re like, oh, a pair of sisters make chocolates because their mom made great chocolate. Now they have this store, which is an homage to her. Or an engineer that I worked with, he had been in engineering for 40 years and I’m like, what’s with the engineering, man? He was a CB in Vietnam and that translated into him being an engineer in civilian life, and he still carries over some of the lessons from that. Getting the stories is so interesting to me.
Russel:
That is a very fascinating and profound question to ask. Let me turn that right back around to you. Why does this matter to you?
Rachel:
Oh, that’s what we call a pro podcaster move. Why this matters to me is I truly believe that words make worlds. If we look at the way that our species even processes reality, right? The technology we run on is based on words and metaphor. There’s been some boring studies done about it with very fascinating implications. George Lakoff and I forget his co author now, but he wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By. Michael Polanyi, who’s a dense philosopher, also has this whole theory of articulation, but to bring it back to a more podcast appropriate level, it’s been proven that the way our brains interact with the world is based on words. If I can change the words in somebody’s mind, I can change the world they’re living in. That’s how we can build a world that we actually all want to live in.
Russel:
All right. I’m inspired. You got me. I’ll have to start asking that question more. It did always make me think that, this is crazy Russel ideas, but if you could teach a kid, make up a language to teach them or here’s the one, psychological trick, to your point, words are fun. Especially what emotions come behind it, but could you make it fun for a kid to do dishes? If you truly treat it as, this is a family event. Guess what kids, we get to do the dishes. Could you make that seem like fun to a kid?
Rachel:
I think absolutely so. Based on personal experience and also, if you want to get into some dense weeds here, there’s something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that also backs you up on that. basically, the way that you change your language, change your experience of the world.
Russel:
What is that hypothesis called again?
Rachel:
Sapir-Whorf. It’s spelled S A P I R hyphen W H O R F. It’s these two linguistic scholars who actually had separate theories, but people moosh them together. The long story short of it is the differences in the language that we speak makes a difference in the way that we are able to cognitively experience the world.
Russel:
All right. This has to go down as the most educational podcast I’ve done yet. Everyone listening is now infinitely smarter. You’re welcome, thank Rachel. We’re changing the world. Speaking of brains, we talked about this a little bit before, but AI obviously coming into the mix, different studies and statistics I’ve seen where copywriting is where it’s certainly inserted itself the most, especially within the agency marketing space. How is Bolt taking a look at AI and what are you liking and not liking? Give me all the nitty gritty as far as you’re concerned.
Rachel:
I love this question mostly because I’ve been shouting about it on the internet. The AI thing is reaching a peak now in our online market conversation. I was working with some LLM, large language model companies back in February and being on the back end and understanding it. I’m like, this is going to be a thing. It’s going to change things. My take on it is, it’s very useful for specific things and it’s garbage for basically anything else. Right now people are enamored with it because it’s like, oh, I can put in something and then the magic word machine will give me words. I’m like, yeah, but the way that an LLM works, it doesn’t actually create anything. It’s a probability game. The way that it generates that text is it takes one word, even a prompt, and then it chooses the word that is most probable to come next based on all this data that it’s scraped from everywhere. It can look creative but what it actually is, it’s just novelty. If you want that creative spark, you have to have a human involved. You can’t do that with that kind of model yet, and maybe never. I guess it’s never, but that also gets into some even more deeper philosophy, which probably is not podcast level appropriate.
Russel:
We’ve learned so much already, but yes.
Rachel:
I know, I don’t want to cram in more. We talked about linguistic theory. No, what I’m telling people about AI is, to my fellow copywriters and content creators who are worried about it and trying to think of ways to compete with it, I’m saying don’t even bother because the machine can’t actually compete with you. It’s not that you can’t keep up with ChatGPT, it’s that it is never going to be able to talk to a client like you do. It’s never going to be able to provide what you do. To my clients who are like, why should I work with you instead of using the magic word machine? I’m like, thing one, most importantly, intellectual property. Anything you create with that, you don’t own the IP to. If you create a bunch of blogs or a bunch of courses or a bunch of eBooks or whatever, you don’t own that. It’s a dumb business idea to farm out your IP like that and then have your assets basically be controlled by something else and hope that nothing ever happens bad that, that bites you in the butt on that. That’s the main thing, and then also it puts out shoddy writing.
Russel:
Oh, I agree. Some people are bad writers, so it definitely is an upgrade, but yes, I imagine coming from a professional, you’re like, this is elementary or certainly subpar. It sounds like you’ve had a very good progressive path from, side hustle to turning this into a full blown successful business. What’s been one of the main challenges you feel like you’ve had to overcome in your journey so far?
Rachel:
I think, honestly, the hardest part has been learning how to be an agency owner instead of a writer because I have a natural talent for writing that I have worked on and honed over the years, but that part’s easy for me. I can’t not do that. But learning the difference between being very good at that and then being good at running a business. Then again, the exponential leap of being good at running a business versus being good at running an agency, totally different skill sets. That was a huge learning curve for me.
Russel:
What were some of the key things you did to combat that or navigate through that?
Rachel:
First thing I did, and this is the first thing I always do, is I find the smartest person in the room who knows about that stuff, and then I ask them. I went around to a bunch of people that I knew who ran agencies or who had success or who had failed with them dramatically, and I’m like, okay, what happened here? What’s going on? And then I took it one tiny step at a time. I would scale up from me to me and one writer. It was like that for three years, and then once that felt good, I would go from okay, that, to me and two writers. Oh, look, now it’s me and three writers in a VA. Oh, now it’s an OBM. We would scale up like that incrementally. I also made a point to scale down when I needed to. I know people tend to think of agency growth as being linear, and we’ve had our team grow and shrink and grow and shrink over the years according to the needs of the business.
Russel:
It sounds you’ve definitely solved some good things to be where you’re at. What are you looking at as far as the longterm goes? What does the future hold for you and Bolt?
Rachel:
That’s such a good question. We’re in the middle of a transition now where we’re focusing on even more of the higher level strategic work that I’ve done all along. I did it as a side gig’cause it’s fun and I had built my brand primarily on writing, but now I’m enjoying the strategic stuff so much more. We’re doing situations where I’ll be a fractional CMO for a company or a company will bring in my team basically as their outsourced marketing department so they don’t have to bring in a marketing department for a launch or something. We’re doing a lot of that. As far as the agency stuff goes, we’re still ticking along. The internet’s going crazy. Everybody thinks the internet apocalypse is here and we’re like, we’re doing our thing.
Russel:
Internet apocalypse. I’ll get my popcorn. Last big question for you, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Rachel:
I think that they are self made. What I mean by that is, I think we’re shaped by our outside influences, I think anybody can do entrepreneurship if they want to. We are all multi potentiate. We’re shaped by circumstance, but I think what it honestly comes down to is a decision probably made when you’re much younger than you actually think to be like, nope, I am going to take charge of this, of whatever’s happening with me. I’m going to take responsibility of where my particular ship goes. For good or bad, it’s on me. I think making that decision and then making the decision to follow through on that, no matter what comes, it makes it all so much easier, right? What I often say about entrepreneurship when anybody asks if they should get into it, I say, entrepreneurship is where almost nothing is your fault and almost everything is your problem. Unless you can go into it with that attitude of, yep, it’s on me, then you’re going to drive yourself crazy.
Russel:
That’s a great quote. Is there a credit to that or did you come up with that on your own?
Rachel:
I think it’s me. I might have accidentally stolen it somewhere, but I think it came out of my brain space.
Russel:
Okay, there we go. Trademark copyrighted to Rachel here. With reference to Agency Story Podcast. Very fascinating. If people want to know more about Bolt, where can they go?
Rachel:
I’m super easy to find on the internet. You can look up BoltfromtheBlueCopywriting.Com. We’re also on Instagram@BoltfromtheBlueCopywriting, Facebook, same thing. Or you can send me an email at Rachel, R A C H E L boltfromthebluecopywriting.com and I will email you back.
Russel:
Don’t let AI write it. Rachel will know.
Rachel:
I will know. I can tell, and I will judge you so hard. Maybe like a tiny bit. I did get one cold email where they said, hello, Rachel. I hope this email finds you in a spirit of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. I was like nope, done.
Russel:
That might actually be a real person thinking that would be clever enough. That’d be interesting. Very fascinating, as I said earlier, I’ve learned a lot, very educational. Can’t wait to see more of your success down the road and how you approach the business and the world of copywriting. Thank you so much for sharing that today. I appreciate you being on the show, Rachel.
Rachel:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on and let me nerd out about all sorts of things.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Rachel:
We had a primarily man led company come to us and say, oh, we want to work with you, but I’m worried about working with a team that is primarily non-men. I’m like, we have people of various genders in the agency, if you can talk me through your concerns. They’re like, basically we were not sure if we can work with a bunch of lady copywriters. Oh, excellent. In the Vox group chat after that, we were like, okay, I think we need to come up with guy names for the team. I was like, all right, I’ll be Chad. My other copywriter, Claire jumped in, she’s, okay, I’m Brad. We had another one be like, I’ll be Chet. We made this whole team of very dude bro names for our fake dude bro copywriting agency.
Russel:
That sounds like an appropriate response to a very interesting question to ask, but I’m so glad you went with Chad and Brad even more appropriate.
Rachel:
I know we should have found a third one, like, I don’t know, Rad, maybe that we could rhyme Chad Brad and Rad.
Russel:
Yeah. Chad, Brad. Chad, Brad is good. I love that. That’s even become similar to Karen
