Hi. It’s Abby, Founder of The Voice Bureau and creator of the Voice Values paradigm for branding.

A while back, in the midst of some big life changes, I found that my relationship to creativity had changed. And, after years of full-time creative self-employment, so had my relationship to work and livelihood. That changed profoundly.

In a tight nutshell, creativity became more important to me. Not in an abstract sense — not creativity “as a birthright” or a concept or a practice. But creativity in a concrete and vital way: my personal creativity and my capacity to explore it. I became very interested in my bandwidth for my own personal creativity, aside from anything that was tied to earning income, meeting expectations, or packaging work for market. I became greedy for more time and more freedom to explore my personal creativity, separate from business.

At the same time, my relationship to livelihood changed. After a decade of full-time creative self-employment (first with a store, then with a freelance copywriting business called Abby Kerr Ink, then with the agency that is The Voice Bureau), I began to question the gestalt of creative self-employment, for me.

The last stop on this self-exploration around creativity and livelihood, for me, was this:

I no longer wanted my livelihood to be tied to the most personal expression of my creativity that I had bandwidth for.

I wanted to separate art and earning.

I decided that I wanted to earn a good living using the following criteria MORE than I wanted to be self-employed:

• work that left my deepest, most exhilarating, personal creativity largely untapped
• work that occupied about 40 hours a week and rarely, if ever, more
• work that stayed out of my nightly dreams and my weekend musings
• work where I could be an individual contributor, but not the face of the brand, the driver of the business, or the heart and soul

After so many years of completely running the show, I realized that what I wanted now was a job, not an empire.

In short, my priorities changed. As they do, for most people, over time. I was 27 when I first became fully self-employed. I’m nearly 39 now. I want different things, in a different way than I once did. My vision of fulfillment and success has changed.

So a while back, I decided that the right next step for ME was to separate creative desire and work-for-pay. (I know — I might’ve once thought this was blasphemy.)

My current stance on totally embracing a j-o-b doesn’t jive with the ethos and mythos of creative entrepreneurship, a stage on which (theoretically) you should find a way to package what you love to do so that you can do it in a way you feel good about, and earn good money at it.

After 10 years of self-employment, I decided that I no longer wanted to pursue this goal.

And yes, I know that many of my creatively entrepreneurial friends cracked their own code on work-life balance, mastered organic systems, and productivity-hacked their way to fulfillment. Work-life balance is something I’ve always massively struggled with (as my close friends both inside and outside of entrepreneurship know), and I’ve made my peace with that.

So I got a traditional day job. And then a different one. As I write this today, I’ve been full-time employed in the traditional workforce for about a year and a half. I have a job description and a salary and benefits and a manager and co-workers and an office I go to about eight days a month.

I also have evenings and weekends almost always free from income-generating work, and time on my calendar to pursue not-for-pay creativity (hello, fiction and cooking and home design) and relationships and fitness pursuits and SLEEP and travel and hobbies and just all the things I always demoted out of guilt when I was self-employed.

I work a day job so that I can use my creative energy outside of work hours to pursue art that isn’t imminently for pay, and possibly never will be.

I’ve separated art and money, for myself. At least for now, and for the foreseeable future.

But this isn’t the end of the story.

I’m happy knowing that The Voice Bureau can still thrive and is on page one of a whole new volume.

Even though life has moved me into a new season, and I’m no longer self-employed, this business I started 8 years ago is continuing on.

The Voice Bureau is moving into a brave new season of its own. This work that captured my heart and engrossed my imagination for so many years will go on.

I’m so happy to announce that the business has a new owner, the inimitable Katie Mehas.

If you’ve been part of our community for long, or if you’ve been a client of ours over the past 4 years, you already know Katie, the person who’s been running The Voice Bureau alongside me. If you hired us for copywriting or consulting from 2012 onward, Katie’s been your main point of contact throughout the life of the project, and on the blog you’ve gotten to hear her perspective on seeing what’s unique about you in business, hearing your own brand voice, and thinking like an editor about your own brand.

Katie has helped build The Voice Bureau into something even stronger, especially the backend in terms of operations, infrastructure, and organization. She’s a natural born writer with a very distinct voice, style, and point of view, a love of wordplay, and client management super-prowess, so it’s been easy to share decision-making with her over these last few years.

That’s why the decision to hand this nearly 8-year-old business over to her, officially, has been easy, too.

Recently, Katie and I signed the papers that would transfer full ownership of The Voice Bureau to her.

So yes, this is an official announcement that I’m moving on. I’m no longer the owner of a brand voice development and copywriting agency called The Voice Bureau. But the amazing Katie is — and I can’t wait to watch how it flourishes under her aegis.

Like most of the incredible people in our clientele and our readership, Katie is very much invested in remaining creatively self-employed — and she’s going to be even more engaged than ever in working with others who want the same.

She’s been involved with The Voice Bureau long enough to have internalized everything this business stands for. She’ll be carrying on the core tenets of what it stands for — working with values-driven businesses, tapping a business’s innate Voice Values for website and offer language and symbology, helping businesses and brands to discover and use their own unique voice in a way that draws their Right People to them. All the things that I (and that she and I) have created will continue to be a part of that.

It’s true that I won’t be the face of The Voice Bureau any longer. But the work I created for it, namely the Voice Values, are still very much the soul of it.

I’ll be keeping an eye on things from a distance and popping in from time to time with a blog post. I didn’t pour myself into building this business for almost a decade to just walk away without a backward glance.

To you, the casual reader who’s recently discovered us, and to you, the devoted reader who’s been following my entrepreneurial journey and the work of The Voice Bureau for years — thank you. Getting to work with you, your dreams and visions, and your amazing repertoires of talents and skill sets, has been creatively rewarding and personally affecting.

I’m so proud of what we’ve built, and what you allowed us to build through entrusting us with helping to bring your brand voices to life online.

I look forward to seeing what’s next for Katie and The Voice Bureau. She’ll be in touch very soon with a post of her own, a post heralding the start of her first ownership year, and letting you know what you can look forward to.

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For the past week, we’ve been casually dropping a pretty major evolutionary fact about our own business on social media.

We did it here. And here. And here.

And now it’s time for the official announcement.

The news? The Voice Bureau has a new Creative Director: Katie Mehas. If you’ve been a regular Voice Bureau reader or a client of ours over the past 4 years, you’ve probably heard Katie’s name and/or had quite a bit of interaction with her via email and docs.

What? You might be saying. Abby, you’re handing over the Creative Directorship of your own business?

Yes, I’m telling you. Yes, I am.

Here’s why:

Over the past 10 years of self-employment, my vision for what it means to own a business has evolved. While once it was a way to fulfill my own creative growth while doing work I truly love, I’ve added to THAT an awareness that this business, The Voice Bureau, is very much an ENTITY outside of myself. And I like it better that way. It doesn’t NEED to be an extension of me, personally, to thrive and serve people very well in the context of what we do. It doesn’t NEED to have my fingerprint all over everything in order to be respected and sought after. (Ego, much? Yeah, I’ve been getting that in check.)

What it NEEDS is to stand confidently in its own point of view, to show up consistently, and to make the most of what it’s got, all in service of its Right People.

A well-run business takes on a life and an identity of its own. It has its own fingerprint. It has its own VOICE. And that is what I’ve actually always wanted out of business ownership — to build something bigger than just me.

What I’ve learned over the past, well, year, especially, is that I CANNOT. DO THIS. ALONE.

Trust me, I’ve tried. Not in the last four years, but before that.

And I’ve learned that doing it with at least one other person, and often more (a VA and our coterie of writers), is eminently preferable to me. Not because I’m the most naturally collaborative person on the planet. Because I truly CAN’T do it alone and serve clients well. What’s more, I don’t want to.

Over the past four years, I’ve had the immense pleasure of being partnered in this business by the amazing Katie, and of sharing leadership with her.

As I’ve already said, her presence in this business has allowed it to stay in business (through my seasons of burnout), has allowed it to grow (as I’ve been able to create new courses and offers because she was managing our client onboarding, our workflows, and our writers), and has allowed me to take a more panoramic view of what we’re really doing here.

Katie’s creative, strategic, and organizational gifts have been a HUGE gift to me, personally, and a HUGE asset to this business. Our clients adore her and say she’s the best they’ve ever seen or dealt with at what she does. And I agree.

This week, she stepped officially into the next natural evolution of her role at The Voice Bureau — Creative Director.

Me, I’m assuming the title of Founder & Brand Voice Specialist. It feels like just the right fit for this season of my life, for where I want to be today, and for where I want to go from here. I will continue to be involved in the business on a pretty intimate level on a daily (well, week-daily) basis, but I will be able to focus on the bigger picture and on more, shall we say, involved new offerings than we’ve ever attempted before.

I will also remain the voice of probably 90% of our free content, including blog posts, e-letters, and social media updates.

I want you to get to know and love Katie as much as I do. We decided to start this intro off (which will, you know, unfold over the course of howeverlong) with some written Q&A. Here we go.

Katie, welcome to your Creative Directorship! What are you most excited about in the next year of TVB?

KATIE: I’m really excited about reconnecting with our readers and clients. Last year was a very internally focused year for us, realigning our direction, figuring out where we want to go as a business, and 2016 is the year for us to get back out there and share that. And I really think people will love seeing what we’ve been planning!

What’s your weird and special pleasure within the work we do for our clients? Any favorite parts we would probably be surprised to find out about?

KATIE: I love helping our clients find clarity in their business and their messaging. I think one of the things that makes The Voicery such a great service — and so useful to the clients we’ve served — is that we find a way to holistically look at everything they’re doing and want to be doing and boil that down into something simple and straightforward, and yet really nuanced. I have a deeply nerdy passion for great systems, which I think can get a bad rap in a time when people say they want to be more fluid and flexible. Creating a framework — whether that’s establishing ongoing categories of blog posts or developing a brand voice to use throughout your business’s copy — gives you a huge amount of freedom to create because you’re not forced to reinvent the wheel every time you sit down. I love helping clients come up with a content strategy so they can spend their time focusing on the parts of the business they really love.

I’m not sure that any of that is particularly surprising…but I also really love getting caught up in the left-brain stuff, too — spreadsheets, HTML, scheduling. It may stem from living in a small house with a toddler and a slew of pets (and another baby on the way). I love getting some order where I can find it!

What growth areas do you see for TVB in the next year? How are you uniquely qualified to take them on?

KATIE: We have so many great ideas floating around, I think we sometimes get caught up in wanting to implement ALL THE THINGS, all at once. I see a lot of opportunity for us to reconnect with our readers, to share some of those ideas — in anything from blog posts to guided courses — but also to polish what we’ve already created.

Abby, you and I recently had a conversation about our complementary styles — how you’re a “starter” and I’m a “finisher.” [Abby’s Note: Yep. I’ve become even more starter-ish as the company has grown through the years, I think because I don’t technically have to finish ALL THE THINGS on my own anymore.] I think some of that stems from my background as a magazine editor, where an idea for a story could take months to turn into something tangible, but then there’s the focus at the end when it’s down to double-checking every line break and photo caption before going to press. I think you have great ideas but may be ready to move onto the next idea by the time we get to the final details of implementation, whereas it’s in that final push that I really hit my stride. And, together, we work really well, because you’ve created such a strong foundation with the Voice Values and the learning products you’ve created, and I can take that to the next level by giving it all some structure. I speak fluent “creative,” but my native language is “left-brain.”

Describe the experience we provide for our clients in 3 to 5 words.

KATIE: Nuanced, thoughtful, actionable. Structured-but-personal.

(That may be cheating, but I’m going with it.)

Explain to our readers, potential clients, and clients what’s going to be different about their experience of The Voice Bureau with you at the helm.

KATIE: Well, anyone who’s worked with us one-on-one in the past almost-four years has already “met” me, and I think they should have a good feel for how I work — structured, but with a personal touch. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel just because I’m at the helm now. We’ve done great work with fantastic clients, and if we kept doing things pretty much the same way and getting those same results, I’d be happy. When you regularly get feedback that a client is in tears reading their copy or consulting package because they feel like we truly “get” them and their business, you want to keep that up. Overall, I don’t think there’s going to be a dramatic change in the feel of The Voice Bureau just because my role is changing.

I know that you (Abby) and I have naturally different styles of communicating: you tend to be more freeform, whereas I live for structure. I’m a little more indigo to your mauve. (We meet in the middle on saffron.) I’m sure some of that will make it into our everyday, but I wouldn’t expect us as a business to suddenly have a different feel. I suspect it would come out in other ways — more regular schedules for sharing content, maybe, or a little more of the structure that I’ve brought to our copywriting process bleeding into our business plan. But really, everything we do at The Voice Bureau is based on the foundation that you’ve created — that we’ve worked on together these past four years — and that’s not going to change. It’s the same heart, just a different face. (That makes it sound a little creepy. A different jacket? Now I’m picturing a heart wearing a peacoat. I give up.)

And there you have it. If you enjoyed this, please check out the first official Voice Bureau creation out of Katie’s brain, a 4-week content strategy course based on her experience as a magazine editor. It’s pretty brill. (Yes, I still say that.)

In the comments, I (Abby) would love for you to:

Give Katie a warm reader welcome, & let her know ONE thing about The Voice Bureau you truly look forward to and love the way we do it, and ONE thing you’d love to see bolstered or made more of. Thanks in advance for your feedback to our newly minted Creative Director!

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