Hillary Gale didn’t just pivot careers—she rewrote the script entirely. A former college writing teacher, she stepped away from academia, launched a one-woman marketing firm, and then discovered she was pregnant—all within days. With nine months on the clock, she had to lead fast, build smart, and carve out space for maternity leave while launching Moneta Copy.

In this episode, Hillary breaks down how strong writing skills are foundational to leadership. She challenges the myth that good writing must follow rigid rules, arguing instead for authenticity, emotion, and real connection. Craig and Hillary dig into what makes content persuasive, how AI is changing the writing landscape, and why personal voice still matters.

Her story is a lesson in resilience and resourcefulness. She didn’t wait for permission to lead—she made the deadline non-negotiable. If you’re a business owner relying on stale content and ChatGPT shortcuts, this conversation will remind you that powerful words—and clear leadership—still win.

Want to learn more about Hillary Gale's work?
Check out her website at https://monetacopy.com.

Connect with Hillary Gale on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hillary-meehan/.

KEY POINTS WITH TIME STAMPS

• 00:51 – Introduction of Hillary Gale, founder of Moneta Copy and host of the Finance Marketing Podcast.
  
  

• 02:18 – Hillary on why copy—not design—is what actually converts in marketing.

• 03:26 – Her background as a college writing instructor and the flaws in traditional writing education.

• 05:21 – How teaching audience-first writing prepared her for marketing.

• 11:32 – Why she left academia in 2020, went all-in on her business, and found out she was pregnant three days later.

• 14:25 – Facing the dual challenge of entrepreneurship and motherhood with a hard deadline.

• 17:04 – How she started delegating, scaling, and building a sustainable business.

• 17:41 – The number one writing mistake business owners make: being too polished and impersonal.

• 20:15 – A story about battling a grammar-obsessed client and standing firm on emotional clarity.

• 22:44 – Why good writing is built, not born—and how daily writing builds leadership.

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;30;20
Craig Andrews
I was in a coma for six weeks while the doctors told my wife I was going to die. When I woke up, she told me the most fantastic story. My team kept running the business without me. Freelancers reached out to my team and said, we will do whatever it takes. As long as Craig's in the hospital. I consider that the greatest accomplishment in my career.

00;00;30;23 - 00;00;51;10
Craig Andrews
My name is Craig Andrews and this is the Leaders and Legacies podcast where we talk to leaders creating an impact beyond themselves. At the end of today's interview, I'll tell you how you can be the next leader featured on this show.

00;00;51;10 - 00;01;11;01
Craig Andrews
Today I want to welcome Hillary Gale. She is the founder and CEO of Moneta Copy. She is a marketing strategist and copywriter for the financial service Professionals. Translation that means she knows how to write compliant copy and keep her clients out of jail.

00;01;11;01 - 00;01;12;02
Craig Andrews
She has,

00;01;12;02 - 00;01;22;03
Craig Andrews
bylines in MarketWatch, wealth tender and Clever Girl finance. Hillary is also the host of the Finance Marketing podcast.

00;01;22;05 - 00;01;33;18
Craig Andrews
It's a show that spotlights in-depth conversations on marketing with financial professionals and finance marketing experts. hillary, welcome.

00;01;33;21 - 00;01;36;08
Hillary Gale
Thank you Craig. I'm so happy to be here with you.

00;01;36;11 - 00;01;39;18
Craig Andrews
Hey, I've been looking forward to it. You know, we connected.

00;01;39;18 - 00;01;51;22
Craig Andrews
We connected well five, six weeks ago. And then my life went chaotic, and we rescheduled, rescheduled, rescheduled. But, you know,

00;01;51;22 - 00;01;58;22
Craig Andrews
you know, I'm looking forward to this. You know, we haven't had a lot of people talk about copy.

00;01;58;22 - 00;02;04;07
Craig Andrews
And, you know, for those who are listening, that may seem boring, but you know what?

00;02;04;07 - 00;02;18;07
Craig Andrews
Words are some of the most powerful things. And I would say I'm interested in your take, but I would say that if you wouldn't be able to move people, you'd better be able to master words.

00;02;18;22 - 00;02;41;21
Hillary Gale
I, I mean I couldn't agree more. I think in the world of marketing people get so excited about design and just their website look pretty. And do they have the right brand colors and things like that. And yes that's important. But really it's the words that are going to connect with people. It's not the colors that are on your website, it's the words that are going to make people take an action.

00;02;41;24 - 00;03;08;13
Craig Andrews
Yeah. Now I'm I'm weird in the marketing world. I'm a engineer by training. And and when I studied writing I went from me both in high school and college. High school taught me how to be a bad writer. College taught me how to be a worse writer. And everything we wrote was, like,

00;03;08;13 - 00;03;09;23
Craig Andrews
boring. I mean, it was like.

00;03;09;28 - 00;03;16;23
Craig Andrews
It was almost like we were taught to write to, to bore our audience to tears.

00;03;16;24 - 00;03;19;10
Hillary Gale
Yeah.

00;03;19;13 - 00;03;25;17
Craig Andrews
Is I realize I'm talking to somebody who used to be used to be a teacher.

00;03;25;19 - 00;03;26;23
Hillary Gale
Yes. So

00;03;26;23 - 00;03;50;05
Hillary Gale
I am a former college writing teacher. I, I want to believe that I was a better teacher than the teachers that you had, Craig. And without tooting my own horn too much, I think that I was because of the way that I taught writing and the way that I wanted people to learn how to write, because I saw what the value of it was.

00;03;50;08 - 00;04;05;18
Hillary Gale
But I will agree with you 100% the way that I was taught to write in high school was horrific. I grew up in Arizona, and at the time, the Arizona education system offered full ride scholarships to,

00;04;05;18 - 00;04;18;20
Hillary Gale
in-state universities for students who scored exceeds expectations on all three sections of the standardized test, whatever it might be. The reading section knocked it out of the park.

00;04;18;20 - 00;04;38;04
Hillary Gale
The math section. I knocked it out of the park. I had to retake the writing section three times. Even though I was a fabulous writer, as you can ask my college teachers. And what finally helped me exceed expectations was instead of trying to write a good essay, I just wrote the standard five paragraph essay that I had been taught.

00;04;38;04 - 00;04;53;10
Hillary Gale
That was just it was. It was the most boring thing I've ever written in my life, and it was so formulaic. But once I finally realized, oh, that's what they're looking for. Exceeds expectations. Full ride tuition to whatever state university I wanted to go to.

00;04;53;13 - 00;05;00;28
Craig Andrews
Wow. So you had to be a little bit of a chameleon. You had to. You had to trash your. I'm writing just to get into the education system.

00;05;01;00 - 00;05;21;22
Hillary Gale
Exactly. And so when I became a college writing teacher and maybe things were changing in the education system at that time, I don't know. But our biggest focus was teaching our students how to write for different audiences. And so they would have various projects throughout the semester that would teach them how to adapt their writing for different audiences.

00;05;21;22 - 00;05;47;01
Hillary Gale
So it wasn't just the boring research papers or the boring argument papers. It was, okay, who who is the audience for this paper? And how are you going to appeal to that audience, and how are you going to write something? And then we're going to take that same topic in our next paper. But we have a new audience, so how are we going to adapt the arguments and the writing and things like that to appeal to this new audience so that I think was a better way of teaching writing.

00;05;47;01 - 00;05;52;16
Hillary Gale
And I also think it prepared me to enter the world of marketing when I decided to make a career shift.

00;05;52;18 - 00;05;56;24
Craig Andrews
Wow. So a real argument that happened in my business,

00;05;56;24 - 00;06;01;15
Craig Andrews
about ten years ago was, you know, we had,

00;06;01;15 - 00;06;09;09
Craig Andrews
we call them info papers. You know, some people call. Actually, this is when originally, at the time I was calling them white papers.

00;06;09;09 - 00;06;19;26
Craig Andrews
And we were publishing a white paper for the client and I think I wrote the first draft and I hand it to my copywriter and she sends it back and she said I'm not kidding.

00;06;19;26 - 00;06;28;06
Craig Andrews
She's like Craig this is too interesting. It's too engaging. This is a white paper. So we need to dumb it down or we need to make it boring.

00;06;28;06 - 00;06;33;23
Craig Andrews
And she because she believed white papers had to be boring.

00;06;33;23 - 00;06;35;24
Craig Andrews
She intentionally made it boring.

00;06;36;01 - 00;06;36;20
Hillary Gale
Yeah.

00;06;36;22 - 00;06;57;14
Craig Andrews
And that's why I quit using the term white papers because it, it carried all that baggage. I was like the, I can only think of one type of writing where you intentionally bore your reader. And that is if you're a CFO and you have a financial disclosure to make. You bore them to tears and put your financial disclosure in the middle, hoping they never get to it.

00;06;57;16 - 00;07;01;21
Hillary Gale
Yeah, that's exactly.

00;07;01;23 - 00;07;02;29
Craig Andrews
Yeah.

00;07;03;01 - 00;07;09;07
Hillary Gale
I have written I've written several lead magnets over over my career,

00;07;09;07 - 00;07;28;22
Hillary Gale
and several of them are PDFs. I would say one was a white paper, and all of the others I would call ebooks or workbooks or something that is not as horrifyingly boring as a white paper, because white papers are boring and they're scientific and they're academic and nobody reads them.

00;07;28;24 - 00;07;36;01
Craig Andrews
Yeah. My my first publication I keep actually,

00;07;36;01 - 00;07;40;12
Craig Andrews
you know, have it try and think if we packed it yet. We're moving.

00;07;40;12 - 00;07;45;20
Craig Andrews
But I keep just as a reminder, it's part of my wall of shame.

00;07;45;20 - 00;07;53;21
Craig Andrews
It was a it was published in a scholarly journal, and I packed as many obtuse words into that,

00;07;53;21 - 00;07;59;11
Craig Andrews
and tried to make it sound highbrow, and it was just horrible.

00;07;59;13 - 00;08;07;10
Craig Andrews
It was horrible. But that's what school taught me. So you're you're in college or you're teaching at college and,

00;08;07;10 - 00;08;15;09
Craig Andrews
you obviously were not teaching the same things my professors were teaching.

00;08;15;12 - 00;08;36;17
Hillary Gale
Right. I actually had a student one semester, the first paper that he turned in and should probably be on his wall of shame. It was one of those that was just packed to the brim with. They were words that I had to look up. I had never, ever heard these words. There were tons of them in this, in this essay.

00;08;36;19 - 00;08;47;29
Hillary Gale
And you could tell he expected me to be really impressed by what he had written. And I, unfortunately had to rip the paper apart. Not literally, but, you know, figuratively with feedback.

00;08;47;29 - 00;09;02;09
Hillary Gale
And, and just kind of reframe this for him. No, we're not writing to impress people. We're writing to change people's minds, and we're writing to, connect with people and to develop relationships and empathy with people.

00;09;02;11 - 00;09;08;29
Hillary Gale
That's that's what we're trying to achieve here. And so I hope that I did a good job of that.

00;09;09;01 - 00;09;17;01
Craig Andrews
You know, there's a there's a guy named Chris Maddox that taught me a lot about writing. He actually studied under James Michener.

00;09;18;14 - 00;09;47;17
Craig Andrews
But he's a he's a marketer. And he was talking once about Don Quixote and about how he's reading this, this work hundreds of years old and the and Cervantes, who wrote it hundreds of years ago, can bring him to tears today. And that's the power of the writer is you can pass across generations. And you can move people emotionally.

00;09;47;21 - 00;09;54;04
Craig Andrews
You can persuade them. You can sell them.

00;09;54;06 - 00;10;09;13
Hillary Gale
Absolutely. I think there's just there, there's so much power with the words that you write. And I, I just think especially in the age of AI and ChatGPT.

00;10;09;15 - 00;10;30;23
Hillary Gale
People are forgetting how powerful those words can be. But the people who know how powerful they can be and who have retained that craft and who really hone that craft, it's going to be easier for them to stand out amidst all of the drivel that's that's out there.

00;10;30;26 - 00;10;43;29
Craig Andrews
You know, I'm hearing this a little bit less, thankfully, but so many people you know that knew they need to be blogging and they just didn't like blogging. And ChatGPT comes out and they're like, hey, I found my blog writer.

00;10;43;29 - 00;10;48;28
Craig Andrews
And they act as if they're the only company in the world that figured out that secret.

00;10;49;00 - 00;10;55;22
Craig Andrews
They're like, I'm going to have I write all my blogs. I'm like, what do you think your competition's doing?

00;10;55;22 - 00;10;57;12
Hillary Gale
Right?

00;10;57;15 - 00;11;03;05
Craig Andrews
Mass generated AI content's the new noise level. So if you want to be in the noise, have at it.

00;11;03;09 - 00;11;21;28
Hillary Gale
Yes. I, I could not agree more. And honestly, it I mean, I think it is such a service to the people who are willing to put in the work and willing to build their personal brands, and they want to connect with people. It's, it's it's going to be easier now. You're going to stand out even more.

00;11;22;01 - 00;11;32;22
Craig Andrews
Yeah. So all right. I'm lost. You're teaching in college now. You're not teaching in college. How did you go from there to here.

00;11;32;24 - 00;11;33;26
Hillary Gale
Okay. So

00;11;33;26 - 00;11;37;01
Hillary Gale
it all happened in 2020. And let's go back to oh

00;11;37;01 - 00;11;39;10
Hillary Gale
we all know what happened in 2020.

00;11;39;10 - 00;11;51;08
Hillary Gale
I was already kind of looking for a way out of teaching the in my particular field teaching college, the job security was not there and the pay was really, really low. So I loved working with college students.

00;11;51;08 - 00;12;05;10
Hillary Gale
I loved what I was teaching, was very passionate about it, but it was not affording me the lifestyle that I really had set out for myself. And so I was already trying to think of ways, well, what, what, what skills do I have?

00;12;05;10 - 00;12;10;05
Hillary Gale
That's a movie quote from one of my favorite movies from the 80s.

00;12;10;07 - 00;12;11;14
Craig Andrews
What movie?

00;12;11;16 - 00;12;12;23
Hillary Gale
She's having a baby.

00;12;12;26 - 00;12;17;29
Craig Andrews
Oh. Interesting. All right, let's see where this goes.

00;12;18;01 - 00;12;18;28
Hillary Gale
So, anyways,

00;12;18;28 - 00;12;39;06
Hillary Gale
I was already thinking of a way out. I was already interested in finance and personal finance, so I knew that I really wanted to work in the finance realm. I really wanted to work with financial advisors. And so I started freelancing and just seeing it financial advisors needed help with their blogs. At that point, we didn't have chat, YouTube, I things like that.

00;12;39;06 - 00;12;44;25
Hillary Gale
So people were hiring people, you know, writers to write blogs for them. And so that's kind of where I dipped my toes and

00;12;44;25 - 00;12;53;12
Hillary Gale
I started I started a little side hustle. And pretty soon as I was writing blogs, I was realizing there's so many other types of communication that,

00;12;53;12 - 00;13;01;15
Hillary Gale
business owners and advisors need to write. They need website copy, they need emails, they need lead magnets, things like that.

00;13;01;17 - 00;13;13;18
Hillary Gale
And those things required a lot more strategy than just the blogs. And so I just dove headfirst into marketing. You know, my background up to that point had been mostly in English.

00;13;13;18 - 00;13;28;02
Hillary Gale
I really fell in love with all of the strategy. I already had this great background of teaching people how to write for audiences, and that's really what marketing is, is it's figuring out who your audiences and then connecting with them so that they want to buy from you.

00;13;28;04 - 00;13;30;13
Hillary Gale
And,

00;13;30;13 - 00;13;51;05
Hillary Gale
I lost my train of that. Oh, no, I got it back. So as I started doing this and building up this little side hustle, pretty soon I was earning more and more money. I got to a point where I was actually tripling. Almost tripling my teaching salary just for my side hustle. And so it, there came a point when it didn't make sense anymore to be giving my time to teaching.

00;13;51;12 - 00;13;57;11
Hillary Gale
So I up and quit in the middle of the semester. But you should not do it as a teacher. But I up and quit in October.

00;13;57;11 - 00;14;03;25
Hillary Gale
So that I could go all in on this little business that I was building. And three days later I found out I was pregnant. And so it became.

00;14;03;25 - 00;14;05;07
Hillary Gale
It became this. This.

00;14;05;11 - 00;14;06;29
Craig Andrews
She's having a baby.

00;14;07;02 - 00;14;25;19
Hillary Gale
She's having a baby. It's full circle. But it became this moment for me of. Okay, I just went all in on this business, working for myself. I'm the only one in the business at this point. Now, I have nine months to figure out how to make this business profitable. Enough that I can take some time away from it.

00;14;25;22 - 00;14;40;24
Hillary Gale
I did not want to be that person who was working from the hospital bed. And the day I bring the baby home, I'm, you know, writing content for clients or answering emails. I really wanted to be able to take some time off and enjoy my maternity leave. This is, you know, my first child.

00;14;40;24 - 00;14;42;28
Hillary Gale
And so that's what I did.

00;14;42;28 - 00;14;46;25
Hillary Gale
I just kind of put on my big girl pants and figured it out.

00;14;46;28 - 00;14;58;18
Craig Andrews
That's amazing. You know, it's. I mean, as you tell that for me, I was. I'm kind of terrified on your behalf. Was. Was that scary?

00;14;58;20 - 00;15;19;22
Hillary Gale
Oh, it was very scary because three months prior to this happening, to this moment where I found out I'm pregnant, I was making enough money that I had just given my husband permission to quit his 9 to 5 job and start his business. And so he was this brand new entrepreneur. We're both entrepreneurs trying to figure things out and and now we have a baby on the way.

00;15;19;22 - 00;15;29;26
Hillary Gale
So it was very terrifying. It was, I would say that the that whole pregnancy, I look back on that time, that those nine months, it was it was pretty anxiety filled.

00;15;29;28 - 00;15;32;26
Craig Andrews
I bet. Oh my goodness.

00;15;32;26 - 00;15;34;04
Craig Andrews
Wow.

00;15;34;05 - 00;15;40;01
Hillary Gale
But he's three now and we're doing great. We have another child now. We have two now. So it all worked out.

00;15;40;04 - 00;15;43;16
Craig Andrews
And that amazing in that mean it just it always works out.

00;15;43;16 - 00;15;51;24
Craig Andrews
But and I think I mean I, I would imagine that that gave you a lot more focus, gave you a lot helped you clear out some of the noise.

00;15;51;24 - 00;15;55;08
Craig Andrews
In the head and figure out what was really important.

00;15;55;11 - 00;16;03;04
Hillary Gale
I always say there is nothing like an impending due date as a deadline. I mean there is just there is no

00;16;03;04 - 00;16;15;14
Hillary Gale
more important deadline than a baby coming because you can't move that deadline and they can move the deadline. They can decide when the deadline is. But you really have no control over the deadline.

00;16;15;17 - 00;16;16;22
Craig Andrews
And it's not like,

00;16;16;22 - 00;16;35;13
Craig Andrews
so me, I'm selling my house. I told you, our sprinkler system is broken. Yeah, we can list the house without that being broke. And I just have to are with it being broke, and I just have to fix it before we sell the house. But it's not like a human being is depending on me for every bit of life and nourishment and.

00;16;35;15 - 00;16;39;12
Hillary Gale
Right, right. Exactly. And it was very important for me.

00;16;39;12 - 00;16;50;09
Hillary Gale
I don't know if this is TMI, but I wanted to breastfeed my babies. And so it really felt like all of this pressure on me to. And I was making much more money than my husband was at the time.

00;16;50;09 - 00;16;55;14
Hillary Gale
It felt like I'm the only person that can do all of the things.

00;16;55;14 - 00;16;58;05
Hillary Gale
How am I going to do this and how

00;16;58;05 - 00;17;04;11
Hillary Gale
what what can I delegate and who can I bring in to help me?

00;17;04;11 - 00;17;13;07
Hillary Gale
So again, I mean, I don't know how deep into the weeds we want to get with this here, but that was kind of my foray into this career path.

00;17;13;09 - 00;17;21;09
Craig Andrews
Well, that's cool. So let's let's explore this for a second. You know, so obviously,

00;17;21;09 - 00;17;41;22
Craig Andrews
I believe in you believe that businesses need professional copywriters who know how to persuade people how to move people. But I think everybody should aspire to be a better writer, even if, even if you have somebody else doing your copy for you.

00;17;41;25 - 00;17;51;27
Craig Andrews
Let's do some nuts and bolts. What, what are some common mistakes that you see business owners making in their writing. And how do we fix them.

00;17;51;29 - 00;18;10;25
Hillary Gale
I think the number one mistake that I see, and this is from a person who's coming from academia, is I think that businesses they try to be too academic in their writing. I think they try to be too polished and professional, and they want everything to be perfectly grammatically correct, whatever that means.

00;18;10;25 - 00;18;26;19
Hillary Gale
And, and I think that we need to let our hair down a little bit, for lack of a better phrase, and talk to people the way that they talk to their friends, talk to people the way that they want to be communicated with.

00;18;26;21 - 00;18;37;09
Hillary Gale
Because that's what they're going to resonate with and connect to emotionally. They're not going to connect with a communication that is emotionless.

00;18;37;11 - 00;18;47;00
Craig Andrews
Yeah. You know, a I told you about the argument we had about ten years ago, we had another argument. I had written some copy of his,

00;18;47;00 - 00;18;56;27
Craig Andrews
email copy, and I hand it off to the editor and she looks at it and she says, Craig, you have,

00;18;56;27 - 00;19;00;20
Craig Andrews
you have a grammar error here. And I think it was subject verb agreement.

00;19;00;22 - 00;19;16;10
Craig Andrews
I forget there was there was some type of grammar error. And I was like, yeah, but I like it. Yeah. And and so I had another editor. I said, let's, let's hand it over to this other person. She looked at it and she came back and she said, Craig, now it's

00;19;16;10 - 00;19;17;29
Craig Andrews
you know, we need to fix that.

00;19;17;29 - 00;19;43;19
Craig Andrews
Doesn't look professional. And I was like, okay, two against one, I'm gonna, I'm, I must be wrong here. All right. And I told her, I said go fix it. A day later she came back and she said Craig I'm so upset. You were right. As soon as I made it grammatically correct, it read dry, boring and stale.

00;19;43;22 - 00;19;55;11
Craig Andrews
And we spent hours. And, you know, debating this and finally decided to intentionally put grammar errors in our copy because it humanized it.

00;19;55;13 - 00;20;15;23
Hillary Gale
Yeah. It humanized it. It's less formal. It's how people talk and that when, when they're, when people are interacting with businesses and business communication. Again I feel like I'm repeating myself. But it's so important. That is what they connect with and that is what they resonate with. When I was,

00;20;15;23 - 00;20;27;16
Hillary Gale
first starting in the business, I was I was writing for another agency, and I was writing a website for a financial advisor who had hired the agency and had the financial advisors.

00;20;27;16 - 00;20;45;22
Hillary Gale
Wife was a high school English teacher. And so when I returned to the website, copy back her feedback, she started it off with, I'm a high school English teacher, so I'm really picky. She completely stripped it of all emotion, right? She just totally just dried it out.

00;20;45;22 - 00;20;50;19
Hillary Gale
And it was so hard for me to not come back and say, well, I'm a college English teacher.

00;20;50;21 - 00;21;00;06
Hillary Gale
And trust me, the version that I wrote is going to do so much better for your husband's business then this version that that you've created.

00;21;00;06 - 00;21;05;29
Hillary Gale
And I just think that that's because I could get so in the weeds here.

00;21;05;29 - 00;21;09;11
Hillary Gale
I have a linguistics background. That's what I did. My master's in was,

00;21;09;11 - 00;21;12;00
Hillary Gale
linguistics and teaching English as a second language.

00;21;12;02 - 00;21;41;08
Hillary Gale
And so I learned a lot about grammar and how academic grammar is one system. But then we have other grammatical rules for other types of writing and genres and things like that. And they're all unspoken. And there's not really books written about, you know, grammar for different types of writing, but it you can't just apply the grammar that we learn about academic writing to all these different forms of writing, because it's not going to be as effective as what it comes down to.

00;21;41;11 - 00;21;57;06
Craig Andrews
Well, Ernest Hemingway got the Nobel Prize for publishing The Old Man in the sea. First thing is that's written at a fifth grade level. The second thing is the last sentence of the opening paragraph is a random one sentence.

00;21;57;06 - 00;22;03;05
Craig Andrews
And he got the Nobel Prize, one of the best writers, best writers in American history.

00;22;03;08 - 00;22;04;20
Hillary Gale
I think he knew something.

00;22;04;23 - 00;22;07;10
Craig Andrews
Yeah. All right. So again

00;22;07;10 - 00;22;16;12
Craig Andrews
let's let's tackle before we wrap up, let's tackle a couple more nuts and bolts. What business owners could do to be better writers.

00;22;16;15 - 00;22;23;04
Hillary Gale
What business owners can do to be better writers?

00;22;23;06 - 00;22;44;11
Hillary Gale
I think that. The most important thing that you can do to be a better writer is just write all the time. You cannot outsource all of your writing to ChatGPT. And if you are doing that, don't just copy paste it, take back what it gives you and work with it and wrestle with it and rewrite it so that you are developing that writing muscle.

00;22;44;11 - 00;23;10;00
Hillary Gale
You know how you're getting to know your own writing voice so that that can come through and stand out from everyone else's writing voices? I think it's just so important to spend not hours a day writing, but be intentional about the times you find yourself writing anyways and and reflect on it. So when you're writing emails to clients, reflect on the choices that you're making in your writing so that you can get to know your own voice.

00;23;10;00 - 00;23;17;09
Hillary Gale
And I, I just write as much as you can if you want to become a better writer.

00;23;17;11 - 00;23;22;04
Craig Andrews
Turns out it's like everything else in life. If you want to get better at it, do more of it.

00;23;22;07 - 00;23;40;15
Hillary Gale
I think the biggest myth about writing is that there are people who are born natural writers, and there are people who are just never going to be good writers. That is just not the case at all. Writing is a skill. Just like basketball or playing the piano. You just have to put in the practice in the hours and you will become a good writer.

00;23;40;17 - 00;23;48;21
Craig Andrews
Well, and I think anybody that's going to be successful in business needs to be a better communicator. And writing is part of that.

00;23;48;21 - 00;23;54;09
Craig Andrews
But they still need help from folks like you.

00;23;54;09 - 00;23;57;07
Craig Andrews
How can people get in touch with you.

00;23;57;09 - 00;23;59;26
Hillary Gale
I am on LinkedIn almost every single day.

00;23;59;26 - 00;24;05;11
Hillary Gale
LinkedIn is great. My, my name on LinkedIn is hillary Gale Meehan. I've tacked on my married name there.

00;24;05;11 - 00;24;11;14
Hillary Gale
So hillary Gale, man on LinkedIn. And then my website is magnetic copy. Com and then of course the podcast,

00;24;11;14 - 00;24;15;12
Hillary Gale
finance Marketing Podcast, which is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and my website.

00;24;15;13 - 00;24;18;02
Hillary Gale
We're not on YouTube yet, but we are going to be on YouTube soon.

00;24;18;02 - 00;24;20;09
Hillary Gale
Those would be the top three.

00;24;20;12 - 00;24;21;05
Craig Andrews
Well, hillary,

00;24;21;05 - 00;24;38;27
Craig Andrews
this has been really powerful and I love the takeaway. Thanks for given the nuts and bolts, because I really think it is important for business owners to do more writing. But at the same time, I hope folks reach out to you so you can help them be really persuasive. Thanks for coming on. Leaders and Legacies.

00;24;38;29 - 00;24;43;17
Hillary Gale
Thanks so much for having me, Craig. It was fun.

00;24;43;17 - 00;25;10;13
Craig Andrews
This is Craig Andrews. I want to thank you for listening to the Leaders and Legacies podcast. We're looking for leaders to share how they're making the impact beyond themselves. If that's you, please go to Ally's for me.com/guest and sign up there. If you got something out of this interview, we would love you to share this

00;25;10;13 - 00;25;12;08
Craig Andrews
episode on social media.

00;25;12;10 - 00;25;35;20
Craig Andrews
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00;25;35;22 - 00;25;43;27
Craig Andrews
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00;25;43;27 - 00;27;46;02
Craig Andrews
It means a lot to my team. If you want to know more, please go to Ally's for me.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.