Freelancer Business Development

Four freelance copywriters. Four completely different business models. One very honest conversation about how work actually arrives.

Forget the generic advice about networking more and posting on LinkedIn. This session puts four freelancers with genuinely different approaches in front of you — and asks them to show their working. How they find clients. How clients find them. How they price their work when AI is undercutting everyone. And what they actually do — deliberately or instinctively — that keeps clients coming back.

The Panel

David McGuire (host) – freelance B2B copywriter and consultant, former director of B2B copywriting agency

Sarah Townsend – Sarah Townsend has spent 25 years transforming messy marketing messages from BLAH BLAH to TA-DA. She’s the author of three award-winning books: Survival Skills for Freelancers and The Little Book of Confusables 1+2, and describes herself as a lifelong neurospicy nerd.

Sarah Townsend Editorial

Jonathan Wilcock – Studied Graphic Design. Worked in advertising as both a Copywriter and Art Director for 20 years. Co-owned a small creative agency for 14 years. Now freelancing as a Brand Voice Copywriter since 2017. And loving it.

So What If

Anna Gunning – Anna is a B2B copywriter and managing director of Gunning Marketing. She started her career in PR and marketing agencies before going freelance and the building up Gunning Marketing into a specialist copywriting and content strategy agency specialising in tech, manufacturing, energy, property and construction, financial services, and professional services.

Gunning Marketing

Mel Barfield – bio TBC

The Session

Audience Reality Check We’ll start by polling the room on where your work actually comes from right now, what you find hardest about business development, and whether AI has started affecting your client relationships. The results go up on screen — and the panel responds to your reality, not a hypothetical one.

Positioning: What Are Clients Actually Buying? Before any tactics, the question that makes tactics work. Each panellist will answer: “When a client hires you instead of someone else — or instead of using AI — what are they actually buying?” Four different answers. Four different business models. This is the part most business development advice skips entirely, and it’s the part that matters most.

How Work Actually Arrives No frameworks. No theory. We’ll ask each panellist to walk us through their last three clients — how they found them, or how they were found. Real stories, real mechanics. The patterns and surprises that emerge will tell you more about client acquisition than any marketing playbook.

Let’s Talk About Money The section most panels avoid. How do you price your work? Has AI changed that conversation? What do you say when a client tells you AI could do it cheaper? Four honest answers from people who’ve had that conversation for real.

Audience Q&A Your business, your situation, your questions. Bring the ones you’ve been sitting on.

You’ll Walk Away Knowing

• Why positioning comes before tactics — and how four different positioning strategies create four different businesses
• The real mechanics of how experienced freelancers find and win work, told through specific examples rather than general advice
• How to price your work in a market where AI exists — and how to handle the conversation when clients raise it
• What makes clients come back — and how to move from one-off projects to ongoing relationships
• One specific thing you can do this month to improve your business development