I love to cook, and I’ve been doing it for quite awhile. I won’t tell you how long, but I will say that I’ve had plenty of time to practice, make mistakes, and buy (and subsequently donate) my share of trendy and unnecessary equipment. Yet, even with all the time, tools, and culinary fads at your disposal, I’ve come to realize that the best measure of success is a precise, easy to follow recipe.
Enter: my Great Aunt Ruby.
Her cornbread dressing was legendary. No Thanksgiving was complete without it. If you aren’t familiar with the dish, ask one of your Southern friends. Believe me, they know about it. Like many home cooks, Aunt Ruby never wrote down her recipe. Someone in the family eventually put something on paper, but it wasn’t precise. In fact, it took me a good ten years to get it right.
Despite living in the same rural town, I only remember meeting Aunt Ruby once. I was about 8 years old, and it hardly made an impression on me at the time. If not for my inheriting her recipe, that tiny fragment of my memory may have withered away entirely. What I do remember is that it was a sticky summer morning, my dirty-blonde pigtails clinging to the back of my neck. There in the shadows of her musty living room, she sat amidst the accumulated content of her life. Dust particles hung suspended in the air as if they were holding their breath, waiting for something to change. Nothing ever did, it seemed.
Fast forward to today—a sunny Spring morning in my brightly lit office on the edge of the Philly suburbs. Nowadays, I run a content marketing agency, whose mission is focused on bridging the gap between our clients and their audiences. As I consider how best we can meet their needs, I am struck by the similarities between what we do, and what most of our clients (and I myself) do every evening for our families: cook dinner.
Just as we rely on recipes to create consistent, delicious meals, Audience Ops follows a precise workflow to deliver meaningful, reliable content. We provide results that can be depended on; the kind of results that get your finished product on the table, on time, and up to snuff. The kind of results I didn’t get when I first tried to replicate Aunt Ruby’s dressing. But more on that later.
When Brian Casel founded Audience Ops over ten years ago, blog writing as a productized service was unheard of. If you needed help with blog content, you had to hire a freelancer—someone juggling multiple clients with no guarantee of consistency. Finding reliable help often took longer than writing it yourself. And that’s assuming you even had the time or expertise.
Brian saw a growing demand, especially in the SaaS world, for a service that provided high-quality content without adding stress to the equation. He envisioned a process that ran like clockwork: articles written, reviewed, and published according to a structured workflow, handled by a dedicated writer who worked on your blog month after month. This system removed the hassle for clients and delivered consistent, dependable content. His approach was novel at the time, and the need for it is just as strong today, not only in the SaaS world, but across various industries.
J.D. Graffam recognized this growing demand when he acquired Audience Ops in 2022. As the owner of multiple businesses, he understands the value of delegation and efficiency. By leveraging Audience Ops’ expertise, our clients can outsource their content production and stay focused on what matters—running and growing their businesses. Our job is to help them achieve their mission, and we can do it because we have done the leg work to develop, test, and refine our process.
No doubt Aunt Ruby spent years perfecting her process, and generations of my family have benefitted from her dedication. Unfortunately, her lack of precision in transferring her knowledge to the page meant I had to spend years figuring it out for myself. Phrases like A large pan of cornbread, A can of Pet milk, and my personal favorite, Add enough chicken stock to make it soupy, left a lot to interpretation. What it really meant was that my long road of trial and error was unavoidable.
And travel that road I did. One year it was dry, the next, too soupy. And one year, early on, I was convinced that there must be a mistake—that she couldn’t have meant six eggs. Spoiler alert: she definitely did.
In a way, I’m grateful to Aunt Ruby for the culinary challenge that she bequeathed me. I can make delicious cornbread dressing now, but only because of all the mistakes I made along the way.
As I consider this legacy she left me, I would argue that success in business, like in cooking, sports, music, or any other endeavor worth pursuing, requires the same consistency and practice. In the words of my son’s music teacher, “Practice until you can’t do it wrong.” Which, because we’re all human and capable of mistakes, essentially means that we should never stop striving for our best.
So while he is in the basement strumming away on his guitar, I’ll be upstairs throwing together a rushed weeknight dinner. Maybe this weekend, I can slow down and enjoy my latest culinary project: tweaking my chocolate chip cookie recipe. They were almost perfect the last time I made them, but I forgot to write down my notes. I laugh to myself a little as I think, Aunt Ruby would be proud.
