Depending on who you ask, William Shatner was perhaps the best Star Trek captain to come along. As the Enterprise’s captain, Shatner restored galactic peace on multiple occasions, prevented the destruction of Earth on several others, and even kissed a blue chick.
That alone brings him up a star on a five-star rating system. The guy earned his fan base, and despite his best efforts, the original Kirk’s legend endures online, at conventions, and in the hearts of millions of fans. Shatner became Star Trek’s poster child.
There was one problem with all this; the role became a defining moment in his career.
Sure, Shatner’s played some memorable roles as Jeff Cable or T. J. Hooker (and the Priceline guy, if you want to include that), but when people think of Shatner, most immediately think of James T. Kirk.
Expanding Beyond Our Original Scope
So why am I writing about this? Good question, especially since I’m much more a Patrick Stewart fan myself. However, Shatner, like many actors who find themselves victims of their own success, was at risk of becoming pigeonholed into select roles. Our company was heading in a similar direction.
Started in 2010, Edited by a Pro (EBP as I like to call it) was created to bring clarity to a muddied world of grammar and spelling mistakes that plagued (and continue to plague) the business world. I was amazed at how our culture’s text-speak had pervaded all facets of life, causing nationwide collateral damage to legible sentence structure. The business world was not immune. Most people rely on the Internet to look up spelling and grammar questions, and there are many disreputable sites that can easily mislead visitors into thinking they’re actually authorities on certain subjects.
With my journalism background serving as my shield, and my passion for clarity in communication my sword, I set out to help businesses communicate more clearly with clients, contractors and anyone else in the mix.
Like Shatner, the business found success in its field. However, we always knew editing wasn’t all we could do. With backgrounds in journalism, public relations and other writing fields, we knew that we could preempt the evils of poorly crafted sentences by simply doing the writing to begin with. And so we did. We pitched existing clients and most of them jumped at the chance. Our editing work had established a reputation for us that led to quick adoption of new services, and shortly thereafter, writing far surpassed our editing service in terms of demand.
Shatnerized
But we, too, had a problem; our name and reputation was all about editing.
When pitching potential clients, prospects just saw us as an editing company. Despite writing having become our number one service, and having added other services such as Spanish translation and topic generation, we were still Edited by a Pro. Worse yet, our original website created back in 2010 was so outdated it didn’t even cover what services we offered these days.
I know, I feel ya.
The message was clear. We were Shatnerizing ourselves, and it was time for a change.
Enter Words by a Pro. We’ve finally taken the plunge and evolved into our 2.0 version. No longer just limited to editing, Words by a Pro encompasses all language related services we offer now and in the future. We’re not just stopping at writing and editing. We’re constantly adapting to feedback from clients and moving into fields where there’s a demand. People need help with generating ideas for their monthly blog posts, so we developed our topic generation service. Companies want to expand their reach into the Spanish-speaking market, so we partnered with an amazing linguist who has a flawless command over both English and Latin American Spanish. And there’s more to come — more languages, more services, more everything.
But to make it happen, we had to evolve internally. And now, we’ve evolved externally with our site and name change. While I hope you enjoy the new site, I’m not content with standing still, and I welcome your feedback on site improvements, thoughts on what services you’d want to see from us, or just commentary on how Shatner was the better captain (I welcome the opportunity to prove you wrong).
Marek Biernacinski
CEO, Words by a Pro
