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Advanced Invasives completed the world's biggest scientific field trial on Japanese knotweed treatment. They needed to turn their popular academic paper into a commercial offering which generated revenue.

Advanced Invasives was a spin-off consultancy founded by two ecologists from Swansea University. The company was founded to commercialise the results of a seven year field trial exploring the most effective herbicide treatment and control of Japanese knotweed. Completed in 2018, at a 12 acre private testing site in south Wales, the field trial was the most comprehensive ever undertaken on knotweed in the world at that time.

Japanese knotweed?

Japanese knotweed is a fast-growing invasive plant. It has underground, sideways growing root-like structures, known as rhizomes. These form an extensive network which makes the plant difficult to control or remove entirely. Knotweed can also spread from tiny fragments of the rhizome as well as small pieces of stems and leaf matter.

So Japanese knotweed is difficult to remove or treat easily. In certain instances the plant can cause interference, or in rare cases damage, to built structures. As a result, there is a patchwork of UK legislation governing the handling, treatment and disposal of Japanese knotweed.

In turn, this has created a complex set of secondary property problems, including matters of private nuisance relating to potential loss of homeowner amenity, and historic lender restrictions making it difficult to raise a mortagage on a property deemed to be affected by Japanese knotweed. All compounded by the British tabloid tradition of irresponsible knotweed scare stories.

The opportunity

Advanced Invasives approached me shortly after the final results of the field trail were published in the 2018 peer reviewed paper: Optimising physiochemical control of invasive Japanese knotweed.

Very quickly it was obvious this niche academic research was going to be the most downloaded paper on the subject. Today, the paper has over 37k+ downloads, a staggering number which speaks to the complex and wide-ranging set of property problems caused by Japanese knotweed and the desire to solve these.

Yet back in 2018, Advanced Invasives lacked even a company tagline, let alone a website with a clear commerical offering. I worked with them to change all this.

The challenge

From a copywriting and content perspective, Advanced Invasives had five problems:

• The company had world class scientific expertise and field research capability, but needed to turn this into fee-generating commercial services.
• The academic paper was extremely popular, but dense and not particularly easy to understand. The findings were already being misreported by the mainstream press such as The Times, The Guardian, and The BBC.
• The brand writing across the small number of client reports and new business proposals was stuck in the academic style. This forced the reader to work too hard to understand what was being said. The fees structure was poorly rationalised and too low.

The project work

I partnered with Advanced Invasives on a series of copywriting and content sprints, intended to to use writing to position the scientific offer of the company and bring revenue into the business as fast as possible.

Here are the five main projects I delivered:

• A complete package of website copywriting and brand writing including a new tagline, commercial positioning of the field research site (ai:LAB), and everything needed to make it clear who the company worked with and why people should work with us and why. In short, every instance of writing you see on the company website, here.
• A set of proposal documents which cut down the old documents from 15 pages to a compelling two page offer for each of our eight services, which I defined here.
• An evergreen white paper which summarised 'Optimising physiochemical control of invasive Japanese knotweed' into a concise and visually compelling sales document.
• A series of five articles to quickly cement authority on the subject of Japanese knotweed control and also correct the widespread misreporting on the findings of the academic research.
• Company writing guidance covering house style, tone of voice, and guidelines for communication of Advanaced Invasives' core scientific ideas.

The outcome

For three years my writing directly contributed to offer creation and winning projects with clients including Network Rail and the main amenity herbicide companies with an interest in knotweed, including Bayer Group, Corteva, and ICL.

I launched Advanced Invasives' expert witness offering by giving a seminar to the leading barrister's chambers with an interest in Japanese knotweed: Hardwicke (now Gatehouse Chambers). The first seminar was over-subscribed, so I repeated it three times, to a total audience of over 100 of London's top legal professionals.

By 2019, I became the UK's youngest member of the cross-industry Japanese knotweed working group, providing guidance and written evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

I was the lead author of 5,000 words of summary guidance to UK Parliament explaining every aspect of the Japanese knotweed problem in a clear and accessible way. This work was used as the central skeleton argument guiding the 2019 inquiry sessions at Portcullis House, which I attended in person. You can read the first half here. Feel free to skip through it.

Overall, my work enabled Advanced Invasives to increase their project fee structure by a factor of 2-7X. So much so, I was offered a long-term marketing and business developement role with the company. Not bad for someone who knew nothing about knotweed a few years earlier.

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