Providing a service implies a duty to care. It’s less about the money than what doing something on behalf of someone entails. If you won’t honor that duty, do better or go do something else.
My faithfulness to that principle is why my client relationships last for years and why individual clients bring me on board to their new companies whenever they change jobs.
For context, I work with clients to craft thought leadership strategies and then carry out those strategies as their thinking partner and writer. I specialize in institutional finance and fintech.
To close out what’s been a weird week on the receiving end of snits and tirades, of shrieking against what should be obvious, here are nine theses for the kind of work I do. I focused them on writing, but with minor edits, they apply to any professional service.
- You have to take someone’s thinking seriously if you offer to help plan or produce their thought leadership.
- You owe it to your clients to become conversant in their specific areas of expertise quickly.
- It’s not your clients’ job to educate you. If you don’t already have the knowledge or understand the language, do research.
- It’s either lazy or cynical to use the mystical aura of “writing” as an excuse to waste clients’ time. Throw away your cheap and derivative Strunk-and-White-esque playbooks and listen.
- Your beliefs about writing are secondary to the integrity of your clients’ thinking and the messages they want to deliver.
- Dragging ideas down to a generic level of writerdom is a subtraction of value. Stop using an imaginary generic reader to justify to hide your lack of care.
- Adding value means challenging your clients’ thinking to make it stronger, more insightful, more rigorous, and more nuanced.
- The only relevant stakeholders are senior decision-makers whose decisions and perspectives on a topic have material impacts on your clients’ business strategies.
- Your job is to write things that influence relevant decisions and perspectives, not something that educates you or your peers.
