Dear Ed

Sports coaches pick up new tricks by watching how coaches in other sports operate; for example, a football coach will watch how a hockey coach manages their players. Does the same apply to running a writing and editing business?
Charlotte

Dear Charlotte

You can pick up tips on how to run a business anywhere. You can even pick them up by watching Mr Sweary's kitchen nightmares. You might have to introduce your own metaphors for fresh ingredients, tart up the decor and disgusting filth, but it's all there: touting for business, reminding clients that you exist, retaining existing clients while searching for new ones.

I hired Atlas the restumper recently when parts of Chez Ed started listing badly to starboard. Even as the jackhammers and noise were driving me half mad, I learnt a couple of valuable lessons from watching Atlas go about his business. His vocabulary was larger than Mr Sweary's, which was a relief, and it was an eye-opener being on the other side of the client-worker relationship. It was also a close proximity hole-in-the-floor type client-worker relationship.

Situation: Atlas was happy because he could restore Chez Ed to its former horizontal glory between working on two much larger jobs. Because he could finish the job quickly, he would also get paid more quickly.

Lesson: Keep several jobs of different sizes on the go at any one time. Small jobs are your bread and butter and ease cashflow problems. But large jobs are where you make the money that allows you to get ahead financially, put money into superannuation and set aside for holidays and the inevitable lulls in workflow (not to mention some emergency restumping).

Situation: Atlas rang when he was late for giving a quote and rang again on the first scheduled day of work after a month's rain fell in one day and turned the clay into, well, clay.

Lesson: Ring if you're going to be late for an appointment or a deadline. Keep your clients up to date with any changes in the schedule and explain why they have happened. It costs you nothing and your clients will love you for it. Although this needs some tact: you can't just say 'I've put your job last because your author was too lazy to even remove the hyperlinks from the online journals he plagiarised and now you expect to verify the sources we both know he didn't look at and list them in the bibliography as his original research' ... even if it's true.

Situation: Atlas kept disappearing each day to give quotes to potential clients.

Lesson: It's not enough to have work right now; you have to keep seeking future work if you want to eat in months to come. And it's the months to come you need to be always thinking about, not the amount of work you have at present. It all gets back to workflow. The aim is to keep workflow constant, without the manic highs and lows of too much and too little. Hard to attain, I know, but it's something to aim for.

Situation: When an unanticipated problem cropped up, like Chez Ed having been built by successive generations of Klingons, Atlas pointed it out to say, 'This is the problem, this is what I propose to do about it. Is that OK with you?'

Lesson: Keep your clients apprised of any changes, or any problems that arise that are beyond the remit of the brief. It's even better if you can propose a range of solutions for them to choose from. Some clients will always choose the second solution proposed, no matter what it is. I don't know why this happens, but it's worth remembering. Perhaps they think the first proposal is the one you want so they dismiss it on those grounds alone.

Of course, there were a few negatives. After Atlas had finished I discovered that all the earth he'd dug out of holes had been thrown back under Chez Ed, perhaps as a long-term investment in future restumping work. The nearest editorial equivalent is adding a few pointed entries into a book's index, of the 'charlatan see lead author' and 'Wikipedia see original research' variety.

Measure twice and cut once

Previous Dear Ed letters

2009

December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009

2008

December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
August/September 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008