I've been working this week on my new book on business writing to be published at the end of April so I've been thinking a lot about how people I meet networking think about writing for their business.
They seem to fall into 3 categories:
- People who loathe the thought of it and put it off until they're pushed to do it - like writing for their websites
- People who quite enjoy it but it comes at the bottom of a long to-do list
- People who understand the impact it can have on their business
I have to say the third category are the rarest and usually include those who are on top of their marketing strategies.
It's easy to understand people who loathe writing because many of them have been put off in school because they didn't 'get grammar' or enjoy writing essays. But writing for your business is quite different and what I find difficult to understand is how they won't then pass the work on to someone else who could do it for them.
I meet a lot of people running their own businesses who feel they should do everything themselves, especially if it saves them money. What we often don't cost in though is our own time. For instance, I could do my own tax affairs but it would cause me stress and take me longer than my accountant who is doing it all the time.
One of my clients employed me to write a letter for them, but not till after they'd spent 10 hours struggling with it. At their hourly rate that actually cost her £1,000 in lost client fees because she wouldn't spend the considerably lower amount I charged her for something I did in a fraction of the time. Crazy situation.
Tomorrow I'll look at the second category of writing phobics
No comments:
Post a Comment