Generating repeat business: meet the brief, meet the deadline

I was recently given a facial as a birthday present – an activity that’s completely foreign to me. When I arrived home after having it (and after having stopped at the shops) I looked in the mirror to see if I could see a glow and discovered large patches of the face mask had been left on my face and up my nostrils.

I have no idea what people who saw my face would have thought – maybe that I’d just come from having a facial – but I was pretty irritated that the beauty therapist didn’t take a few extra seconds to ensure all traces of the mask were cleaned off.

This inability to finish a job properly and in a way a client would expect, led me to think about how I approach commissions from editors.  A number of new clients I’ve been doing work for have been quite specific about how I present the finished articles.

With one client, I have to use their template and be specific about filling in sections of my work under the categories: headline, byline, intro and body text.

Another client specifies the font type and size, including a different size for the headline as well as a mandatory footer that follows a particular format that has the date and a slugline.

Complying with this adds a bit more time to the job and a bit more resentment that it’s expected of me. But comply I do. As a result I feel I’ve got more work from them. They know that because I present the job exactly how they want it, they don’t have to do as much at their end.

In their mind, it’s become easy to get me to do the work as I give them what they want.

When I taught journalists about how to ensure they received regular repeat work from editors I always stressed: meet the brief and meet the deadline. There is no point sending through something that only partly answers the brief and think the editor won’t notice: they wrote the thing.

The same goes for the deadline. Even if you feel that you’ve been given an early one and that it’s not essential you meet it, you must. Editors will not give work to journalists who they feel are unreliable; they can’t risk it.

If you give the editors what they want, when they want it – and these days it seems if you also present it in the way they want – you will be right there at the top of their list when they are commissioning articles.

Sometimes it’s all in the presentation. Just like this dessert I had with friends recently at Esca in the Hunter Valley to celebrate my birthday. Being served something like this would keep everyone coming back for more.