Re: Okay all you independent contractors: hit the bricks with THIS
Remember, scarcity leads to value. If everybody knew the information your
company paid $425 for, then it wouldn't be worth $425. It would be free.
Yup. Several years ago I did a consulting gig for a small chunk of a large bureaucracy. They wanted to know why their customers weren't using a web- and email-based service they thought was incredibly nifty. My report was brief: "It currently takes 3-7 days to get a response to an email or web form query and several weeks to get the result of the requested service. Your customers won't put up with that and neither would I." Oh, I padded it out with a short intro describing the problem, a couple of paragraphs about the monitoring and tracking I did, some pithy quotes from interviews with dissatisfied customers, and my recommended solution ("Use an email auto-responder to give immediate feedback, send a personal response within 24 hours, and send progress reports if you can't complete the service within 3 days."), but the whole thing was only 2 pages long.
My client dumped it back in my lap, saying his directors wouldn't accept anything that short as an authentic consultant's report, and he certainly wouldn't authorize payment unless I could come up with something that was "substantial" enough to justify my fee. <sigh>
I spent an hour online and a couple hours at the library, added a bunch of barely-relevant full-color graphsand pie charts to the report, recast most sentences into passive voice and salted them with industry-standard acronyms and buzzwords, and tacked on a 12-page bibliography. Then I increased the font size and put the resulting 38 pages into a fancy binder and sent it across town to the client by a messenger service (indicating both importance and urgency).
The danged report STILL didn't say anything more than "It currently takes 3-7 days to get a response to an email or web form query and several weeks to get the result of the requested service. Your customers won't put up with that and neither would I. Use an email auto-responder to give immediate feedback, send a personal response within 24 hours, and send progress reports if you can't complete the service within 3 days." BUT...my client loved it. His directors loved it. Their customers loved the revamped service. I got my full fee plus a substantial bonus.
Kat Nagel,
who reluctantly concludes that, while clarity and brevity are essential in a procedure and desirable in most purely technical publications, they are not necessarily suitable for all forms of business communication.
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