At Word Monster, we’re no stranger to love/hate relationships. We love working remotely, but hate having to put on a smart shirt for Zoom calls with clients. The parents among us love our kids, but hate having to bribe them to be quiet while trying to attend said Zoom calls. We even love our clients, but hate… wait, who are we kidding? We straight up love our clients. Seriously. And if we were to take this one step further by saying that we loved ALL of our clients, you’d probably think we were joking, right? I mean, no one can love each and every one of their clients, surely (much like children, you’re more likely to have your favourite and then the one that you think is the devil incarnate*)?
Well, here’s the funny thing about Word Monster: we genuinely do love our clients. And that’s not because we’ve coincidentally only worked with clients that we love, but because we are fortunate to be able to choose the clients we work with. So, what is it about those clients that we choose to work with over and over and over and over (you get the point) and over again?
A bangin’ brief
A good brief is a sure-fire way to win our hearts. It’s the difference between us being able to dive straight into a new project for you, and us scratching our heads for 30 mins trying to figure out what the fudge it is we need to do. No additional detail is too small or insignificant – if you think it might help us to deliver better work for you, then please share! Whether it’s information about preferred spelling (UK or US), reference formatting, or tone of voice, we want to know it all.
However, we fully recognise that the brief you send us may only be as good as the brief your client sends you (which, let’s face it, can sometimes be non-existent). In which case, we may need to jump on a call to thrash the details out together. Which leads us on to another key attribute that makes us go all googly-eyed…
An open dialogue
As freelancers, our job is to help lighten your load. You can leave your project in our capable hands while you focus on other tasks. But, from time to time, we may hit a stumbling block or have questions about a brief. When this happens, it’s important to know that we can reach out to you, whether via email or a quick call. And as effective two-way communication is the foundation for any good relationship, you can always reach out to us with any queries or concerns too – in fact, it’s something we expect and want.
Keeping it real with timelines
Our favourite clients are those who completely understand the way we work. The saying might be that opposites attract, but we believe our life-first culture attracts like-minded clients who get our ethos and respect our working patterns – and boundaries. They won’t email at unsociable hours or expect us to drop everything at short notice to meet an unrealistic deadline. We will always do our best to help our clients achieve their deadlines (even offering an After Dark service), but our fave client understand that they’ve booked us for X hours a day, and trust us to make the best use of that time. They also recognise that if we are unable to complete a particular piece of work in that time, then it’s not because we didn’t try, but rather that it simply wasn’t possible.
Open, honest feedback
Imagine you worked your socks off to deliver a piece of work to your client, only to get crickets in response (not actual crickets, that would be weird). How would that make you feel? Thankfully, our lovely clients are great at giving us feedback on our work. Constructive criticism helps us to grow and evolve as writers – we’re only human and are bound to make mistakes from time-to-time. Feedback not only lets us know if we hit the mark on the previous brief, it also helps us to understand your needs and preferences, so we can do an even better job next time.
Once our clients see what we can do, we hope they won’t be able to help loving us too 😊.
*All Word Monster parents would like it known that they love each of their children, equally.
