Got questions? You’re in the right place! Here you’ll find quick answers to the most common things people ask before working with me or exploring my services.
By Topic
Working together
B2B is my focus – I love B2B. I love taking the “business thing” and making it make sense to the people who need it.
My background is in treasury management product management at some of the largest financial institutions (FIs) in the United States. If you’re with an FI, fintech, or a vendor that sells into the financial system, let’s definitely chat.
Having said that, I was a product manager in a highly regulated environment. I worked with tech, QA, customer service, implementation, sales, sales support, operations, risk, compliance, legal, control, and more. And vendors. If you’re in a different B2B industry, please feel free to contact me. I will ask a ton of questions, and I’ll ask them from a place of having managed B2B products and services. I learn quickly: I LOVE learning new things and new industries! (Hint: When it comes to your content, there’s almost certainly a benefit to hiring a writer from outside your industry!)
One industry I really love learning about is shipping, transportation, and logistics. That started with a big project in grad school. If you’re a carrier, NVOCC, freight forwarder, FreightTech, MarTech, or LogTech, I’d love the challenge of bringing my excellent writing chops to the complexity of your industry!
If you’re in treasury management (TM), that’ll be a short learning curve since that’s my background. In my career I managed returned items, cash services (cash vault/money center/branch), remote deposit capture (both desktop and mobile), an ACH check conversion service, foreign check clearing, a direct clearing service between FIs, and even a short stint of virtual lockbox.
If you’re in a different area of financial services than TM, it’ll be a shorter learning curve than usual. I may need to ask questions, talk with some internals, read your existing materials and so on but it’ll be quicker than another freelancer who doesn’t come from 20+ years in the industry.
With other B2B industries, remember that I love learning. I’ll get up to speed by asking for anything you already have: for example, product material, internal training materials, sales decks, implementation guides, existing marketing content, plus your website. I’ll also look online for anything I can find about you and your industry. Then, if it makes sense, I’d love to interview your subject matter experts.
Absolutely. In fact, I enjoy it. Subject matter experts know their products inside and out—but they’re often too close to them. I understand that from firsthand experience, because I’ve worked with those wonderful people! My job is to ask the questions that uncover what your buyers actually need to understand.
Both, depending on your needs and my bandwidth.
Some clients may choose to bring me in for a single case study, white paper, or messaging project. Others will need an ongoing partner to help with blogs, newsletters, sales enablement, or product marketing content. I’m happy to talk through what makes the most sense.
The process
Here’s generally what you can expect from me:
- Discovery call. We’ll hop on the phone or Zoom to discuss your needs, and see if we’re a good fit for each other. I’ll ask lots of questions and take notes.
- Email summary. If we agree to work together, I’ll send you a summary of my notes to be sure I captured the essence of our discussion, including what your end goal is and what you’re looking for from me. If it’s pertinent at this point I may send you an estimate, but that’ll depend on the project and any outstanding questions.
- Proposal. I’ll send this to you after any outstanding questions are answered. I need as much information as possible to send you a solid proposal: what business problem you’re trying to solve, what we agreed I can do to help you with that, defining any information or documents I’ll need, how long the project will take, and so on – along with what your investment would be for the project’s scope.
- My initial prep and first draft. After you agree and sign the proposal, the next part is more behind the scenes: this is where I gather information I may need whether for reference or to to educate/update myself before ink actually starts flowing from my fountain pen (or fingers hit the keyboard) to write. I want to be sure I know as much as possible about you, your clients, and what keeps you and your clients up at night.
Then I’ll start writing your first draft. - Revisions. Edits and revisions are expected; they’re part of the process. I won’t die on certain hills – if you or your marketing department change my “use” to “leverage” or my “through” to “via” I won’t dig my heels in (I’ll shed a few tears in my coffee to myself, though). I tend to write in direct, conversational, easy-to-comprehend language without the corporate buzzwordy word salad. Our signed agreement will cover the number of revisions based on the project.
- Payment(s).
— Small projects, which are those priced at $1,000 or less, are billed upfront; work will start after payment is received.
— Larger projects, meaning those priced at more than $1,000, require a 50% deposit up front; the remaining 50% is due upon receipt of the first deliverable.
— Monthly retainers are billed at the end of the month with net-15 terms.
This can vary by project; I’ll do as much on my own as I can, but I may need additional material from you to do my job well. Additional material can mean pieces like spec sheets, implementation guides, internal sales decks, learning guides, internal training materials, customer case studies I can’t access online, and so on. I’ll review your entire website as well. My goal will be to know as much as I can about you, your product/service, your clients and their pain points. I’ll also be thinking about the business goal(s) you’re trying to solve.
This can vary by project; I’ll do as much on my own as I can, but I may need additional material from you to do my job well. I may need to interview internal subject matter experts (SMEs). I may also need any material I can’t access publicly such as spec sheets, implementation guides, internal sales decks, learning guides, internal training materials, and so on.
My goal will be to know as much as I can about you, your product/service, your clients and their pain points. I need to know that to do my job well.
This definitely varies by project! Depending on workload, a case study can take 2-3 weeks while a white paper can take 3-6 weeks. A set of sales enablement materials depends on what specific components (e.g., battle cards, cold prospect email templates, follow-up email templates, sales decks) you’d like me to create for you.
Want me to put our approved copy into a Canva creation also? That’ll depend on what it is: a couple of quick images for social media is one thing, but building a 14-page client guide is something else.
AI use policy
No. I may use AI to help me do research or maybe even create an outline draft. But your content will come from my brain.
AI lacks emotional intelligence, it has no real-world experience, and it simply does not understand the nuance of context that human expertise provides. If it helps, understand this: AI generates content based on patterns — it doesn’t truly understand anything.
I may use AI to help me research, because it can be faster. But I verify anything it gives me. AI can—and absolutely does—give false information (ask me about my “favorite band” trick and how that turned out). The speed may be useful but anything found through AI will be verified.
And by the way, I’ve known how to use em dashes a long time. Same goes for colons, semi-colons, and more. And I won’t stop using them.
Things I use AI for include:
- research and finding sources
- brainstorming
- proofreading for typos and grammar
- transcribing interviews for me to reference during the writing process later
Sorry, no. AI content detectors also think the U.S. Constitution was written by AI. (Hint: Mr. Madison is rolling over in his grave and would like a word…)
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (written 1796-97; published 1813) has been falsely accused of being written by AI (uh, no). So has the book of Genesis from the Bible (even bigger no). One Redditor put Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” from 1842 into an AI detector, which flagged it as 60% AI (again … really?!). The list goes on.
So again, sorry. No. I do not care about the opinion of a piece of software that:
- was created by people looking to financially capitalize on the current AI-in-its-infancy situation
- for people who either A) desperately want it to work or B) are looking for an excuse to get out of paying an invoice.
I know better than to enter your confidential or proprietary information into an AI tool. For one thing, I can check the little box to “don’t use my interactions to train AI” all day long but that doesn’t mean I trust it!
And I encourage you to be skeptical also… please don’t put your company’s confidential or financial information into any AI tool.
More importantly, I come from a highly regulated environment (financial services/treasury management) where I had to work with confidential, material non-public information (MNPI) on a regular basis. Not to mention take compliance courses every year on the proper handling of that kind of info.
Trust me, I understand better than most freelancers how to carefully handle business around trade secrets and other confidential data. That behavior is ingrained in my soul at this point!