What’s Not Your Job?
You’re a freelancer, and you know what your job is. You’re a web designer. You’re a copywriter. You’re a marketing consultant.
Here’s what you probably don’t think about often, but should:
What’s not your job?
I’m not talking about clients who ask you to perform above and beyond the scope of the project. When that happens, you can politely tell clients they’re asking for something beyond what you’ve agreed to, and they’ll usually back down.
I’m talking about when you limit yourself because you’re not clear on what’s part of your responsibility to a client.
For example, I know a marketing expert who frequently gets frustrated that so many people don’t actually take her advice. They don’t put it into action. “What I’m telling them is smart stuff,” she states. “And they smile and they nod and tell me I’m so brilliant. And then they don’t do anything with what I tell them.”
She used to worry about it. She felt guilty. Maybe she shouldn’t offer marketing consults at all if her clients weren’t getting anything out of it. If her clients didn’t turn right around, apply her advice and rocket their businesses into 6 figures, maybe she should just quit. She felt like a scam artist. She promised something – success – and she felt like she wasn’t delivering.
Then it hit her one morning.
“I just realized,” she said. “Putting my marketing advice to work is not part of my job.”
Her job was to give sound advice. Her job was to tell a client the next ten things that person needed to do in order to hit a certain milestone goal. Her job was to analyze what would work and what wouldn’t.
Her job wasn’t to make the client put this advice into action. Or to make sure he’d executed the advice properly. It wasn’t to create a success story.
Her job was to provide good, smart, reasoned, executable, savvy marketing information.
What the client did with that was completely beyond her control.
So What’s Not Your Job?
If you’re a graphic designer, it isn’t your job to make sure that everyone and their grandmother visits your client’s shiny new site. Your job is to make sure the site looks fantastic. That it’s easy to navigate and draws the eye to the right places. That if your client does his part of the job – getting traffic to the site — your design wows people.
Likewise, if you’re an SEO expert, it isn’t your job to make sure your client’s content is well-written. Your job is to tell the client what keywords to use, how frequently, and in which places.
If you’re a copywriter, it isn’t your job to get potential clients reading the web copy you’ve written. Your job is to make sure that whoever comes to read your web copy feels compelled to pull out his wallet and buy the product.
And if you’re a blogger, it isn’t your job to make sure the blog post you wrote lands on the front page of Digg. It’s your job to make sure that the post is good enough to be on Digg in the first place.
It’s important to know what your job is.
But it’s equally important to remember what it isn’t.
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Thank you for this post!
As a beginner copywriter, I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the pressure to not only make sure I was writing great copy, but that I was doing everything else too! I’m going to keep this post in my files for when I need a little reminder.
A very good article. This does not just apply to the freelance industry but also in day to day work at the office, basically everywhere we need to deal with clients imo. I found frustrated sometimes when my advice is listened but not taken action too. But from time and time that is exactly the lesson I learn: it is beyond my control and I just try to do the best within my limitation. Beyond that is someone else’s call.
True words of wisdom.
One man that is really good at one thing is better off then one man that is kinda good at lots of things. Yes, women too.
This doesn’t always apply if you’re a freelancer/entrepreneur. Sometimes you just have to do everything. But delegating my “kinda good” tasks has almost always given me more time to spend on my “really good” tasks.
Good post interesting article.
Thanks for the post. Great piece here – unfortunately, as freelancers we frequently invest ourselves into our clients – we see their success as our success, their failure as our failure.
It’s nice to be reminded sometimes that that’s just not how it is.
Great advice. I’ve run into this a few times, and it’s always nice to have a reminder of my own sanity
I’ve been there and it’s no fun. Anxiety from work that you don’t even need to do leads to your work suffering. It’s a danger zone because you aim to give the highest service possible to your clients, but that doesn’t mean every service possible. Thank you for the reminder!
You guys nailed it with this article. It was a great read!
I get this a lot regardins SEO. Often clients think that building a website implicitely means you’ll take care of everything SEO related. Of course, I always try to design sites to be as SEO friendly as possible. I’ll even make sure it’s at least indexed, if the client can’t take care of that part. But doing ‘link building’, installing managing Google Ads campains and other SEO related stuff is not automaticaly part of the deal. And when they insist and redo my estimate with the added hours this will take me, they are shocked!
I also get clients that call me when their ‘Outlook’ crashes, very annoying.
Tx for the always usefull reminders.
Nothing remotely related to being a Macintosh Mercenary is “not my job”. That’s why I make $75 an hour and could work 24hrs a day if I wanted to (I don’t, sorry clients).
I consider myself a concierge type, so most requests, even “broken Outlooks” don’t bum me out. I have absolutely had “my Entourage isn’t working” gigs turn into huge website revamp/branding gigs that paid the rent for a year simply by being personable, easy to work with and having the ability to un-complicate things.
There is definitely an upside to being “the computer guy” as opposed to choosing a particular area of expertise, especially when you kinda love it all anyway
This article is spot on!
I know this info but to see it written out and explained so well is great. I will be refering to this one for years to come.
Add to your list of businesses where this is a concern: training consultants. When you make your living helping businesses get more out of their employees, you become keenly aware of how challenging it can be to get participants in your training to apply what you teach them when they return to their usual work environments, filled with simuli, systems and tools, and supervisors that interfere, passively or actively, with change.
Most of my clients (independent training consultants) try to find some middle ground: avoid doing training when they absolutely know it won’t make a difference; warn their own clients about their internal obstacles to getting the full benefit of the training; and accepting that they generally aren’t responsible for achieving full implementation of better practices and new principles, but merely for making adoption of those better ways of doing things possible for the client organization.
This concept is hard for me to do. I want to do everything.
This reminds me of a nagging question. Someone offers you a job a a Virtual Assistant. You know you’re tech savvy but aren’t sure if your skills are sufficient to what your client might require of you. Do you accept the job?
This is so true. It can be very frustrating when you give advice and clients don’t take it, and we can so easily feel responsible when their businesses don’t skyrocket in the next month. But it’s really not our job to babysit our clients. Great post!
Answer to poch – I would take the job and then do the research/legwork to make sure I did the job right. But I rarely say no to a job, even if I have to outsource it.
That is really good and true.
I think taking the job in this case, might depend on how “big” it is, how much responsibility do you take on? Will you’ll have enough time to correct mistakes if you make them, or, have enough time to get things done right in the first place? (you might take longer to do certain things if you’re not used to doing them, or are unsure about how to do them at first.) How quickly and efficiently can you assimilate and put into practice the info and actions necessary to carry out the job? Can you even find the answers to these questions?
Do as much research as you possibly can on what your responsibilities will be (talk to people/ ask questions/ read up on it through blogs etc.) to ensure that you have the best breakdown, time wise etc., of how you need to accomplish your tasks. You may also want to do everything you can to find a way to ease yourself into it (try it part time/ do things for friends that mimic the real job) and if that’s not possible then you’ll just have to jump right in.
You already seem to understand that, sometimes, the only way to know how well you can do something is to actually do it. So, prepare yourself as best you can and then take the plunge. Remember to note what works, and what doesn’t, for you, once you’re in the job. If it doesn’t work out there could be lots of things to learn about why it didn’t work out and what you could have done to handle things better that could apply to future jobs and life in general.
“Preparation” should also include reminding yourself not to be too thin skinned about the whole endeavor being rough going for quite some time, or simply not working out. You may want to – before you dive in – give yourself some sort of timeframe for how long you’d be willing to stick it out if things don’t go well, especially if you are risking yourself financially by giving this new job a try. You don’t want to find yourself in a hole with no way out.
Thank you for your great post! Its valuable for me.
As a Web Developer who sets up Content Management Systems – its not my job to add all the content!
Very well written article. Often we are asked to do something that is not actually our task by the client.
I indeed agree to this post. It’s good to have myself focused in a subject instead of doing everything. This way I will not take my time to learn something new by saying “Yes, I can do it”. The important thing is, I will not waste the client’s precious time, nor mine.
Great article! Sometimes though when the budget is not big you gotta do it all, it should however be explained what you will and won’t be responsible for.
great article. it’s often the case that a client will ask you to do something out of your remit and in my experience, it’s a case of gently reminding them that im not contracted to do (task a) but that I’m here to build and guide them on their website. More often then not, it’s that they don’t know themselves what it is that you do and don’t do rather than them wanting you to do everything for nothing.
Sometimes I am wondering if comments like “great post” are just for SEO and does not add any value to conversation…
Anyway it is quite frustrating when clients don’t listen. It makes me very sad, there are so many great people there with lots of skills and knowledge but yet many businesses are failing every day.
Business owners listen to whoever offers advice, think about it and if it makes a sense do something!
I don’t freelance (yet) but I’ve definitely been thinking about this one at work. “It isn’t my job to keep the customers happy. My job is to cook great food.”
Wow.. how come I’ve never read something like this when I’ve started freelancing? Thanks a lot! Now, I know where the limits of my work lies. Problem is, as a multi-skilled freelancers, my clients often throw me this and that.. where I’m often lost in translation. Though they are satisfied with what I do, I wonder if I’ve reached a milestone since they expect me to do multiple stuff. I think setting clear goals is crucial in any freelance project. Cheers!
For web designers, it’s also not your job to be your client’s tech support for basic computer issues. I can’t believe how many people hire us to build them a website, then call us about the most random computer questions….
This was the latest:
Client: “I can’t open this file that someone sent me as an attachment.”
Me: “What kind of file is it?”
Client: “What do you mean?”
Me: “When you look at the file, what is at the end of the name, after the period?”
Client: “The letters ‘A’ and ‘I’”
Me: “That’s an Adobe Illustrator file. You can only open it with that program. Do you have Illustrator?”
Client: “No…. So why can’t I open it?”
Me: “You have to have the right program to open it, and it sounds like you don’t have it.”
Client: “What if I open it as a Google Doc or something?”
Haha…. This reminds me of a funny experience too.
What a great question to ask myself : “what is NOT my job??” – thank you!!
I am clear up front that I don’t do when it comes to creating simple websites, but often have people asking for loads more then was agreed on the original quote (which is in writing, of course !)
I tell them I’ll research whether it can be done, and/or that it’ll cost approximately X amount more – when you then put a price on their request, they will rethink the request before committing … this approach, which I just started using recently, has meant extra revenue when their request was serious, and less wasted time for me when it was not… win-win
I continue give advice on copy that I receive from clients, especially if it doesn’t make sense or give enough explanation to a customer about how to purchase something or how the business works. If I can’t understand it, the customer definitely will be confused as well and probably leave the site. Should I leave well enough alone? I feel responsible to say something to help them out, but again that isn’t my job as a web designer. Maybe taking the step to suggest my client run the copy by a few people to see if it makes sense, rather than just doing it myself?
Thoughts?
Great article. However (because nitpicking is fun), If what you said is true for your friend’s situation, then what you’re saying for many of the following examples would be a contradiction.
As a graphic designer I submit designs and layouts for ads which I’m proud of. By the time upper management is through making changes the ads aren’t something I’m proud to admit to working on. My job is to submit ideas but then execute them as management sees fit. If the ad isn’t effective it’s really not my fault. That’s just how it is. Same for web design. You might submit great designs but if the final product is difficult to navigate then that’s hardly your fault if that’s what they want.
I write SEO web content, so my job is to draw in traffic but also to convert that traffic to sales.
I get a lot of questions about marketing and I’m interested so I usually try to help, but in general it’s not my job. Writing is. I want to do everything though!
As a webdesigner , sometimes my clients -small businesses mainly – are asking about parts of the project which are not my jobs, like copywriting, or very basic SEO. There are two things for considering: what I am not good at, what I am good at. If I cant help, I don’t frustrate myself, I state it clearly, lead them to a professional etc. If I can help, but it is not part of the original contract, then I state that I am helping gladly for this and this rate. This is my way or dealing with the “not my job situation”.
I’ve had a few cases recently where clients thought the copy I wrote for them was really great. They used it on their sites or in there documents, but not before changing it and making it sound rubbish. Even worse, one obviously didn’t know how to copy and paste because spelling mistakes were introduced that weren’t there before. Is it my job to point this out or shouldn’t I be so precious?
Hoorah. This is a hard lesson that I’m just starting to learn. I can lie awake at night wondering if there was something I could have done differently to influence a client towards success — OR — I can get some sleep so that, when I do wake up, I’m fresh and ready to continue putting out excellent content.
On the flipside, many clients are now assuming that providing content includes providing social media buzz (i.e. you can write this article for $XXX, but we expect you do Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc to promote it.) Sometimes, this is only communicated on the back end in the form of, “Why haven’t you Tweeted this out to your followers, yet?” *sigh* Remember the good ‘ol days when providing content was providing content?
Get the expectations up front — in writing if possible. (And keep up the great work. This post is going in my “precious” file.)