I attended a workshop in Ft. Lauderdale a week ago, put on by a fellow who is the author of four books, the publisher of a magazine, and, according to him, an all-round sales guru. We met in April when he was the keynote speaker at a conference where I was presenting my “Write Right, Right NOW! The Ultimate Writing Boot Camp for Successful Speakers.” At this conference, he presented two PowerPoint lectures that were full of typos, and punctuation and grammar mistakes. He misspelled the host organization’s name two different ways. And his magazines! Don’t get me started. Huge, embarrassing mistakes on every page. I edited three issues, and handed them to him after the conference. I offered to give him an hour’s worth of editing consultation at no charge, which he indicated he’d be interested in discussing.
So on Thursday I traveled to Ft. Lauderdale to see if I could turn him from a cocky know-it-all into a cocky salesperson who is at least smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, and who would consider hiring me to edit his materials. Was there a sincere desire for excellence? In other words, would he back up his big talk with a commitment to publishing professional-level marketing materials?
Not hardly.
The PowerPoint he presented had 27 slides with at least one serious mistake; some slides had more than one mistake. There may have been more mistakes, but he was moving so fast through the last group of slides that I didn’t have a chance to read them thoroughly. He made every bush-league mistake in the book: misspelled words, missing words, grammar mistakes, punctuation mistakes, and mistakes I had never seen before.
So I went up to him afterwards with my list. I waited until he was by himself, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. I reminded him when and where we met, and again offered the hour of consultation. What did he say? He laughed and said that he didn’t need it. His staff, you see, writes “so fast” that its members can’t be bothered to make sure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed.
I said, Yeah, but you have at least 27 slides on the PowerPoint you just presented, the PowerPoint that you used to try to get me and everyone else in the audience to pay more than a thousand bucks a year to join your “group,” and that’s 27 too many.
He looked at me like I was a purple polka dotted alien and said that no one but me would ever notice that words were misspelled, and, even if someone did, no one would care. The PowerPoint, he said, was “good enough.”
I have to wonder at what point his work would not be “good enough.” Is it the number of mistakes? Would 28 be too many? Or, is it his audience members, who, he predicts, don’t know and won’t care?
One thing I’m confident about though. It’s not worth talking to someone like that. People who are deliberately ignorant—wait, let me rephrase that: people who are determinedly ignorant aren’t worth my time. And, certainly, not worth my money. Why in the world would I shell out a thousand-plus dollars a year to deal with someone who can’t spell? Someone who is sloppy? What, exactly, could I learn from someone like that?
You never know how much business being sloppy can cost you. In this case, it cost him my business. You can get a lot of editing done for a thousand bucks!
Bottom line: good writing makes you money.
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