Stop and smell the roses today

Fourth week on a new job and, as usual, I’m learning new things all the time. The most recent lesson? The difference between a plain document and an attractive document is HUGE. Heap-big. Imagine presenting your client with a document that is little more than bolded headings and blogs of text, versus bold use of colors — dark blue background with white text, for example.

I’m not advocating going overboard here, nor am I saying that creating a nice looking report/document will win or keep you any business. What I am saying is that presenting your reader with something well organized will grease the skids and make life a bit more pleasant.

Through the craziness of our days, we sometimes forget to take the time to craft a document, rather than compile it. Take a look at the PDF I’ve appended to this post. It’s printed from, literally, a Word document template. I used pre-formatted objects within Microsoft Word to create this, and it took no more time to do than a standard, run-of-the-mill plain document.

So next time you’re putting something together for a client, think about how you can give it that extra oomph to make them feel appreciated. It’ll pay off in spades later.

Click here to see the nice document. It’s a very small PDF file.