Today I want to talk to you about deadlines, and what you should look for in a consultant when it comes to them. I’ll be the first one in the room to raise my hand and say that early on in my career, I did miss a few delivery deadlines. This was usually due to piss-poor planning and time management on my part, and less-than-stellar communication on the stakeholder’s part.

Today, in my role as a copywriter and content consultant, I still miss deadlines—but for completely different reasons. And what’s surprising is that my clients love me for this.

Whaaaaat? Well, whenever I begin a relationship with a client company, I make one thing super-clear:

Any project deadlines missed will not be due
to my blowing a milestone.

That’s right: I deliver great stuff, on time, no matter what. Any missed deadlines must always come from the client side. Shit happens, people head off on vacation, fire drills drag them away to address emergent issues, and they miss getting responses, raw materials, or feedback to me on time.

When that happens, the schedule shifts, but the most important thing is that they always remember that I delivered on time. And if the schedule shifts due to a client-side missed deadline, guess what? I also hit my new deadline with a velvet sledgehammer. Every. Time.

If your content consultant can’t/won’t/doesn’t do this, are you wasting, time, money—or both?