You delegate work with your fingers crossed. Due to work load and time pressures, mistakes are cropping up. Typos, caption mistakes, the occasional design error, once a minor worry, are occurring on a regular basis. The difference between getting a job done and getting it done right, is a question of time.

You constantly burn the candle at both ends for demanding clients. You can't seem to ease the load. You know what you want and you need it yesterday. It's you who has to face the music when everyone else has gone home. You could do it yourself, but there is just too much to do.

You and your team routinely struggle to meet multiple tight deadlines. As your people keep turning on a dime from concept to concept, and switching among competing deadlines, you face a recipe for burnout, staff desertion and mediocre creative. You risk both missing deadlines and producing less than stellar campaigns.

You are concerned about the strategy of your creative work. It's hard to say which is worse. Not getting a reaction. Or getting a big reaction - for a blunder. When your designer sees a cool layout, but your client squints to find his main message, you know you have a common problem - good creative talent often lacks a sense of strategy. Or, a well-meaning staffer may write okay for one type of job, but be unskilled for another.

You need to get tighter control of output without coming off like a tyrant, but in some areas, your people just don't get it. Creatives are a thin-skinned breed, you've got to treat them gingerly or risk resentment, water cooler talk, even turf wars. If you could leave the emotion out of it and get on with the work, it would be so much easier to get control of the outcome.

You need to calculate the risk and return of hiring more staff. To grow your business you have to grow your ability to service more accounts. A variety of staff experience, expertise and style attracts good clients. Beefing up. It's your call and it's never easy. Think salary, overhead, workspace (about 200 sq. ft. per employee), tools-(one of the latest of everything) benefits, staff chemistry, and so on. Should new work taper off, you have a dilemma. You can't carry extra full-time staff without new and steady income.

You run an in-house marketing team. You may have agency experience but now you are totally client-side. You could care less about ad awards, but you care a lot about ROI. Your team is willing but not always able to take on any creative challenge. You could use an outside source for expertise, to show your staff how it is done, and to take a load off their shoulders. Your not downtown anymore, but find that email and phone works just fine in most cases. Plus, meetings are an expense you can usually do without.

You may never have set out to be the conductor of a creative services orchestra, but if that’s the tune you dance to, rest assured you are in good company.

I have found that clients who have been able to overcome the operational challenges of delivering quality creative output to solve strategic marketing problems, share some common characteristics.

You know that many creatives are not strategic and many strategists are not creative. When you find that combination in a single source you value its potential as a wellspring you can draw upon for a wide array of communications needs.

You understand that avoiding a missed deadline can pay for outside help many times over. Superior service, greater convenience, and easier working relationships mean you usually get it right the first time around. A copywriter who is faster than anybody better, and better than anybody faster, would be a good partner for you.

You get excited when you see outstanding creative development. You recognize the strategic potential of a marketing campaign when it reveals that it can be a creative container for the delivery of numerous media: print and radio ads, posters, signs, buttons, banners, multiple product descriptions, and more.

You don't want to know costs in advance of defining projects. You approve a creative brief expecting it will be met in every respect and when it is you are satisfied. You are decisive about exactly what you want and when you need it. You are not beholden to a committee to subjectively judge work based on hunches rather than the requirements of the brief.

You view the craft of copywriting, rightly as a mixture of strategy, words and images, concocted to deliver the tone and taste of a brand. You realize that a master craftsman can sometimes seem to work magic with these elements, but that reliably getting the job done on time and as instructed, is well worth the investment.

You are a professional who has run a lot of campaigns. You are not a start-up trying to launch your first campaign on a shoe-string budget. Your goals are a little out of reach, but not out of sight. You keep your team always stretching to be better, but not disillusioned by constantly chasing hare-brained expectations.

You don't have to educate your clients. Like any creative shop, you took whatever you could get in the beginning. But along the way you occasionally turned away difficult or offensive clients. You re-focused your efforts on more sophisticated clients who appreciated the skills you provided. Now your clients still demand value, but they are easier to get along with because they are experienced professionals themselves. They are not entrepreneurs grudgingly writing a cheque on their personal account.

You know that it is hard to put a value on doing everything right, until everything goes wrong. You appreciate that evaluating freelance work is nearly always a combination of service and price. Value is subjective. The best overall value must factor in talent, service & experience, comparing apples to apples. You believe you get what you pay for.

Now that you know the kind of business professionals I work with, the issues I help them resolve, and the elements of your marketing make-up that ensure your success, click on this link to learn more about what it is like to work with me.