fired.jpgI just had a teleconference with a long-time client, and my contact told me they were outsourcing my role to an information service and relegating my job to a couple of articles a month. Until now, I’ve been a big player in their newsletter. But the organization of the project was very inefficient, and we were all spending far too much time each month. I spent quite some time talking with them about how they could make the process easier.

But, err. This means I talked myself out of a paying job.

Actually, I’m quite relieved. I wrote a few weeks ago about jobs I work on that have serious flaws. This job was one of them. They were spending thousands a month on the newsletter, and they didn’t have an electronic version that tracked how many people were actually reading it. And a lot of my role was that of glorified secretary. I simply had to organize things and request that people send me their contributions. I did very little writing, and, as I’ve proclaimed before, I am a writer.

Another reason that I’m not worried about the end of this project is that this group was locked in at a very early hourly rate. I wrote about asking them for my standard rate and worrying that they would pass. Since then I’ve been able to increase my rate for incoming groups, but I felt obligated to keep my hourly the same for this client.

So, it’s a very good thing that they’ve reorganized this project, and I know their decision had nothing to do with my contributions. It just made sense. They still want a quote from me to handle their PR and press releases, so I’ll be able to renegotiate my rate.

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