Reading as half the work
On why every engagement begins with a half-day of reading what the client has already published — and why that reading is never separately invoiced.
Before we write any new copy for a client, we read every word the client has already published. The site, the last twelve months of blog, the last twelve months of email, the sales decks from the past quarter, any internal documents the team forwards. For a small client this is a half-day. For a larger one it is a full day. It never appears on the invoice as a separate line.
There are three reasons to do this. The first is the obvious one — we cannot match a voice we have not heard. Reading the existing surfaces is the only reliable way to internalise the brand's actual patterns: the sentence length, the punctuation choices, the words the brand uses and the words it does not, the way the brand handles concession, the way the brand handles call-to-action. None of this is in a brief.
The second is less obvious. Reading the existing material almost always changes the engagement. Every engagement so far has produced a moment where we said: this is not the work the brief asked for. The brief asked for a new landing page; the right work is a sequence of three landing pages because the audience is segmented. The brief asked for an SEO article on a topic the brand has already covered three times; the right work is to consolidate those three into one and redirect. The brief asked for a tone-of-voice guide; the right work is a Brand Voice Audit first, because the brand does not have a problem with the guide, it has a problem with the inputs to the guide. We catch all of these in the reading phase. We could not catch them any other way.
The third reason is the simplest. Reading is how we earn the right to suggest. A client takes a suggestion seriously to the degree the suggestion is grounded in their actual material. "You should write shorter sentences" is a generic recommendation. "Your campaign emails average twenty-eight words per sentence; your transactional emails average fourteen; the campaign emails feel laboured because of it" is a specific observation. The client believes the second one immediately because we read both inboxes.
Reading is never a separate line on the invoice because it is not separable from the work. It is the work, or it is half of it. The other half is the writing, which is much faster, much cleaner, and much more useful for the reading having been done first.