A Little Reintroduction: Client Communication, Content Curation and Small Business Reality

Allow me to reintroduce myself…

If you’re wearing all the hats in your business, there’s a fair chance the words are taking up more brain space than they should.

• The client email you’ve rewritten 6 times.

• The post you meant to write 3 days ago.

• The scope conversation you know you need to have.

• The photo sitting in your camera roll because you took it “for social media” and then had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

Hi, I’m Lee.

I’m a Client Communication and Content Curation Specialist, which is a slightly fancy way of saying I spend a LOT of time thinking about what business owners say, how they say it, and why sometimes we make the whole thing lots harder than it needs to be.

I’m the person behind Lee Longmire Co, based in the Riverina in regional NSW.

And around here, you’ll see my work show up in two main ways.

There’s the communication happening between you and your clients.

And there’s the communication happening between your business and the people you want to buy from you.

One lives primarily inside The Messaging Reset.

The other lives inside The Content Edit.

They look like two different subjects on Instagram.

They’re actually much more closely related than they first appear.

When a perfectly reasonable client email takes 45 minutes

If you run a client-centred business, there’s a decent chance you’ve had one of these moments.

You know what you need to say.

You know the request is reasonable.

You may even have written the email already.

And yet somehow you’re still sitting there wondering:

“Does this sound rude?”

“Should I explain why I need it?”

“Should I soften this a bit?”

“Do I need to apologise?”

“Maybe I’ll rewrite that sentence one more time…”

This is the territory of The Messaging Reset.

The Messaging Reset is for women in client-centred businesses, including VAs, OBMs, freelancers, creatives, consultants, service providers and solopreneurs.

It looks at communication habits that can follow us out of employment and into business.

Things like:

• unnecessary apologising
• overexplaining
• softening perfectly reasonable requests
• worrying about sounding difficult
• struggling to hold scope
• avoiding firmer conversations
• treating a client relationship a little too much like an employer relationship

Because if the client said they’d send the approval Tuesday and it’s now Friday, asking where it is does not require a three-paragraph apology.

Sometimes the communication really can be simpler than we make it.

When social media becomes another job you apparently acquired

Then there’s the other side of my work.

If you run a retail or service business and you’re responsible for your own social media, you may know this particular routine.

You open Instagram or Facebook because you really should post something.

You stare at the screen.

You look through the camera roll.

You find 14 photos you took specifically “for social media”.

You still don’t know what to post.

Huzzah.

This is where The Content Edit comes in.

The Content Edit is my Content Curation work with local retailers and service businesses across the Riverina and surrounding regional NSW communities.

And no, Content Curation is not a fancy way of saying I hand you 100 Instagram ideas and send you on your way.

It starts with your actual business.

Your customers.

What you sell.

What people need to understand before they buy.

What questions keep coming up.

What’s happening seasonally.

What you already have sitting around the business that could become useful content.

And importantly, how much capacity you genuinely have for social media while ALSO RUNNING THE BUSINESS.

Because there is no point building you a content plan that requires the resources of a marketing department when the marketing department is you.

Along with customer service.

Sales.

Purchasing.

Admin.

Accounts.

And quite possibly the person putting the bins out.

What Content Curation actually means for a small business

Content Curation is about deciding what is actually worth communicating, rather than constantly trying to invent more things to post.

For a small business, that might mean working out:

• what your customers need to know
• which products or services need more explanation
• which common questions could become content
• what needs promoting now and what can wait
• what photos or video would actually be useful to capture
• how frequently you realistically want to show up
• what types of content suit the business
• what social-media advice you can happily ignore

Through The Content Edit, I build a personalised Content Curation Framework around those decisions.

It’s not a generic calendar.

It’s not social-media management.

And the goal isn’t to turn you into someone who spends their life creating content.

The goal is to make it much easier to answer:

“What should my business actually be talking about?”

Why client communication and content curation sit together

Because I’m interested in the point where a capable business owner knows their business but gets stuck on the communication around it.

Sometimes that’s:

“What do I say to this client?”

Sometimes it’s:

“What do I say to my customers?”

One day I might be talking about scope creep.

The next I might be talking about Christmas content for a shop.

Both very much my lane.

The bit underneath both is working out what actually needs to be communicated, getting rid of the unnecessary complication and helping the way you communicate better match the business you’re actually running.