I’m particular. Some call it anal. But I prefer particular. I blame many people for this. In order: my father, my mother, my first CEO, and Mark Masseur.

My father is the most organized person on the planet. He’s 25 steps ahead of you and has every detail figured out, every back-up scenario figured out, and every back-up to the back-up scenario figured out. He’s spent his life in disaster recovery, with a father who was in the military, a policeman and a high-school principal, so I guess that explains that.

My mother re-ironed 130 handkerchiefs three times for my wedding so the creases were exactly right. My first CEO saw me making copies one day and used 12 profanity-laced sentences to tell me that I should never @#!$ send ANYTHING to a client without our logo on it (which actually wasn’t relevant to what I was copying, but I remembered never to forget our logo on anything).

And then there’s Mark Masseur (Symmetri partner/creative director), who still refuses to type a basic letter in Microsoft Word because in Microsoft Word you can’t use grids.

I blame them all for making me so particular. I iron my clothes every day. I make my bed every day. Laziness drives me crazy. Not being thorough drives me crazy. Typos drive me crazy. And not having proper text alignment or spacing between lines drives me crazy. 6 pt paragraph spacing, people!!!

Maybe I am crazy. But I’ve found that in this business, crazy is important. Most people don’t even know what 6 pt paragraph spacing is. But that’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s not that I think you should spend all your time ensuring there aren’t any grammatical errors or typos or miscalculations or fixing line spacing. Not at all. But errors and sloppiness are noticed. Even in a world that lives and dies by email. I don’t want any impression of sloppiness given to our clients.

If we’re particular, anal, critical – whatever you want to call it – with our own daily work, we’ll be even more particular, anal, critical about the work we do for our clients. It makes our work better. And it makes our client relationships stronger.