Atten­tion to detail. Known in the office as ​‘ATD’. The sec­ond favourite phrase of our Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er, Rick Bar­row, dur­ing work­ing hours . The first revolves around whose turn it is to brew up.

On a week­ly basis we receive let­ters addressed to Mr Jack­son, Mr Bar­rett (for­giv­able giv­en the sim­i­lar­i­ty between this and the name of the fam­i­ly who make up a large per­cent­age of our work­force), Mr Gass, Mr Smithy and Mr Annexe. None of whom work here.

We have let­ters redi­rect­ed from our offices on Grove Street, where we have not been locat­ed for over ten years.

We have tens of let­ters sent to us with­out a ref­er­ence on them. Many of the let­ters that *do* have ref­er­ences on them sim­ply have a mem­ber of staff’s name on them. Often spelt wrong. ​‘Quin­ton’ being a favourite of mine (as in Quentin Dodd, Legal Exec­u­tive). Often not the cor­rect mem­ber of staff actu­al­ly work­ing on that file.

This despite us send­ing out intro­duc­to­ry let­ters at the start of a trans­ac­tion inform­ing all par­ties who the point of con­tact is for that file.

We strive to main­tain excel­lent ATD stan­dards. But you’re only as good as the infor­ma­tion that you are giv­en. We rely on the ATD of oth­er stake­hold­ers. When they get some­thing wrong, we get some­thing wrong. The only dif­fer­ence being our mis­takes are picked up on by our clients, who assume that we lack ATD.

So I sup­pose the point I’m try­ing to make in this first blog of mine is that excel­lent ATD is vital. Not just in our indus­try, but in all indus­tries. ATD is key!