A Tool That Does Not Know Your Business

What it does not have

Your last twenty invoices, and therefore what the work actually costs.

Your job records, and therefore how long things take and what usually goes wrong.

Your photographs, your area, your suppliers, and the reason you stopped offering something in 2019.

And your judgement, which is what a customer is really asking for when they read an advisory page.

Those are the parts that work

• A range from your own jobs.
• The fault that causes most of them.
• What you refuse to take on.
• A photograph of a real failure.
• The case where your usual advice is wrong.
• Your recommendation, stated plainly.

None of those is available to any tool that has not been told them, and every one of them is what a customer remembers from a page. The generic material around them is the part that could be produced automatically, and it was never the part doing the work.

The information is in your records

Which is the useful reframing, because it turns a philosophical point into an afternoon's work.

The ranges are in your invoices, and nobody has looked at them as a set.

The common faults are in your job notes, or in the memory of whoever does the work, which is a conversation rather than research.

The exceptions are the jobs everybody still talks about.

The photographs are on somebody's phone, unfiled.

So the barrier to writing something a tool cannot produce is not skill or time, it is that nobody has spent an hour collecting what the business already holds.

A worked example

A business spent an hour on their most important service before writing anything.

They pulled the last twenty invoices for that work, which gave a range and a typical figure.

They asked the two people who do it what goes wrong most, which produced one answer immediately and unanimously.

They found three photographs from a job where the underlying problem had been worse than expected.

And they agreed on the situation where they tell people not to bother, which nobody had ever written down.

The page took two hours to write afterwards and contained four things no competitor and no tool could have produced.

Supplying it changes what the tool is for

And this is where the honest use sits.

Give it your figures, your fault, your exception, and your recommendation, and ask it to arrange them into a page.

The output will be genuinely useful, because the substance is yours and the arrangement is the part it does well.

That is a real saving and it is a different activity from asking it to write a page about your service.

The gathering is the work, the writing was always the easier half, and the tool takes the easier half.

Anybody selling content generation without asking you for any of this is selling the part that does not matter.

Start collecting as you go

Since the hour works once and a habit works for years.

Photograph anything interesting during a job, at the moment you notice it, rather than only the finished result.

Write one line when something goes differently: what it was, what caused it, what it cost.

Note the questions customers ask that you have not seen before, since those are next year's pages.

None of that takes more than a few seconds at the time and it is the only way the material accumulates rather than being reconstructed each time somebody wants to write something.

The question to ask a supplier

Since this will be offered to you in the new year.

Ask where the specifics will come from.

A good answer involves interviewing you, reading your records, or visiting a job, because there is nowhere else for them to come from.

An answer about research, industry knowledge, or best practice means the pages will be the average, whether written by a person or a machine.

That single question separates the two kinds of supplier more reliably than any discussion of process or price.

It has always been the right question and it is now the decisive one.

It cannot hold an opinion

The point that matters most for advisory pages.

A customer reading about a choice wants somebody experienced to say which they would pick.

A tool producing the average of everything written will describe both options evenly and decline, because both positions exist in what it learned from.

Your view, formed over years and stated plainly, is the entire value of an advisory page and is the one thing that cannot be generated.

Which is worth remembering when a generated draft ends by saying it depends on your circumstances, as they all do.

Say who you are on the page

A small addition that compounds everything above.

A name, a photograph, and a line saying how long that person has done this attaches the specifics to somebody accountable for them.

That is not a claim a tool can make on your behalf, and it is increasingly the difference a reader notices between two pages covering the same ground.

It also changes how the rest of the page reads, since a figure attached to a named person with twenty years behind it carries differently from the same figure floating unattributed.

Where you are already publishing your own experience, saying whose experience it is costs one line and is the cheapest improvement available.

The counter-case

Not everything needs to be specific.

A good deal of a site is standard and should be: how to contact you, what happens next, ordinary descriptions of ordinary things.

Some businesses also genuinely have little that is distinctive, and pretending otherwise produces manufactured differences customers see through.

And the tools will become able to use your own material, at which point the gathering is still the work and the argument here is unchanged.

Spend the hour collecting what your business already knows, then use whatever tool you like to arrange it.

The hour

1. Pull twenty invoices for one service.
2. Work out the range and the typical figure.
3. Ask what goes wrong most often.
4. Find three photographs from a real job.
5. Write down the case where you say no.
6. State your recommendation.
7. Then arrange it, however you like.

Step seven is the only part any tool can help with, and putting it last is the whole of the argument.

What that material does on a page is covered in showing the work behind an answer.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.