Why Do I Write the Way I Do?
- 11 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Why Do I Write the Way I Do?
I spend a lot of time talking with small business owners. Not hypothetical owners, not case studies, and not necessarily the kind of businesses that tend to appear in articles about entrepreneurship. I sit across the table from people trying to make payroll, deciding whether they can afford another employee, wondering why there is never as much cash in the bank as they expected, questioning whether their advertising is actually working, or simply trying to figure out what they are supposed to do next.
Those conversations have shaped the way I write.
There is no shortage of information available to small business owners. A lot of it is good information, but good information is not automatically useful information. Sometimes it assumes a level of business knowledge the reader does not have. Sometimes the examples are built around companies operating at a scale that bears little resemblance to the business reading the article. Other times the advice may be technically correct, but it does not quite fit the reality of the person trying to apply it.
That disconnect is what I am trying to address.
Small Business Is Not One Size
Scale changes what matters.
The phrase small business covers an extraordinary range of businesses. A company with several million dollars in annual revenue may be considered a small business, but so may a person operating a repair shop in a rural community, a contractor working from a pickup, a retailer on a small-town square, a family-owned restaurant, a home-based service business, or someone who has essentially created a job for themselves and perhaps one or two other people.
They may all fall under the same broad description, but they do not operate in the same reality.
Here in rural West Texas, some businesses operate in communities with populations measured in hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands. Their entire practical customer base may be smaller than the number of people another business serves in a month. They may never need a large marketing department, a sophisticated customer relationship management system, layers of management, or a strategy built around rapid expansion. Their challenge may simply be figuring out how to remain profitable while serving a limited market year after year.
Scale changes what matters.
Losing ten regular customers can mean something very different in a community of 800 people than it does in a city of 800,000. A new competitor can alter a local market almost overnight. One major employer closing, a highway project changing traffic patterns, a difficult agricultural year, or a relatively small population shift can affect the environment in which several local businesses operate.
None of this makes a rural business less sophisticated or less important. It means that advice written without considering scale can easily miss the business owner who needs it.
The Business Model Is Only Part of the Story
Business writing naturally gravitates toward models, systems, strategies, metrics, and processes. Those things matter, and I write about them too. But the business model is only part of what is happening inside a small business.
There is a person making the decisions.
That person brings goals, obligations, habits, experience, confidence, uncertainty, strengths, and weaknesses into the business with them. They may be supporting a family while trying to build the company. They may have invested retirement savings into it. They may be turning a skill they have practiced for twenty years into a business for the first time. They may be exceptional at their trade and know very little about accounting. They may understand their customers instinctively but have no idea how to read a financial statement.
Those things matter because business decisions are still human decisions.
Cash flow may be financial, but some of the decisions that create cash-flow problems are behavioral. Marketing is strategic, but understanding why one person chooses one business over another involves people. Leadership may be discussed as an organizational function, but in a small business it often comes down to how one individual communicates, handles pressure, delegates responsibility, responds to problems, or avoids decisions they know they need to make.
Pricing is another good example. A spreadsheet can tell an owner what they need to charge to cover their costs and earn a reasonable return. The spreadsheet cannot make them comfortable looking a longtime customer in the eye and asking them to pay the new price.
If we understand the numbers but ignore the person making the decisions, we are only looking at part of the business.
Business Language Can Create Distance
Once the idea makes sense, the terminology usually becomes much easier to understand.
Business has its own vocabulary, and some of it is important to learn. Owners should understand concepts such as margins, cash flow, break-even, market segmentation, customer acquisition, working capital, and competitive advantage. I do not think we help anyone by pretending those concepts do not matter.
I also do not think the terminology should become a barrier to understanding them.
When I talk about cash flow, I want someone to understand why a business can show a profit and still have trouble paying its bills. When I talk about a target market, I want the owner thinking about the actual people most likely to buy from them, not worrying about whether they filled out a demographic profile correctly. If we are discussing competitive advantage, the important question is not whether the owner can define the term. It is whether they can answer, Why would someone choose my business instead of another option?
Once the idea makes sense, the terminology usually becomes much easier to understand.
I am not trying to remove complexity from subjects that are genuinely complex. I am trying not to add another layer of complexity simply because we are talking about business. If something can be explained clearly, I would rather explain it clearly.
Useful Does Not Have to Mean Complicated
There is a tendency in business to associate sophistication with improvement. More technology, more data, more software, more automation, more channels, and more metrics can certainly create opportunities. They can also become distractions when the basic problem is somewhere else.
A business serving a few hundred customers may gain more from consistently answering the telephone, following up on estimates, reconciling the bank account, maintaining accurate records, and staying in contact with former customers than it would from implementing the newest marketing platform.
A rural retailer may need to understand why people are leaving town to make certain purchases before worrying about national consumer trends. A contractor may need to know the true cost of completing a job before building an elaborate sales funnel. A restaurant may need to get control of food cost, labor, waste, and repeat traffic before discussing a second location.
There is nothing unsophisticated about solving the problem that actually exists.
That principle influences a lot of what I write. I would rather help an owner recognize the issue sitting directly in front of them than introduce another system, another acronym, or another tool simply because it sounds more advanced.
I Write to the Person Making the Decision
Plain language is not simplistic thinking.
Business writing often makes companies sound as though they are independent beings.
The business should do this.
The company needs to evaluate that.
Management should determine something else.
For many of the small businesses I encounter, “management” may be one person sitting at a desk after everyone else has gone home. The marketing department may be the owner with a phone. Human resources may be the owner and a payroll service. Strategic planning may happen while driving between jobs. Sales, operations, purchasing, customer complaints, bookkeeping, and deciding whether the air conditioner can make it another summer may all belong to the same person.
That is usually the person I picture when I write.
I am not writing to a corporate identity. I am trying to explain something to the individual who eventually has to make the decision. That means recognizing tradeoffs and limited resources. It means understanding that the theoretically perfect solution may not be the practical solution available today. It also means respecting the reader enough to explain something clearly without talking down to them.
Plain language is not simplistic thinking. Some difficult business concepts can be explained clearly without stripping away what makes them important. If I cannot explain an idea in a way that allows an owner to connect it to their own business, I probably need to work on the explanation.
What I Hope the Reader Takes With Them
Not every article I write will apply equally to every business. I would be suspicious of anything that claimed it could.
What I hope is that a business owner reaches the end and finds at least one useful idea, one question worth asking, one assumption worth reconsidering, or one action worth taking. One person may recognize that revenue and profit are not the same thing. Another may realize that too much of their business depends on a single customer. Someone else may recognize that they have been setting prices based on instinct rather than cost. Another owner may simply come across a question they have never stopped long enough to ask themselves.
That matters because business education does not always have to produce an immediate transformation. Sometimes it simply helps someone notice something that had become invisible through repetition or routine. That new awareness may lead to a question, the question may lead to a conversation, and the conversation may eventually change a decision.
That is what I mean when I say I try to write with intention. I am not necessarily trying to provide every answer. Sometimes the more useful thing is helping someone recognize the question they need to ask.
Somewhere Between the Textbook and the Kitchen Table
We need business books, research reports, industry studies, academic papers, technical guides, and material written for people who already understand the language of business. Those resources have value.
We also need something somewhere between the textbook and the kitchen table.
The person reading may be opening their first business and may never have taken an accounting course. They may employ twenty people, two people, or nobody. They may operate in a growing metropolitan area or in a town where nearly everyone recognizes their vehicle when it pulls into the parking lot.
They may not be trying to create the next national brand. They may be trying to build a business that works, supports their family, serves their community, provides a good living, and is still there ten years from now.
I think that business owner deserves useful information too.
When the Writing Has Done Its Job
The business owners I meet have taught me that knowing something and being able to use it are not always the same thing. Business principles may apply broadly , but the circumstances in which people use them can be remarkably different.
I write about the human side because people make the decisions. I use plain language because understanding the idea matters more to me than making the idea sound complicated. I focus on practical problems because those are often the problems sitting on the other side of my desk. And I try to remember that the smallest business in the smallest community deserves to see itself somewhere in the conversation about small business.
If someone finishes something I have written and thinks, I understand this. I can use this. I need to think about what this means for my business, then I have accomplished what I set out to do.
