Client trust

Referral is how most service businesses grow and it is the one channel you cannot operate. Everything you can do is one step removed, which changes what is actually worth working on.

If anything or anyone is ever going to carry your words, something has to define what your words are. It is a genuinely interesting exercise and most owners have never done it.

A checklist for evaluating anyone who wants to build or automate something inside your business. It is deliberately usable against me, which is the only way a checklist like this is worth anything.

The research says disclosing AI use lowers trust. It also says being caught is worse. That is an uncomfortable pair of findings, and here is the policy I think it actually points to.

Readers detect AI writing at close to a coin flip. What they reliably detect is blandness, and they confuse the two. That distinction decides what you should actually worry about.

People cannot reliably tell AI writing from human writing. They punish it severely the moment they believe it is there. And telling them yourself does not buy you credit. Three findings that decide where the line has to sit.

Most service business websites explain a method to a reader who does not yet care about the method. Here is the structure that works instead, in the order a stranger actually needs it.