I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about growing a small business lately. Lots of episodes, lots of opinions, and after a while they blur into the same checklist: marketing, sales, networking, getting that metaphorical foot in the door. All important. But there's a core skill that almost never gets an episode of its own.
Then one guest surprised me. On a podcast for NZ business owners, advisor Rob Drower raised something I'd never heard an advisor say out loud: people give you a go because they like you. Clients want a good sense of who you are and a feeling that you'll represent their interests. Some of that is being personable and having integrity in person. But here's the thing nobody connects: most of your prospective clients meet your writing before they meet you.
Your website, your proposal, your follow-up email, your invoice note. For a small business, writing isn't admin. It's the advance party for your reputation.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy put it bluntly in a famous 1982 memo to his staff: "People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches." Your clients can't see your thinking. They can only see your writing, and they'll assume the two match.
The evidence: sloppy writing is expensive
If "be likeable in writing" sounds soft, the numbers are anything but:
- A UK entrepreneur measured revenue on one of his retail websites before and after fixing a single spelling mistake. Sales doubled after the typo was corrected. The BBC's coverage put it plainly: misspellings spook customers because they trigger credibility and fraud concerns. One typo. Half the sales.
- A survey of over 1,000 UK consumers found 59% would not use a company with obvious spelling or grammar mistakes on its website, with most saying they wouldn't trust it to deliver a quality service.
- An A/B test running identical Google Ads to two landing pages, one seeded with typos, found the error-ridden version had an 85% higher bounce rate.
- And it's not just small businesses. Big firms in the US spend an estimated US$3.1 billion a year fixing their employees' writing, according to a College Board survey of business leaders that called writing a "threshold skill" for hiring and promotion. The corporate world pays to fix bad writing after the fact. As a small business, you can't afford the after-the-fact part. Your proposal either lands or it doesn't.
Four things to get right
The good news: you don't need to become Hemingway. You need to be deliberate about four things.
Tone. Tone sets the stage for how your message lands. Friendly and approachable, yet professional, is the small business sweet spot: conversational enough to feel human, composed enough to feel safe to hire. Think about who you're writing to and what tone will resonate with them, then keep it.
Professionalism. This isn't stiffness. It's clarity and care: saying things plainly, skipping the slang in the wrong moments, and being courteous even in the awkward emails (especially in the awkward emails, which get forwarded). Professional writing signals you take the work seriously, which clients read as: you'll take their work seriously.
Consistency. Use the same style, tone and terminology across everything: emails, website, social posts, proposals. Consistency is how a one-person business looks like a brand instead of a person improvising. If you call it a "discovery session" on your website, don't call it a "kick-off chat" in the proposal and a "scoping meeting" on the invoice. Pick one. Your clients are keeping score without knowing it.
Error-free, or close to it. Given the numbers above, proofreading is not perfectionism. It's loss prevention. Always re-read your writing before it goes out, ideally after a break, ideally out loud (the awkward sentences will reveal themselves immediately, often to your embarrassment, which is the point). For anything high-stakes, get a second pair of eyes on it, or run it through a review tool. We were so convinced of this we built a review tool that scores documents for readability, jargon and waffle before your clients do it silently in their heads.
The honest summary
Marketing gets people to your door. Your writing decides whether they trust what they find there. For the cost of some attention and a proofread, it's the cheapest credibility a small business can buy.
And if you'd like to sharpen yours properly, our business writing workshops were built for exactly this. Happy writing!