Say what you do in one sentence anyone can repeat
Sample video: in the live course this plays the full walkthrough.
Here is a test worth running before anything else in this course. Think of someone who likes your work and would happily recommend you. Now imagine them at a table with a friend who needs exactly what you do. Can that person say what you do, out loud, in one sentence, without hedging?
For most people the honest answer is no, and it is almost never because the work is bad. It is because the description is soft. “I do design.” “I help businesses with their marketing.” “A bit of everything, really.” None of those are wrong. They are just impossible to repeat, so the recommendation quietly dies at the table. Everything else in this course, the packaging, the price, the page, sits on top of one sentence. So we write that first.
The sentence has three slots
A sentence that travels does three jobs in a row, and no more than three. Filling the slots is mechanical once you see them.
- Who it is for. Not “businesses.” A group narrow enough that someone in it recognises themselves, and someone outside it knows to pass. “Independent dentists.” “Second-hand bookshops.” “Wedding photographers who shoot fewer than twenty a year.”
- What changes for them. The state they are in afterwards, described the way they would describe it, not the way your industry would. Not “brand alignment.” Try “so their price list stops confusing people.”
- The thing you actually make or do. The concrete object or activity. A website. A monthly email. A two-day workshop. A set of photographs. If a stranger cannot picture it, it is still too abstract.
Put together, the shape is roughly: I make [the thing] for [the who], so that [the change]. It is not a slogan and it is not supposed to be clever. It is supposed to survive being repeated by someone else.
Three rewrites
Before: “I’m a freelance copywriter, I do websites, emails, brochures, whatever people need.”
After: “I write the website copy for small law firms, so a person can tell in ten seconds whether they are in the right place.”
Before: “I help small businesses with their social media.”
After: “I run one month of posts at a time for garden centres, so they stop scrambling for something to put up on a Friday.”
Before: “I’m a bookkeeper. I take on most kinds of client.”
After: “I keep the books for tradespeople who work alone, so their year-end is a morning and not a fortnight.”
Notice what did not happen in any of those. Nobody claimed to be the best. Nobody promised a result they cannot control. The sentences got smaller, and became far easier to pass on.
The pull towards vagueness is real, and it usually comes from fear: naming a narrow who feels like turning work away. It is worth saying plainly that a narrow sentence is a description, not a fence. You can still take the job that walks in from outside it. What the sentence changes is how easily the right person, and the person standing next to them, can tell that you are relevant.
Say it out loud, then cut it
Write your sentence, then read it aloud to a person who does not do your kind of work. Watch for the moment their eyes go somewhere else. That word is the problem. Cut it, replace it with the plainest thing you can think of, and read it again. Two or three passes is usually enough. A sentence you can say without your voice going up at the end is done.
A quick, honest note before we go on: results vary, and this course teaches a craft and a way of running the work, not any promise about money. What it will give you is language you can use without wincing, and a set of decisions you have actually made on purpose. Next, we take that sentence and turn the work behind it into a package with edges, because a clear description of loose hours is still loose hours.