Blog
Practical thinking on business intelligence, marketing technology, and making better decisions with the data you already have.
How to Set Up an Online Presence for a New Business
Four phases, mostly free, an evening per item, order mattering more than speed. We stood up our own presence this year and kept the receipts — the address that leaked for months, the profile seen three times, the 250 spam links, and the AI summary that confused us with a British firm.
Plain English6 min read
Why Isn't Your Website Contact Form Working?
A broken form is the quietest failure a website can have. The five ways forms die silently, the two-minute monthly test that catches all of them, and what our own contradictory records taught us about trusting a form nobody has tested.
Plain English4 min read
How Do You Show Up in AI Search Results?
AI models quote what they can extract, attribute what they can identify, and skip what they can't parse. When we first measured our own site it ranked 22nd for its own name and an AI mixed us up with a British firm. The fixes were ordinary; measuring them is the hard part.
Plain English5 min read
What Analytics Does a Small Business Website Need?
Three free tools, and one matters more than the others. Search Console is the report card nothing else can produce, GA4 is the census, and Clarity is the camera. What each answers, the setup decisions that matter, and where all three go blind.
Plain English5 min read
What Social Media Profiles Does Your Business Need?
Fewer than you fear. At the baseline a profile is not a marketing channel but a public record that vouches for your identity, to customers and to machines cross-checking it. What to claim, what to keep consistent, and the preview card almost nobody checks.
Plain English5 min read
How Do You Set Up a Google Business Profile?
The mechanics take an evening; the four decisions are where profiles go wrong. Exact name, true category, honest hours, and a description that follows Google's rules — walked through on our own profile, including the step we skipped.
Plain English6 min read
Should Your Website Use www or Not?
Neither form is better, and the split matters anyway. To a machine your www and bare addresses are two different websites, and everything your site earns is credited to whichever one your configuration testifies for.
Plain English4 min read
What It Costs to Hold Inventory
The 20-to-30% carrying cost rule is a shrug standing in for five real numbers: money, space, spoilage, insurance, and markdowns. Adding up your own version takes twenty minutes and moves every ordering decision.
Plain English5 min read
Why Didn't Cutting Costs Increase Your Profit?
Cutting a cost rarely cuts the work it was paying for. The work migrates onto whoever is left, usually the owner, at a rate the books record as zero. That is how a payroll line improves while the business gets worse.
Plain English5 min read
How Much Safety Stock Do You Need?
Safety stock is insurance, and certainty is priced like insurance. Going from 95% to 99% sure costs about 40% more stock, and doubling your lead time grows the buffer by 1.4x, not 2x. The dial is worth choosing on purpose.
Plain English5 min read
How Much Inventory Should You Order at Once?
Ordering costs fall as orders get bigger and carrying costs climb, so there is a quantity where the total bottoms out. Finding it takes three numbers, and checking your habit against it takes two.
Plain English5 min read
Your Star Rating Is the Last Page
A star rating is an average, and averages lag. The words and dates underneath move first. Reading a year of reviews backward tells you what changed inside your business, and when it changed.
Plain English5 min read
Should You Raise Your Prices?
The unanswerable question is how many customers you'd lose. The exact one is how many you can afford to lose. On a 62% margin a 10% raise lets you lose one in seven before it costs you a cent — and a 10% cut makes you win one in five just to break even.
Plain English4 min read
Why Does AI Writing Still Sound Like AI?
You tell it not to sound like AI and it does anyway. The tells aren't choices the machine makes; they're its default sentence shape, like an accent, so the fix is a review step that catches them, since no instruction reaches deep enough to prevent them.
Plain English5 min read
What Banks Look at Before a Small Business Loan
The week you want money is the worst week to start becoming readable. Four moves that build the lender's checklist in advance, and they pay for themselves even if you never borrow a dime.
Making the Case5 min read
Know What's Worth Owning
Buy the plumbing, own the core. A field guide to spotting which of your tools could vanish tomorrow without a trace, and which ones are quietly holding your business's crown jewels.
Making the Case5 min read
The Mechanisms Behind the Magic
Computing got easy enough to feel like magic, and then AI arrived and the feeling never wore off. There are mechanisms under there, and the one that explains the most is which direction the explaining runs.
Plain English5 min read
What Does "Best" Even Mean?
Ask an AI to make you the best restaurant in Boone and it has to guess what you meant. The guess is where the disappointment comes from, and ten minutes with a pen is the fix.
Plain English4 min read
The Bus Test: One Question, Four Audiences
Customers, lenders, successors, and someday-buyers are all quietly running the same test on your business. One set of evidence answers all four.
Making the Case4 min read
The Two Inventory Questions Nobody Actually Runs
How much to order and when to reorder are arithmetic, not instinct. The answers are close at hand, the mistakes are expensive, and one of them probably describes your storeroom right now.
Plain English5 min read
Is Your Business an Asset, or a Job You Can't Quit?
A one-minute test: You leave for a month, starting tomorrow. What breaks first? The answer tells you what you actually own, and every piece of it is fixable this quarter.
Making the Case5 min read
Why Your POS Data and Marketing Should Talk
Your point-of-sale system knows what sold. Your marketing knows what got attention. Connected, they tell you what actually works.
Plain English3 min read
What AI Search Means for Small Businesses
AI-generated answers are changing how customers find local businesses. Here's what that means for your visibility — and what to do about it.
Plain English3 min read
The Real Cost of Disconnected Business Tools
You're paying for tools that each see one part of your business. Here's what that fragmentation is actually costing you.
Making the Case2 min read
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