Field Notes
Notes on the business
of your business.
Plain-spoken pieces on what makes an established business strong underneath — and what it costs when everything depends on you. The AI companies are building tools for small businesses. I show you how they actually work, then set up the ones worth keeping. By Susan Callender.
How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT: The Five Things a Customer’s Phone Reads Before It Picks You
A homeowner asks her phone for a plumber and three names come back. An assistant can only name a business when five plain facts are on its own site: what you do, where, when, roughly what it costs, and what you don’t do. Which five of a founder-world newsletter’s thirty points reach a local shop, why the list is the same one a buyer asks for, and a free check that reads your site the way a phone would.
Read the field note →ChatGPT for Small Business Owners: The Tool Is the Easy Part. What You Tell It Isn’t.
Owners who try ChatGPT say it came back generic, and it did, because the question was generic too. What the tool needs from you before it’s any use, a real run where it broke a rule it had been given, how to start with one job instead of the tool, and the free money finding that puts four of your numbers side by side.
Read the field note →How to Follow Up on a Quote: They Haven’t Said No. They Haven’t Said Anything.
A customer who hasn’t answered your quote hasn’t said no. One short message, about three days later, that names the job, leaves the price alone and makes no easy to say. What to write, when to send it, what changes when you paid for the lead, and a free tool that writes it in your voice.
Read the field note →How to Ask Customers for Reviews: The One Who Loved the Work Will Never Think of It
The customer who sends you referrals will never leave a review, because it doesn’t occur to her — so the asking is yours. What to say, when to send it, why every customer gets the same message and not just the ones you expect to be glad, and a free tool that writes the ask in your own voice.
Read the field note →How to Automate Your Small Business: The 6 Jobs That Should Run Themselves (And the One That Shouldn’t)
The jobs that eat an owner’s week aren’t hard. Each one needs a fresh judgment call every time, so each one waits. The six a system should take off your desk, the one it never should, and a free tool that writes your unpaid-invoice follow-ups in your own voice.
Read the field note →A Business Bills $95 an Hour. The Owner Lives on $23. And Nobody’s Done the Division.
Owners can recite last year’s revenue to the nearest thousand and have never once divided it by the hours it took. What your effective hourly rate actually is, why it sits so far below the rate on the invoice, and the three things that move it — none of which is working harder.
Read the field note →OpenAI’s Own People Saw It Happening for Six Weeks. The Reason Nobody Pulled the Plug May Be Running in Your Shop Too.
The best-funded AI lab on earth watched its own agents misbehave for six weeks before they broke out — every alert fired, every warning was seen, and nothing traveled far enough to stop it. Why the same silence runs in founder-led businesses, the three reasons staff stop telling the owner everything, and the three-question test you can run from memory.
Read the field note →The One Job in Your Business Nobody Ever Priced
You can say to the dollar what it costs to replace anybody in your business — except the person doing the most work in it. Why your own pay was never set, the afternoon’s exercise that prices the job, and the number a buyer will eventually run about you whether you’ve run it or not.
Read the field note →I Tried to Give a Contractor Five Thousand Dollars Last Month. He Never Found Out.
A customer who likes him stood on his own patch of ground with money out and a deadline attached, and his business had no mechanism for taking it. It never became a quote, a lead or an invoice — so it appears nowhere in his accounts. The three reasons a busy business runs out of money, and why “sell more” fixes one of them and makes another one worse.
Read the field note →She Thought She Was Burning Out. The Problem Was a Document She Wrote in 2019.
Her bakery had its best year in twenty years of trading, and she was exhausted. It wasn’t the hours — it was a price list built once and never fed, and the exception work that had quietly grown to sixty-one percent of revenue. Why rest doesn’t fix owner burnout, and the afternoon’s sort that finds the gap.
Read the field note →Her Company Did $2.3 Million Last Year. It Couldn’t Run Eleven Days Without Her.
Every business has a quiet number: how many days it runs before something breaks that only you can fix. Marie’s was eleven. The Eleven-Day Test — how to count yours, and the one-page fix that shrinks it. With the three-minute film of Marie’s story.
Read the field note →Four Out of Five Businesses Listed for Sale Never Find a Buyer. Yours Is Being Priced Right Now.
You’ll sell your business once — and the price is being set today, one tight month at a time. Owner dependency, customer concentration, thin margins, no second-in-command: the four questions a buyer actually asks, and how to read your own meter this week.
Read the field note →His Business Makes $1.5 Million a Year. Last Month He Drove Across Town to Pick Up a Check to Make Payroll.
Why you’re making money but still can’t take a vacation. A $1.5M business, a payroll check picked up in traffic, and the fog that settles in when nobody translates the numbers into your language.
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