How do you know if your one sentence works?
Would a stranger get every word
Your industry has a private vocabulary and it's invisible from the inside. Holistic, aligned, bespoke, strategic, curated. They feel precise to the person who chose them and they arrive as weather. If a word needs a second sentence to explain it, that word is costing you the first one.
Is there a change in it
Most sentences name a category. I'm a bookkeeper, I run a studio, I'm a brand strategist. All true, and none of it says what's different afterwards. Finish the line "and then they can" out loud, and whatever comes out has a stronger claim on the sentence than your job title does.
Is there a someone in it
Businesses, brands, clients, people. Those are placeholders sitting where a person should be. Name the trade, or the stage they're at, or the room they're standing in, and the right reader recognises herself before she reaches the full stop.
Could someone else repeat it tomorrow
This is the check that decides it and the one nobody runs. Your sentence doesn't have to convince the person in front of you. It has to survive being carried secondhand, by someone who half remembers you, to the person who actually needs you. Past about twenty words it won't make that trip.
The only sentence that grows a business is one somebody else can repeat
Everything else needs you in the room to deliver it, which caps the whole thing at how many rooms you can be in.
Three that got shorter
Real shapes, details changed. Watch what leaves.
The bookkeeper
She had: "I provide holistic financial management solutions for small businesses, giving owners clarity and peace of mind." Twenty words that could sit on ten thousand websites. What she meant, once she said it to me plainly, was that her clients are tradies who hate paperwork and she gets their books straight so they stop dreading the mail.
She landed on: "I keep tradies' books straight so they stop dreading the mail." Eleven words, one clear person, one thing that changes, and a detail so specific it makes people laugh in recognition.
The photographer
She had: "Capturing authentic moments and telling your story through timeless imagery." Lovely, and interchangeable with every photographer in the country. The thing that made her different was that she shoots families with small children and nobody has to behave.
She landed on: "I photograph families with little kids, and nobody has to behave." The parents who've been dreading a shoot book her on that line alone.
The consultant
He had: "I partner with ambitious founders to unlock scalable growth through strategic clarity." Every word in it is a word about words. When I asked what he actually does on a Tuesday, he said he sits with people who have nine offers and helps them kill six.
He landed on: "I help founders with too many offers work out which three to keep." Same job, and now it has an edge you can catch yourself on.
Where it goes once you have it
The top of your homepage, above everything, before the photo and the welcome and the story of how you started. Your Instagram bio, in place of the three-line poem. The first line of the email when you introduce yourself to someone new.
Then the answer you give at a barbecue, which is the version that matters most of all, because that's the one your friends repeat when somebody asks them who they know.
Where this sits
Your website is Home in the Digital Triangle. Found is how strangers arrive. Seen is the relationship that runs before anyone buys anything.
The sentence is what makes Home worth arriving at. You can pour Found into a site that never says what it's for, and it drains out the bottom, which is how a business ends up with traffic and no enquiries and a growing suspicion that the problem is the algorithm.
Questions I get asked
What if I genuinely do more than one thing?
Pick the one you want more of. The sentence is a door, not an inventory, and nobody has ever walked away because a door was too narrow. The rest of your range can live on the page behind it.
Should the written version match what I say out loud?
Near enough, yes. If the written one has to be grander than the spoken one, the spoken one is the honest one and the written one is a costume. Type what you said.
How often should it change?
When the business changes, not when you get bored of it. You'll be sick of your sentence roughly eighteen months before your market has heard it once.
