Prompts That Sound Like the Person Who Actually Runs the Place
Field Notes

Working observation / Small Business

Prompts That Sound Like the Person Who Actually Runs the Place

Generic AI writing can flatten a local business into the same voice as everyone else. A useful prompt starts with the owner’s real constraints and language.

1 min readBy theProject.

The worst thing an AI can do for a local business is make it sound like every other business on the internet.

A useful local voice starter

text
You are helping [Owner Name], who has run [Business] in [Town] for [Years].
Tone: direct, warm, a little plain-spoken. Never corporate.
Never say 'leverage' or 'synergy'.
Write like you are replying to a neighbor who asked a practical question.

Then we feed it one real email or one real job they already did well.

The second pass is always 'make this sound more like the version you would actually send at 7pm on a Tuesday'.

It is not magic. It is just refusing to let the machine erase the person who built the business.