Dawn Henwood - Business Writing For Innovators and Change-Makers

Business Writing for Innovators and ChangeMakers

Business Writing for Innovators and ChangeMakers

Dawn Henwood

Business Writing for Innovators and Change-Makers

Copyright Business Expert Press, LLC, 2020.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations, not to exceed 250 words, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2020 by

Business Expert Press, LLC

222 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017

www.businessexpertpress.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-95152-778-5 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-95152-779-2 (e-book)

Business Expert Press Corporate Communication Collection

Collection ISSN: 2156-8162 (print)

Collection ISSN: 2156-8170 (electronic)

Cover image licensed by Ingram Image, StockPhotoSecrets.com

Cover and interior design by S4Carlisle Publishing Services Private Ltd., Chennai, India

First edition: 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

Dedication

For my daughter Claire, who is my Sunshine.

Abstract

Business Writing for Innovators and Change-Makers is a writing guidebook with street-smarts. It recognizes the unique communication challenges entrepreneurs face and offers clear action steps for tackling them.

As an entrepreneur with a pioneering product or service to offer the world, you cant rely on templates to get your meaning across. You need a set of writing strategies that are quick to implement and easy to adapt to a variety of communication situations, from e-mails to pitch decks.

Dawn Henwood provides a simple, flexible approach to writing that will open your eyes to the subtle ways written communication can engage and motivate your target audience. Each short chapter includes:

Advice from an innovative entrepreneur

Concise, practical tips you can put to use right away

Insights to help you become more productive and persuasive

Checklist to help you coach yourself and your team to better writing

Whether you are just starting your business or scaling up to the next level of success, youll find Dawns straightforward teaching just the help you need to make your message heard. This book will empower you to build your confidence as a communicator, strengthen your brand, and increase the impact you have on customers and clients.

Keywords

marketing; marketing collateral; messaging; pitch decks; pitching; proposals; technical writing; grant applications; business plans; business writing; business communication; e-mail; productivity; blogging

Contents

As an entrepreneur, youre continually pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. Blazing your own trail requires you to learn new skills and pick up tools you havent handled before or perhaps have even intentionally avoided. Im not a numbers person, but running my own consulting business has forced me to learn to navigate spreadsheets and financial statements. Likewise, Id rather get my teeth drilled than make a prospecting phone call, butto my great amazementIve learned how to do that too.

Im amazed every time I pick up the phone to approach a potential client because I used to suffer from what I called a profound phone allergy. I dreaded not just making calls but taking them too. Even the thought of dialing a colleague or client I knew well would start my heart pitter-pattering and make my gut churn.

Then I met Mary Jane Copps, aka The Phone Lady (www.thephonelady.com), who introduced me to a step-by-step process for starting a phone conversation. I came to realize that the ability to build relationships over the phone isnt an innate talent but a learnable skill set. Id misdiagnosed myself as having a constitutional deficiency, an allergy, when I only lacked knowledge and practice.

In my 20 years as a writing instructor and coach, most of the people Ive trained have held a similarly mistaken belief about their writing abilities. Theyve bought into the popular assumption that strong writers are born, not made. And theyve been startled to discover how much more fluent and effective their written communication becomes as soon as they stop viewing writing as a gift and start seeing it as group of techniques that anyone can master.

As an entrepreneur leading an innovative business or social enterprise, you need a particularly adaptable set of writing skills that will enable you to tackle each new communication challenge as it arises. In a large, established organization, people produce a limited range of documents, determined by their role. Junior engineers produce incident reports, while senior engineers write technical reports and contribute to proposals. Marketers produce marketing collateral, accountants report on financial matters, and learning specialists develop training materials. But as an innovator at the helm of an evolving organization, youre called upon to create (or supervise the creation of) a wide variety of writing that spans multiple business functions.

This week, the challenge might be to write a critical e-mail following up with a prospective client you met at a networking event. Next week, you might be faced with drafting a proposal, revising your web copy, or starting your first white paper. Or you might find yourself Googling to clarify the kind of document a client is expecting, especially if theyve thrown an acronym or a piece of jargon at you, such as SOW (Statement of Work), pitch deck, or TOR (Terms of Reference document). As you know, when you head into the wilds of entrepreneurship, no one gives you a map of the territory. Nor do you get a guidebook to all the different kinds of writing youll need to produce.

This book doesnt pretend to provide a comprehensive guidebook to entrepreneurial communicationbecause no book could possibly cover all the peculiar writing tasks youll encounter along your entrepreneurial journey. Instead, it gives you practical tips and tools for producing the kinds of writing that power up innovative organizations. These are the types, or genres, of writing that fuel growth. They attract clients and customers, secure capital, and engage your client base in an ongoing conversation centered on your organizations values and mission.

Think of this book as a writing coach rather than as a writing instructor. I suggest that you start with the first chapter, which outlines an agile writing process you can apply to any kind of business writing. Ive dubbed this method the Change-Maker Writing Process because it addresses the special challenges you face when youre communicating at the edge of innovation. Writing persuasively about a brand new solution, or a solution your readers dont grasp from a technical perspective, requires you to pay particular attention to what your audience does understand and value so you can connect with them in ways that go beyond the cognitive.

Once youve learned the Change-Maker Writing Process, I invite you to explore the other chapters in whatever order makes sense to you, perhaps on an as-needed basis. Youll find that each chapter contains straightforward tips, examples, and models you can apply on the spot, along with a handy checklist.

Throughout the book, youll also meet other innovators who have shared with me their insights into producing powerful writing that drives business results. Like my favorite writing guru Peter Elbow, I believe firmly that everyone can write, and the real entrepreneurs featured in this book show how true that is. None of them are trained or professional writers, yet theyre all using writing to connect with their target audiences and move their businesses forward. Im grateful to all of these folks for giving us glimpses into their personal writing process, and I hope you find their stories relevant and motivational.