In early November, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told staff that 1,271 people, about 22% of the company, would be affected by a restructuring. Some will lose their jobs, some will change roles, and some will be asked to relocate. Canva hasn’t said how many fall into each group.

The package for the people leaving is unusually good. According to Canva’s note and the coverage of it, everyone leaving gets at least six months’ pay in every country, healthcare continued where Canva already provides it, career coaching, the one-year vesting cliff waived for recent hires, and their company laptop to keep. They can also apply for a US$10,000 grant to start a business or community project, with Canva taking no ownership in what they build.

That deserves real credit. Many people laid off this year got far less. It’s also fair to notice that a package like this protects a company’s reputation with future hires, customers and investors. Both things can be true.

But a well-wrapped exit is still an exit. And the package, however generous, sidesteps the question that matters most: whose decisions led here?

The decisions behind the “hardest moment”

Perkins called this the hardest moment in Canva’s thirteen-year history. Her note gave two main reasons. Growth slowed for the first time in a decade, and as the company grew, work got split across so many teams that nobody owned a result from start to finish. Coverage adds that Canva cut its 2026 growth forecast from 30% to 20% in August, after delivering AI features reportedly cost more than expected.

Look at what kind of problems those are. A company doesn’t end up with too many layers by accident. Someone approved each new team, each new manager and each hiring plan built on growth that didn’t arrive. Someone decided how much to spend on AI features and what to charge for them. The people now leaving didn’t make those calls. Many of them were hired to carry them out.

As far as public reporting shows, the restructuring came with no leadership pay cuts, no leadership departures and no statement from any executive naming a decision they got wrong.

Leaders almost always call layoffs a hard decision, and I believe most of them mean it. But it’s worth asking what was hard about it, and for whom. The person who signs off on the cuts usually keeps the job, the salary and the house. The person on the other end goes home and tells their family. If a decision costs the people making it nothing they’ll actually feel, it was a painful thing to announce. It wasn’t a hard thing to live with.

The language that makes it nobody’s fault

Read enough layoff announcements and you start to notice the words. Roles are “impacted.” Teams are “streamlined.” Companies are “rightsizing,” “realigning,” or in Canva’s case “refounding.” Perkins wrote that “small changes won’t be enough.” Earlier, when Canva cut most of its technical writing team, a spokesperson said the company was evolving its approach to technical content.

Notice what’s missing from almost every one of those sentences: a person. “Roles were impacted” has no one doing the impacting. “Changes were necessary” doesn’t say who made them necessary. The grammar is doing a job. It turns a series of choices, made by specific people at specific moments, into something that just happened, like weather.

That’s not an accident either. At large companies, layoff announcements typically pass through communications and legal teams whose job is to protect the company. Protecting the company and telling the plain truth aren’t always the same task, and when they conflict, the plain truth tends to lose. What’s left is a message that sounds caring and says almost nothing about responsibility.

This isn’t just a Canva problem

Canva is an Australian company, but the pattern is one American workers know well. US employers announced more than 617,000 job cuts through October of this year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Meanwhile, pay for the people running the largest companies has kept climbing. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found that CEO pay at the top 350 US firms rose 14% in 2025, to an average of $27.9 million, or about 325 times what a typical worker earns. In 1965, that ratio was about 21 to 1.

Those numbers don’t prove any single layoff was wrong. They do show where the risk lands. When a company’s bet pays off, the people at the top share heavily in the upside. When it doesn’t, the people below them carry most of the downside.

And the research on whether layoffs even work is not kind to them. Wayne Cascio at the University of Colorado Denver has studied downsizing for decades and found that, as a group, companies that cut their way through trouble don’t outperform the ones that don’t. His summary: “You can’t just shrink your way into prosperity.” Wharton’s Peter Cappelli has said there’s no evidence that cutting jobs to improve profitability helps beyond a short-term accounting bump. Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer put it more bluntly: “Layoffs are definitely a confession of poor management.”

If that’s true, then the confession should come from management.

It can be done differently

Some leaders have shown what that looks like. When Stripe cut 14% of its staff in 2022, CEO Patrick Collison put five words near the top of the memo that most layoff letters avoid: “We, the founders, made this decision.” He went on to say the company had been much too optimistic about growth and had overhired, and that he and his brother took responsibility for it.

When Zoom cut about 1,300 jobs in 2023, CEO Eric Yuan wrote that he was accountable for the company’s mistakes. He cut his own salary by 98% and gave up his bonus for the year, and the rest of the executive team took 20% pay cuts and gave up their bonuses too. It’s fair to point out that a salary cut means less to a founder whose wealth is mostly in stock. But the words still mattered. Employees knew whose call it was, and so did everyone watching.

Neither of those examples undid the harm. People still lost their jobs. But there’s a real difference between “this happened” and “I did this.” The first asks employees to accept a loss with no one attached to it. The second gives them the truth.

The fair counterpoint

None of this means a company should never lay anyone off. Markets change, sometimes fast, and generative AI has upended the design-software business in ways no one fully predicted. A company that refuses to adjust can fail, and then everyone loses their job. Cascio’s own research suggests cuts tied to a genuine change in strategy tend to work better than cuts made just to save money, and Canva’s restructuring may turn out to be that kind of change.

The argument isn’t against ever making the call. It’s against making it from behind language that hides who made it.

What owning it would look like

Accountability doesn’t require a public apology tour. It could be one sentence: “I approved a hiring plan built on growth we didn’t hit, and that’s on me.” It could be leadership taking a real pay cut or giving up bonuses in the same year they ask employees to give up their jobs. It could be a plain explanation of how decisions about hiring and spending will be made differently from here, so the same mistake doesn’t repeat. Each of those tells the people who stay that the people at the top share the cost of being wrong.

Canva may still do some of this. The company held an all-hands meeting on November 10, and what was said there isn’t public. But the announcement is the moment everyone learns who is paying for what, and that moment has passed.

If you run a small business

Most founders reading this will never lay off 1,271 people. But plenty will, at some point, have to let someone go because a plan didn’t work: the hire made for a growth spurt that stalled, or the role created for a service that never took off. When that happens, you won’t have a communications team to write around it. Good. Say it plainly. The plan was yours, the job existed because you created it, and it’s ending because your bet didn’t pay off.

Give the kindest exit you can afford, and own the decision out loud. People can usually accept losing a job to a bad bet. What’s much harder to accept is losing one to a bad bet that nobody will admit making.

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Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

I’ve spent a long career on both sides of the vendor table. I’ve bought software and services, and I’ve sold them. Over that time I’ve come to think one question sorts vendors more reliably than any feature list or price comparison: is this vendor selling me a solution to my problem, or selling me a problem that happens to fit their solution?

The two can look almost identical in a sales meeting. Both vendors are friendly and both have good slides. Both will tell you they understand your business. The difference is the direction the conversation runs. One starts with what’s actually going wrong for you and works toward whatever fixes it, even if that isn’t much. The other starts with what they sell and works backward until your business seems to need it.

Most vendors aren’t doing this on purpose. If you sell a hammer all day, every conversation starts to sound like a nail. Sales teams have targets, product teams ship features that need customers, and a new capability everyone is talking about gets added to every pitch whether it fits or not. None of that makes anyone a bad actor. It does mean the job of noticing falls on you, the buyer.

What working backward sounds like

The first sign is usually how fast the demo starts. If you’re seeing the product before anyone has asked what’s going wrong, the vendor has already decided what your problem is. A discovery call that turns into a tour within the first ten minutes is a demo with a few questions attached.

The second sign is vocabulary. Listen to how your problem gets described back to you. If you said “we keep losing track of who we’re supposed to follow up with” and it comes back as “you need pipeline visibility and lead-scoring automation,” your problem has been translated into their product’s terms. Sometimes that translation is accurate. Often it quietly makes the problem bigger, so it matches the size of the solution.

The third is that every problem maps to a feature. A vendor who has an answer for everything you mention, with no “we’re not the right fit for that part,” is either remarkably well suited to you or not really listening. Real fits have edges.

The fourth is the problem you didn’t know you had. Good vendors do sometimes spot something you missed, and that can be valuable. But if most of the meeting is spent convincing you of a problem you’d never noticed, which happens to be the one their premium tier solves, it’s worth slowing down and asking whether it’s costing you anything today.

What starting from your problem sounds like

The vendors worth working with tend to ask a lot before they show anything. They want to know what you’ve already tried, what it costs you when things go wrong, and what “fixed” would look like. They describe your problem back in words you’d actually use.

They’re also willing to tell you where they stop. “We don’t do that part, and here’s who does” is one of the most trustworthy sentences a vendor can say. So is “you probably don’t need our bigger plan yet,” or even “honestly, a spreadsheet would handle this for now.” A vendor who will talk you down from a sale is a vendor whose yes means something.

And they’re clear about what leaving looks like. Who owns your data, how you’d get it out, and what you’d be left with if you walked away in a year. A vendor confident in their value doesn’t need the answer to be complicated.

Questions worth asking before you sign

You don’t need to be cynical to protect yourself. A few plain questions usually show which direction a vendor is working from.

Ask what problem they think you have, in one sentence, before they show you anything. If their answer sounds like their product’s tagline, you’ve learned something.

Ask who their product is not a good fit for. A vendor who can’t answer hasn’t thought about it, or doesn’t want you to.

Ask what the smallest version of this would be. What’s the least you could buy, or the least you could change, and still fix the thing that’s actually bothering you?

Ask what happens if you leave. Where does your information go, and what do you keep?

And ask yourself one question after the meeting: did I come away understanding my own problem better, or just their product?

The same question, pointed the other way

There’s an uncomfortable flip side to all of this.

If you sell anything, a service, a product, your own expertise, your customers are quietly asking the same question about you. It’s easy to fall in love with what you’ve built and start seeing every conversation as a reason someone needs it.

I try to hold myself to the same test I’d hold a vendor to. Listen first. Describe the problem in the client’s words, not mine. Say plainly what I don’t do, and when the honest answer is “you don’t need me yet,” say that too.

The vendors I’ve trusted most over the years weren’t always the cheapest or the most impressive. They were the ones who seemed more interested in my problem than in their pitch. That’s a high bar, and it’s the right one, for the people we buy from and for ourselves.

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Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

This month PwC US announced that it will put more than 85,000 partners and employees through a new Critical Thinking & Judgment Certificate. According to Bloomberg Tax and Business Insider, the program opens with a diagnostic of each person’s thinking style. From there it moves to masterclasses and personalized simulations, and it adds an AI coach trained on PwC’s own framework. The firm estimates the total investment at more than $100 million. That figure includes funding for selected universities to build introductory courses around the framework. Completion is targeted for mid-2027, and coverage says it will be tied to performance reviews.

It would be easy to roll your eyes at this. A big firm buys a big certificate and announces it with a big number. But the reason PwC gives for the program is honest, and it deserves a hearing before any criticism.

The problem PwC is naming

PwC’s leadership has said, in effect, that AI is taking over the routine work that used to teach people judgment. That is a real problem, and it isn’t unique to accounting firms.

Think about how anyone gets good at spotting a bad number. You build hundreds of them yourself. You get some wrong, someone more experienced catches the mistake, and you remember how it felt. After enough rounds, something looks off to you before you can say why. That instinct came from repetition and correction, not from a class.

When AI does the building, the repetition disappears. The output still needs someone to check it, because AI tools still make confident mistakes. They misread a source, invent a figure or apply a rule that doesn’t fit, and they sound just as sure when they’re wrong as when they’re right. So the work now calls for more skill at reviewing, while the job no longer gives people the practice that builds that skill.

Why “AI will fix it” doesn’t close the gap

The common answer is to let AI check AI. Sometimes that works. When there’s an outside test, like code that either runs or doesn’t or totals that either tie out or don’t, a second pass can catch real errors, because the test decides what’s right.

The hard questions in business usually don’t come with a test. Is this assumption reasonable? Does this contract term actually protect us? Does this forecast pass the smell test? For questions like these, a second AI pass means asking the same kind of system to grade its own thinking. It tends to repeat the same blind spots, with the same confidence. A review like that feels thorough without being one.

PwC seems to understand this, and that’s why the program exists. The question is whether a certificate is the right tool.

What a certificate can do

A well-built program can do several useful things. It can give a large organization a shared vocabulary, so a manager can say “walk me through your evidence” and everyone knows what that means. It can turn good habits into a routine, such as checking the source, asking what would have to be true, and looking for the number that doesn’t fit. Simulations add practice reps in a setting where mistakes are cheap. A firm-wide program also sends a clear message that leadership expects people to question the tools rather than simply trust them.

These are real benefits, and for an organization of 85,000 people, consistency alone may be worth a lot.

What a certificate can’t do

A certificate can’t prove that someone has judgment. Judgment shows up on real work, with real consequences, when no one has written the answer key in advance. A simulation is graded against an answer someone already decided was correct. That’s useful practice, but it’s a different thing from the work itself.

There’s also no public evidence yet that this program works. According to International Accounting Bulletin, PwC developed the framework internally and is validating it with academic input, including professors affiliated with Wharton and Harvard, as it goes. That’s a reasonable way to start, but it means the program is a well-funded experiment, not an established standard. Tying completion to performance reviews adds another risk. When a course becomes a box to check, people learn how to check the box.

The university funding deserves a clear-eyed look too. Paying for introductory courses built around one firm’s framework helps students, and it also builds that firm’s brand with future hires. That isn’t sinister, but readers should see both sides of it.

What’s coming next

When a firm this size puts nine figures behind “judgment in the age of AI,” others will follow. Expect weekend courses, digital badges and new training companies promising to make your team AI-ready or certified in AI oversight. Many will copy the language of a program like PwC’s without the scale, the simulations or the senior people behind it.

If one of those lands in front of you, a few questions can help you sort it out. Does it use your own work, or generic cases? Who reviews the output: an experienced person, or another tool? What does it say the certificate proves, and is there any evidence beyond completion rates? Does it assume you still have experienced people to learn from, or does it promise to replace them?

The real test

The skill PwC is trying to protect is worth protecting, and it was never built by a course. It was built by doing the work while someone who knew better looked over your shoulder. That gives anyone a simple way to judge this program, or any of the copies that follow it: ignore the certificate and watch the review. If experienced people spend more time checking AI-assisted work, the program is building judgment. If review time shrinks because everyone is now certified, the firm has traded the people who had judgment for a document saying everyone does.

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Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

Why “I’ll Just Do It Myself” Is the Most Expensive Sentence a Founder Says

Every founder says it at some point. Usually early, usually about something small — the website, the bookkeeping, the CRM, the thing that feels too minor to pay someone for. “I’ll just do it myself.” It sounds responsible. Frugal, even. It’s the sentence that feels like the safe choice.

It’s rarely the cheap one.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud when they’re the one saying it: your time isn’t free just because you didn’t write a check for it. If you bill, or could bill, at any real rate for the work you actually do — consulting, services, whatever your business sells — then every hour you spend fighting with a website builder or reconciling a spreadsheet at midnight is an hour you didn’t spend doing the thing that actually makes money. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just math nobody made you do.

Say you can genuinely bill $150 an hour for your actual work. Spend six hours over a weekend wrestling a contact form into working with your email — not because it’s hard, exactly, just slow and unfamiliar — and that’s $900 of your own time, gone, to save what would’ve cost a fraction of that to have built correctly the first time. Do that once a month for a year on some version of this problem, and you’ve quietly spent five figures being your own unpaid IT department. Nobody sends you an invoice for it, so it never feels like spending. It just feels like a long weekend.

That’s the illusion “I’ll just do it myself” runs on: if no money left your account, it didn’t cost anything.

It cost something. It just cost the thing you can’t get back.

There’s a version of this that goes deeper than money, too. A founder who does everything themselves isn’t just spending time — they’re becoming the single point of failure for their own business. If you’re the only one who knows how the website works, how the books are organized, how the follow-up sequence is supposed to run, then the business doesn’t actually run without you. That’s not independence. That’s a business that can’t take a real vacation, can’t hand off cleanly to a new hire, can’t survive you getting sick for two weeks.

None of this is an argument for hiring a full team before you need one, or handing every decision to someone else. Plenty of “just do it myself” moments are genuinely fine — you don’t need help writing your own emails. The question worth asking isn’t “can I do this myself.” Almost anyone can do almost anything themselves, eventually, with enough YouTube tutorials and lost weekends. The real question is whether doing it yourself is actually the best use of the one resource you can’t buy more of.

The founders who get this right aren’t the ones who never do anything themselves. They’re the ones who got honest, early, about which hours are actually theirs to spend — and which ones are quietly the most expensive thing they own.‍

Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

Why “I’ll Just Do It Myself” Is the Most Expensive Sentence a Founder Says was originally published in Venture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is Your Offering Aligned With Your Marketing Capital?

When I started PrecisionPath, it was an advisory firm built for executive leadership. The work was helping leaders build operations and technology that held together and could last, instead of a patchwork of systems and habits that got harder to manage every year. I believed in the offering, and I still believe the problem it addressed is real. What I didn’t fully account for at the start was what it would cost just to get in front of the people I wanted to serve.

Executives are some of the most expensive buyers to reach. They’re busy and well protected, and they already have advisors they trust. The usual routes to them run through industry conferences, executive events, sponsorships, and advertising in the places they actually pay attention to, and none of those come cheap. On top of that, a buyer at that level wants to see a track record, references, and a name they recognize before taking a meeting seriously. I had the expertise. What I didn’t have was the budget to keep showing up in those rooms long enough to earn that trust.

I don’t think my experience is unusual. Most founders with a good idea run into some version of it sooner or later.

Why it happens

When you design an offering, you naturally picture the customer you most want to serve. That’s often the bigger, more established buyer with a real budget and a problem worth solving. The difficulty is that the most attractive buyers are usually the most expensive to reach. They take more meetings to win, involve more decision-makers, ask for more proof, and already have someone doing the work.

So the idea can be right and the market can be real, and the business can still stall. The offering lines up with a market, just not with what you can spend to reach it.

I think of that spending power as marketing capital. It’s more than cash. It includes your time, the people who already know you, and the credibility you’ve built. Every market has a price of entry, paid in some mix of those four, and the question worth asking early is whether you can pay it now, not whether you’ll be able to someday.

The signs you’re aimed too high, for now

A few patterns tend to show up. First conversations go well, then stall while the buyer waits for references or a bigger name. The channels that actually reach your buyer cost more than your runway can carry for as long as they take to work. And you find yourself spending more time trying to get noticed than actually selling.

None of those mean the idea is bad. They mean the market and your current resources don’t match yet.

What I changed

I eventually stepped back and asked a different question. Instead of asking who I most wanted to serve, I asked who I could actually reach with the time, network, and budget I had, and whose problem my experience could still solve.

The answer was founders and startups. They face a smaller-scale version of the same problem I’d been trying to solve for executives: operations and technology that don’t connect, put together one tool at a time and rarely designed to work as a whole. That became PrecisionPort, built around a prebuilt operating platform for businesses at that stage.

The marketing math is very different. Founders and small business owners are reachable through local connections, chambers of commerce, community events, and modest sponsorships. Those channels cost a fraction of what executive-level events and advertising do, and they reward exactly the capital a new firm actually has: time, showing up consistently, and being useful to the people in the room. Trust gets built in person, one conversation at a time, rather than bought.

The broader lesson

If your offering is pointed at a market you can’t afford to reach yet, you have two choices. You can try to raise the money it takes to pay that market’s price of entry. Or you can find a nearby market where your existing capital already goes far enough, and adapt the offering to fit it.

The second path isn’t settling. A reachable market lets you build the things an expensive market demands: real clients, real references, revenue, and a reputation. Those are what eventually open the doors that were closed at the start.

Before you spend another dollar or another month on marketing, it’s worth asking honestly whether the market your offering is built for is one you can afford to reach right now. If the answer is no, the idea may be fine. It may just need a different first market.‍

Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

The Market You Want vs. the Market You Can Reach was originally published in Venture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What Is Your Growth Really Costing You?

Growth is the goal for almost every business, and most owners know roughly what it’s bringing in. Far fewer know what it’s costing. That matters more than it seems, because revenue can grow every month while the business underneath it quietly gets weaker. It doesn’t show up on a standard Profit & Loss report, at least not until it’s expensive to fix, and it almost always starts the same way: the cost of winning each new customer climbs faster than anyone is watching.

Two different costs

Every sale carries two costs, and most owners only keep an eye on one. The first is the cost of serving the customer: the materials, labor, and time it takes to deliver what you sold. Revenue minus that is your margin, and most owners watch it closely.

The second is the cost of winning the customer in the first place. That includes advertising, commissions, your salesperson’s salary and time, and the discounts you gave to close the deal. A quick note on wording, because it trips people up: accountants often use “cost of sales” to mean the first kind, the cost of delivering what you sold. This post is about the second kind, so I’ll call it the cost to win a customer.

Most businesses never pull that second number out on its own. It sits inside a line on the books called something like “sales and marketing” or “advertising” and gets looked at as one total. The total isn’t the useful part, though. The ratio is: how much did it take to win each new dollar of revenue, and is that getting better or worse? Here’s a made-up example. If a thousand dollars in advertising brought in ten thousand dollars of new business last year, you spent a dime to win each dollar. If the same thousand brings in five thousand this year, it’s twenty cents. The ad bill didn’t change, winning business got twice as expensive, and nothing on a normal report would flag it.

Why nobody notices

Four things tend to hide the trend, and each one is small and easy to justify in the moment.

The first is averages. Most businesses get some customers cheaply, through referrals and word of mouth, and some through paid channels like ads or a salesperson. Here’s another made-up example with round numbers. Last year, forty referral customers cost about $25 each to win and ten paid customers cost about $100 each, for an average of $40. This year the referrals hold steady, but paid customers now cost $150 each. That channel got 50% more expensive, yet the average only moved from $40 to $50. The cheap customers prop up the number you’re looking at while the channel driving your growth gets steadily pricier.

The second is that rising spending looks like success. When marketing spending and revenue both go up, it feels like investing in growth, and nobody’s first instinct is to check whether the ratio between them is slipping.

The third is discounts. Closing a deal at 15% off when the last one was 10%, or adding a free month to get a signature, is a real cost of winning that customer. It never shows up as an expense, though. It just looks like slightly less revenue per customer, which is easy to miss one deal at a time.

The fourth is sales pay. Good salespeople are in demand, and commission rates and guarantees tend to drift upward over time without anyone checking them against deal size or margin.

Any one of these on its own is manageable. The trouble starts when several stack up at once, quietly, for long enough.

How the spiral runs

It usually begins with a reasonable goal, like growing ten percent over last year. The easy customers are already yours, so hitting the goal takes more selling and more marketing than last time. The next customer costs more to win, because ads cost more to get noticed, a new salesperson takes months to pay off, and closing against the same competitors takes bigger discounts. So you spend more to keep growth looking the same, and that spending pushes costs up again the next period. Each trip around the loop runs at a slightly worse ratio.

It keeps going until margins get squeezed somewhere that can’t last, or the cash runs out. Then the correction is sudden and painful: a channel gets cut overnight, people get let go, or prices get overhauled under pressure. The same adjustment, made two years earlier, would have been small. Nobody decides to enter the spiral. It happens while everyone is busy growing.

The warning signs

A few signs tend to show up early. It takes noticeably more spending to bring in the same amount of new business as it did a year ago. Deals close with bigger discounts or more extras than they used to. Sales take longer to close, while the share you win stays flat or drops.

The clearest test is a single question: what did it cost us, in total sales and marketing, to bring in each new dollar of revenue this quarter, and is that better or worse than last quarter? If the honest answer is “we’d have to dig for that,” you have plenty of company. It also means the business could already be partway into the spiral without anyone having noticed.

What to start tracking

The number isn’t hard to track once you decide to look at it. Track it as a ratio, total sales and marketing spending divided by the new revenue it produced, rather than as a raw expense. Track it by source instead of blended, so referrals, ads, and salespeople each have their own figure; the most expensive source is usually your early warning. Watch it over several quarters, since the direction tells you more than any single period. And compare it to your margin. A dollar that costs ninety cents to win and earns twenty cents is a very different business from one that costs ten cents, even though both show up as “a new customer.”

All of this depends on your books keeping sales and marketing spending in their own categories rather than folded into one general expenses line. If yours don’t, that’s a good first conversation to have with whoever keeps your books, and they or your CPA can help you decide what a healthy number looks like for your business. It’s also worth reviewing every quarter rather than once a year at tax time. By the time a rising cost to win customers shows up in an annual review, it has had four quarters to compound.

Growth feels like progress, and often it is. But a business can grow and get weaker at the same time, and the only way to tell which is happening is to know what your growth is really costing you.

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Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

Every week, some small business owner posts something genuinely good on LinkedIn or Substack. It gets read, liked, and shared around for a day or two.

Six months later, almost none of it is doing anything for their business. The problem isn’t the writing. It’s where the writing lives.

When you publish only on Medium, Substack, or LinkedIn, you’re farming land that belongs to someone else. You do the work — the thinking, the writing, the time — and the platform holds the deed. It can change its algorithm and show your next post to a fraction of the people who saw your last one. It can change its rules, its paywall, or its business model. It can suspend an account, or shut down entirely, the way plenty of sure-thing platforms already have. If any of that happens, your work doesn’t automatically come with you.

What you’re actually building

Every post on someone else’s platform does two jobs at once. It tells your story, and it builds that platform’s authority. When a prospect searches for exactly what you do six months from now, the result they find belongs to Medium or LinkedIn, and your own website gets little or none of the credit for what you wrote.

A post on your own domain works differently. Each one adds a little to your site’s standing in search. It stays where you put it, and it keeps working whether or not anyone’s algorithm is in a good mood that week. That’s the difference between renting attention and owning something.

Why people do it anyway

To be fair, there’s a real reason people default to these platforms: they’re easy. There’s no setup, no formatting fights, no clunky website editor. You write, hit publish, and an audience is already sitting there.

The audience is a genuine advantage, and it’s worth keeping. The ease is less of one than it used to be. A blog on your own site that’s set up well can come close to the same routine: write it, paste it in, publish. Most of what people dread about running their own blog comes from sites that were never set up with publishing in mind.

You don’t have to choose

None of this means abandoning LinkedIn or Substack. It means changing the order. Publish the full piece on your own site first, then share it, summarize it, or excerpt it wherever your audience already is, with a link back home. The platforms bring the readers. Your site keeps the work.

If you’re going to put real effort into writing something worth reading, it should still belong to you next year, not just to a platform’s engagement numbers or this week’s algorithm. Your own land, built up one post at a time, keeps paying off for as long as you keep adding to it.

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Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

Five Accounting Systems and What You Need to Ask

Most founders don’t choose their accounting software so much as inherit it. A friend used it. A free trial was running. A bookkeeper set it up years ago, and now it’s simply where the numbers live.

That’s usually fine, until it isn’t. The software itself rarely causes the problem. What causes it is not knowing whose account it is, who can get into it, and what happens to your records if the arrangement around it changes.

Two notes before we start. First, this is not accounting advice. How your books should be kept, which reports you need, and anything involving taxes are questions for a CPA who knows your business. This post is about the software and the setup around it. Second, a disclosure: we set clients up on QuickBooks Online. We’ve tried to be fair to the other four for exactly that reason.

The short version of each

QuickBooks Online is the most common choice for small businesses in the US. Its biggest advantage isn’t a feature. It’s familiarity: a large share of accountants and bookkeepers already work in it every day, and more third-party tools connect to it than to anything else on this list. The trade-offs are cost, since prices have gone up more than once recently, and user limits that depend on your plan. If more people need access over time, check what that does to your plan.

Xero is the closest direct alternative. It covers similar ground with a cleaner interface, and every plan includes unlimited users, which matters more than it sounds once a partner, an accountant, and an operations person all need access. It’s especially strong outside the US. Here, fewer accountants work in it day to day than in QuickBooks, though that’s changing.

FreshBooks started as invoicing software and still feels like it. For solo service providers who mostly send invoices, track time, and log expenses, that focus is the appeal. The trade-off is that its accounting side is lighter than the others, and adding team members costs extra.

Zoho Books is the value option, and it makes the most sense if your business already runs on other Zoho apps, since it’s built to work inside that larger suite. It offers a free tier for very small businesses. Outside the Zoho ecosystem, it’s a solid standalone choice, just a less common one among the accountants you’re likely to work with.

Wave is the free option for very small operations: basic invoicing and bookkeeping at no cost, with paid add-ons for things like payments and payroll. The trade-off is headroom. It’s built for the smallest businesses, and a growing company can outgrow it. Before relying on it, check which features are free and which aren’t.

What the comparison articles leave out

Every comparison ranks features and prices. Almost none of them ask the question that matters most: is your data living in a standard system you control, or inside someone else’s?

In December 2024, Bench, a well-known bookkeeping service used by thousands of small businesses, shut down with no warning, days before year-end. Customers lost access to their financial records the same morning. Part of what made it so painful was that Bench kept customers’ books in its own proprietary system. There was no standard ledger to log into and no file to hand to a new accountant. Businesses whose books lived in a mainstream system, under their own account, could have just picked up the phone and handed someone access.

That story isn’t really about Bench. It’s about the difference between the system that holds your records and the service built on top of it. Services come and go. Your records shouldn’t go with them.

Questions to ask before you commit

Some of these are for your accountant. Some are for whoever sets up or manages the software. None of them require you to know accounting.

“Which system do you work in, and which do you prefer?”
Ask your accountant or CPA this before you choose. The best software is often simply the one the person reviewing your books is fluent in. A mismatch here can mean paying for hours spent working around a tool instead of working on your numbers.

“Whose name is on the subscription, and who is the primary admin?”
The account should be in your company’s name, billed to you, with you as the owner. Accountants, bookkeepers, and consultants can be invited users with their own logins. None of them should hold the master account.

“Who has access right now, and how is access removed?”
Look at the user list at least once a year. Anyone who no longer works with you should be removed, and you should know how to do that yourself without asking anyone.

“Is this the actual accounting system, or a service on top of one?”
If a bookkeeping service handles everything through its own app, ask where the underlying records live. If the answer isn’t a standard system you can log into directly, ask what happens to your records if the service ends.

“What does this cost as we grow?”
Beyond the sticker price, ask about user limits, added-seat charges, payroll or payments add-ons, and what happens at the next plan tier. The cheapest option at five employees isn’t always the cheapest at fifteen.

“What connects to it?”
Your bank, your payment processor, your invoicing, your CRM. Ask which of your existing tools connect cleanly and which would need manual entry, because manual entry is where most errors start.

“How do I get my records out?”
Every system on this list can export reports and transaction history. Know where that option is and try it once. A backup you’ve never tested is a hope, not a backup.

“Who do I call when something doesn’t look right?”
The software’s support team can fix a login problem. It can’t tell you whether a number is correct. Know who your accounting question goes to before you need an answer.

The software is the part you can change later

Moving from one accounting system to another isn’t fun, but people do it every year, and good accountants know how to help. The costly situations are the ones about control: records locked inside someone else’s system, a subscription in a former employee’s name, a list of users nobody has checked in three years.

‍ Settle those questions first, and whichever software you choose will be a lot easier to live with.

Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

Five Platforms and What You Need to Ask

Most founders choose a website platform the way they’d choose a font: by whatever looked good in the demo. Many don’t choose at all. The designer picks, and the founder finds out which platform they’re on the first time they try to change something and can’t.

The platform matters less than most comparison articles suggest, and more than most founders realize. It matters less because all five of the most common options can produce a good-looking, professional site. It matters more because each one makes a different set of trade-offs: who can edit the site after launch, what it costs as the business grows, and how hard it is to leave.

A quick disclosure first. We build on Webflow. That’s exactly why this post tries hard to be fair to the other four, and why the second half, the questions to ask any designer or agency, matters more than the platform rundown in the first.

The short version of each

Wix is the widest on-ramp. Its drag-and-drop editor, large app marketplace, and wide range of built-in features make it one of the easiest places for a founder to start alone. The trade-off is that the same editing freedom can leave a site structurally messy as it grows. Wix is also one of the harder platforms to leave. There’s no way to export your site as usable code, so moving somewhere else usually means rebuilding. Wix also has a separate professional product, Wix Studio, aimed at designers and agencies, so it’s worth asking which one you’d actually be on.

Squarespace has the most polished defaults. Its templates look good out of the box, and features like scheduling and simple commerce are built in. The trade-off is the other side of that polish: the guardrails that keep everything looking good also limit how far you can customize, and there are fewer third-party integrations than on some of the others. If you ever leave, some of your content can come with you. The design can’t.

Framer is the design-forward newcomer. It grew out of a prototyping tool, and designers tend to love it: it’s fast to build in and strong on animation and visual polish. The trade-off is that it’s built primarily for marketing sites. If you plan to sell products, confirm exactly how checkout would work before committing. Its pricing and plan limits have also changed more than once recently, and extra editor seats can add up.

Webflow is the visual developer’s tool. It offers more control over a site’s underlying structure, a strong content management system for things like blogs and case studies, and clean output. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve. Day-to-day content edits are manageable for a founder, but structural changes usually need someone who knows the platform. Code can be exported, but the CMS content doesn’t come along in working form. The company has also recently repositioned itself toward larger marketing teams, which is worth keeping an eye on.

WordPress is really two different things, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re being offered. WordPress.com is a hosted service. WordPress.org is open-source software you install on hosting you pay for separately. Self-hosted WordPress is the most portable option on this list: you own every file and can move to a different host whenever you want. The trade-off is that someone has to own the maintenance: plugin updates, security patches, backups, and the hosting itself. A self-hosted WordPress site that nobody keeps updated is one of the most common versions of the “abandoned website” story.

A few others you’ll hear about

If selling products is the main point of your site, Shopify belongs on your shortlist. It’s built as a store first, with pages added around it, which is the opposite of the five platforms above. It’s the right trade for a product business and more than most service businesses need. Every question in the second half of this post applies to it just the same.

You’ll also hear about AI builders that turn a short description into a finished site in minutes. Wix and Squarespace both offer AI-guided versions of their own builders now, and a growing number of standalone tools make the same promise. For some founders, that will be enough, and it’s fair to wonder whether you need a designer at all. But a site you prompted into existence still sits on a domain someone has to control, still has forms that have to go somewhere, and still has an account with someone’s name on it. Getting a site built got faster. The ownership questions didn’t go away.

What the comparison articles leave out

Every platform on this list is an ongoing subscription, separate from whatever you pay to have the site built. Most of them have changed their pricing or plan structure within the last couple of years.

The companies themselves change, too. In late May 2026, two of the platforms on this list announced significant layoffs within a day of each other and repositioned themselves around AI. That’s not a reason to avoid either one. Companies restructure all the time, and both platforms still run a very large number of healthy sites. It is a reminder that “which platform will be around forever” is the wrong question. The better question is: if I ever needed to leave, how painful would it be, and who holds the keys?

That question has much less to do with the platform than with how your designer or agency sets things up. Which brings us to the part that actually protects you.

Questions to ask before you hire anyone

“Which platform, and why that one for my business?” Plenty of good designers specialize in a single platform, and that’s not a red flag on its own. The red flag is an answer that’s about their comfort instead of your needs. A good answer sounds like: “You’ll publish a lot of content and want to edit it yourself, so here’s why this fits.”

“Whose name is on the accounts?” The platform account, the hosting, and the domain should be in your name, billed to you, with you holding the admin login. Your designer can be a collaborator on those accounts. They shouldn’t be the owner. This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong, and the hardest to fix after the relationship ends.

“What will I be able to change myself after launch?” Don’t settle for “it’s easy.” Ask them to show you. Editing a paragraph and adding a new page are very different tasks, and you want to know which one needs a phone call and an invoice.

“What will this cost to run every month once you’re done?” That means the platform subscription plus any paid plugins, apps, add-on features, or extra editor seats. Ask who pays each one, and whether any of them run through the designer’s account instead of yours.

“Where do form submissions actually go?” A contact form that looks perfect and delivers leads nowhere is surprisingly common. Ask where a submission lands: an inbox, a CRM, somewhere else. Then send a test before launch and confirm it arrived.

“Who’s touching my DNS at launch, and do they know my email lives there too?” Pointing a domain at a new website often means editing the same settings that route your business email. A careful designer will ask about your email setup before changing anything. If they don’t bring it up, you should.

“What happens if I want to leave — you, or the platform?” Ask what you’d walk away with: logins, exported content, any documentation of how the site is put together. A designer who’s confident in their work is usually comfortable answering this one.

“What does ‘after launch’ actually include?” Fixes, small changes, updates, and how quickly they respond. For WordPress in particular, ask who is responsible for keeping plugins and security patches current, because the answer is never “nobody needs to.”

The platform is the part you can change later

A good designer will answer all of these without flinching, and some will be glad you asked. If you’ve picked a platform that turns out to be the wrong fit, you can rebuild somewhere else. It isn’t fun, but it’s a known quantity. The costly mistakes are the ones about ownership and access: a domain you can’t reach, a site billed to someone else’s account, an email setup nobody wrote down.

Settle those questions before the first design mockup, and the platform choice becomes much easier to get right.‍

Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.

The Three Reports Every Founder Should Actually Look At

Most founders open QuickBooks the way they’d open a tool they don’t fully trust — poke around, glance at the number in the corner, close it, get back to actual work. That’s not a knock. Nobody starts a business because they love financial statements. But three reports in there are worth five minutes each, not because they’re accounting homework, but because each one answers a question you actually need answered.

Here’s the honest version, from one founder to another — not as someone who’s mastered this, but as someone who’s learned the hard way which question goes with which report.

The Profit & Loss statement answers: did I make money during this period?

It adds up everything you billed or earned, subtracts everything you spent, and gives you a number for the month, the quarter, the year. It’s the report most founders check first, because it’s the one that feels like a scoreboard. The catch is right there in the question — “did I make money” is not the same question as “do I have money.” A P&L can say you’re profitable while your bank account says otherwise, and that’s not the report lying to you. It’s the report answering a narrower question than the one you were actually asking.

The Balance Sheet answers: what do I actually own and owe, right now?

This is the one founders skip most often, probably because it doesn’t read like a story the way a P&L does — it’s a snapshot, not a trend. But it’s the only report that shows the full picture at a single moment: cash in the bank, money owed to you, equipment you own, debt you’re carrying, money you owe out. A healthy-looking P&L sitting next to a balance sheet loaded with unpaid invoices and short-term debt is a very different business than a healthy P&L sitting next to a clean one. You don’t get that distinction from the P&L alone.

The Cash Flow statement answers: where did the cash actually go?

This is the report that reconciles the other two. Profit on the P&L doesn’t automatically show up as cash — it might be sitting in an invoice a client hasn’t paid yet, or it might have already walked out the door to cover a loan payment that doesn’t show up as an “expense” the same way rent does. Cash flow tracks the money as it actually moves: what came in, what went out, and whether the business is generating cash from its actual operations or just staying afloat on what’s left in the account.

Here’s a version of how this plays out, worked through as an example rather than a real client’s numbers. A founder closes out a strong quarter — the P&L shows solid profit, work is steady, things feel good. Payroll comes due, and the account is tighter than the P&L would suggest. Nothing was mismanaged. The profit was real. But a chunk of it was sitting in invoices that hadn’t been paid yet, and another chunk had gone toward paying down a loan — a real cash outflow that a P&L, by design, doesn’t fully capture as an expense. The P&L wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t built to answer the question the founder actually needed answered that week.

That’s the real argument for looking at all three, not just the one that feels most like good news. The P&L tells you if the business model works. The balance sheet tells you what you’re actually standing on. The cash flow statement tells you whether the money’s timing lines up with your bills. Any one of them alone can leave you confident about the wrong thing.

You don’t need to become an accountant to use these. You need to know which question you’re actually asking before you go looking for the answer in the wrong report.‍

Originally published at https://www.preciseport.com.