Prompt Writing Basics for Busy Business Owners

Most people’s first AI experience goes like this: type a short request, get something generic, conclude “it’s not that good really”, leave. The tool wasn’t the problem, the instruction was. Here are the five techniques that fix it, learnable in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

1. Brief it like a new employee, not a search engine

A capable new starter would need context: who you are, who the customer is, what good looks like. AI is the same.

Instead of: “Write an email chasing an invoice.”

Try: “I run a small landscaping company. A good customer is 3 weeks late paying a £1,400 invoice, it’s unlike them and I want to keep the relationship warm. Write a short, friendly chase email that assumes it’s an oversight, and mention we can take payment by bank transfer or card link.”

Same tool, wildly different result. Context is the whole game.

2. Tell it who to be and who it’s for

One line each on role and audience shapes everything: “You’re an experienced customer service manager” … “The reader is a busy site foreman who skims emails on his phone.” Tone, length and vocabulary all snap into place.

3. Show it an example of “good”

The single most underused technique. Paste in your best previous quote, email or product description and say: “Match this style and structure.” Your voice, kept, the drafting time, gone. (This is how businesses avoid the dreaded generic “AI voice”, and it’s the foundation of every writing setup I build in implementation projects.)

4. Iterate, don’t start over

The first output is a first draft from a colleague, not a verdict. Reply to it: “Shorter.” “Warmer.” “The middle paragraph is waffle, cut it.” “Now do a version for WhatsApp.” Each refinement takes seconds, and the conversation is the point: people who dialogue with AI get results people who query it never see.

5. Save what works

The moment a prompt produces something great, save it, a shared document is fine. Next time, it’s fill-in-the-blanks instead of starting fresh, and everyone on the team benefits from the best version rather than reinventing their own. A shared prompt library is one of the standard deliverables of the AI Essentials Workshop, because it’s the difference between one person being good at this and the business being good at it.

A worked example, start to finish

Task: respond to a customer asking why their delivery is late.

You’re the customer service voice of a small furniture workshop, warm, honest, no corporate speak. A customer emailed asking where their order is; it’s 5 days late because our timber supplier delivered late. New delivery date is Friday the 14th. Write a reply that: apologises properly without grovelling, explains honestly, confirms the new date, and offers a £20 voucher off their next order. Keep it under 120 words. Here’s a previous email of ours so you can match the tone: [paste]

That prompt takes ninety seconds to write and returns something you’d genuinely send after a light edit. Multiply that across every word-shaped task in your week, quotes, follow-ups, descriptions, summaries (start with these ten if you want candidates), and you can see where the hours come back from.

Prompting is a skill your whole team can learn in half a day, and if you’d rather compress the learning curve, that’s literally what the workshop is for. Not sure prompting is even your first priority? The free AI Opportunity Review will tell you where to start.