Your voice won't scale. Your opinions will.

"This is good, but it doesn't sound like us."

A founder I worked with kept sending that line back to his agency. There was already a brand guide. It said the company was confident, clear and human. The agency followed it, and the copy was polished and perfectly acceptable. He still rewrote almost every important piece before it went out.

So we put his edits side by side.

What he changed, and why

He cut "get up and running in days". In his words: "Our customers have to change how they work. I don't want to pretend that's instant."

He replaced "save time" with the specific job customers were trying to get done.

He pushed back on "seamless integration", because the product did need some configuration.

He refused to call it "easy", when what he meant was "straightforward once you've done the work to set it up properly".

Each one is a belief about how the company should sell: don't promise what the product can't deliver, don't hide the hard part of the customer's problem, and don't use the same vague benefit language as everyone else in the category.

The agency couldn't have written them, because nobody had told them what he believed.

Adjectives describe everyone

"Confident, clear, human." "Bold but approachable." Most voice guides could belong to almost any B2B company.

Try it: put a competitor's name at the top of your voice guide. If it still fits, it isn't guidance. It's decoration.

Write down your opinions instead

What you believe that most of your market doesn't. The view of the problem you'd defend in a room of people who disagree.

What you're against. The default approach, tool or habit you think is wrong, and why.

What you won't say. Claims you refuse to make, and the reason behind each one.

The examples you always reach for. The customer moment, the failure, the reason the company exists.

Tone follows from those. A marketer who knows what you believe finds your voice faster than one who has memorised your adjectives.

Turn every rewrite into a line

Each time you change a marketer's copy, write one sentence explaining why, and add it to the document. "We name the spreadsheet, because that's what we replace." "We never call competitors 'legacy', because our customers chose them."

It takes a minute per edit. Within a few months, your edits get smaller. That's the document working, and it's the same decisions your marketer was always asking you for, finally written down.

That founder stopped expanding his voice guide and wrote his opinions down instead. The agency's next drafts changed because they now knew what he thought. His edits got smaller. Approvals got easier.

Start with your next edit: write the one-sentence reason before you send the copy back.