Feed It Your Best Work, Not Your Average Work

AI learns from examples — so the quality of your examples is the quality of your results. Most small businesses get this backwards: they feed the tool a pile of average past work and wonder why the output is mediocre.

Think of it like training a new employee. You wouldn't hand them your messiest files and say "do it like this." You'd show them your best proposal, your clearest email, the invoice format that never causes confusion. Give AI the same courtesy.

Pick three to five examples of the task done excellently. Clean them up first — fix the typos, clarify the fuzzy parts. These become your gold standard. When the AI's output drifts, you compare it against these, not against your memory of "how we usually do it."

This is the same principle behind good documentation: define the best version once, then measure everything against it. In my systems work, the gold-standard example was always the most valuable page in the file.

Garbage in, garbage out is a cliché because it's true. Feed it your best, and you'll get its best.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.