Customer service is really easy to get right, so why are so many sole traders and small businesses getting it so wrong?

There’s a myth about starting a business that seems baked into the British psyche, and it usually goes something like this: you need to write a ‘professional’ business plan (whatever that is) so you can get a big loan to pay for a slick logo and an even slicker website, and then hire an office with a secretary, and there is no point even thinking about starting a business unless you’ve got all of that in place first.

Starting out as a freelancer is exciting, but it can also feel a bit like being thrown in the deep end. Suddenly you’re not just doing the work. You’re also the accountant, the marketing department, the customer service team and the admin assistant, all at the same time, usually in the evenings after a long day.

Tax. Just the word is enough to make most of us reach for the cake tin or gin bottle and stare blankly at the wall. And when you’re self-employed or running a small business, the rules around what is and isn’t claimable as a business expense can feel overwhelming. But here is the good news: once you understand the basic logic of how HMRC thinks about expenses, the whole thing becomes a lot more straightforward.

Most sole traders assume GDPR and AI are problems for big businesses like M&S and Capita, and not for someone sending invoices from a kitchen table. But the moment you drop a client's details into an AI tool, you're operating inside the same legal framework as the largest brands in the world, just without their legal team to back you up. If something goes wrong and that information is stolen, you  won't get a free pass just because you’re self employed.  GDPR law is applied proportionately, but that could still mean a fine, and certainly a loss of reputation.

‍ Making Tax Digital is nearly upon us. If you’re self-employed and/or you earn money from property, and you turned over £50,000 or more in financial year 2024 to 2025, you will need to start giving HMRC quarterly updates from 6th April 2026. These updates will be in addition to submitting your usual annual end of year tax return.

Every day there seems to be another story on the news about AI. How it’s becoming more advanced, how it’s taking our jobs, how it’s changing the world. But when you’re in the sole trader trenches and your working day involves getting hands on with emulsion, engine oil or compost, the possibility of AI capabilities having any impact on how you paint a wall, service a car or pot up some seedlings seems very far away. And on the practicalities side, you’re not wrong. We’re a long, long way from robots capable of doing these tasks in any meaningfully cost-effective way. But AI having an overall impact on how we operate isn’t just in the near future, it’s here now.

We’ve all been there. I’m having a really productive and engaging conversation with my AI assistant of choice about a marketing idea. I’ve given it loads of context, asked it to put its social marketing experts hat on and we’ve talked through some scenarios, but then, mid-flow, it suffers some kind of memory loss and gives me a load of flannel that’s vaguely related but not really what I’ve asked about. Even worse, it’s also contradicted something it said two messages ago and now I’m not sure what’s fact and what’s hallucination. It’s frustrating and annoying, and it feels like a waste of my time, especially if I have to start again from the beginning. So why does it happen, and more importantly, how can we avoid it?

AI is great. I’m continually astonished at how adept and intuitive it is, and I use it a lot (as you’d imagine considering my job). It’s a great assistant for brainstorming ideas, researching products, and giving me recipe suggestions. It’s also really good at spelling and grammar checks, drafting letters and emails and coming up with marketing suggestions. If you’re already using it this way to save time and effort, you’re ahead of the game, and if you’re not, you should definitely start. But, and there is always a but, while incorporating AI into your everyday working and personal life can have real benefits, there are some areas where AI really shouldn’t be in charge.

More and more of us are using an AI model to check whether something we’ve read or heard is true. It’s easier and quicker to type a question into an AI prompt box and hit send than it is trawling through the multiple pages thrown up by a Google search.  Not only does it take just a couple of seconds to get the answer, the AI models are also great at giving us information that is easy to understand and laid out in a quick to grasp way. So, what’s not to like?