Lately I have been thinking about something that is very much in the air these days on Umrezi.se: the quality of a company and the quality of its application often have little to do with one another. There are companies that have exported steadily for years, have regular customers in Germany and make products few others in the region can match, yet they put together an application that, on paper, looks weaker than that of a competitor half as serious. The opposite happens too: a company that has learned how to write an application can come across as better than it really is.

The reason, it seems to me, is simple. A public call does not measure how good a company is, but how skilled it is at writing that down. And running a good company and writing a good application are two different skills. The first means knowing your product, your market, your customers, your people and your numbers. The second means knowing the language of the call: its objectives (what is being asked for), its constraints, the logic of the project framework, the theory of change, the indicators, the way value gets translated into the sentences an evaluator is looking for. No one is born with that second skill. It is practised, like any other, except that a part of the economy has never had the chance (or the patience) to master it. And the evaluator does not have the company in front of them, only the paper, so they assess what they see.

There is a trap here that I have written about before. When people try to write in an “expert” register, they usually think it sounds more professional, when in fact they blur the very thing they know best. I remember an objective from a workshop: “solving the problem of flooding across the municipality.” When you read that, you imagine the whole municipality under water, while behind the phrasing stood a single small stream that floods at one spot. Had they simply written it that way, everyone would have understood at once what it was about and what needed to be done. The people who wrote it knew what they meant, but a reader from the outside could quite reasonably reach the wrong conclusion. The same thing happens in applications: a company with tangible, concrete knowledge tries to wrap it in generic phrases and loses, along the way, the very thing that makes it special. Phrases have a way of swallowing the details.

None of this would matter so much were it not for one awkward consequence. The companies that most need development support are precisely the ones that are not “professional applicants”: good manufacturers with no significant digital presence, hidden champions dependent on a single customer, companies that have never run a project with a donor. These are, by their very nature, the companies that will write a weaker application. So it easily happens that a call turns away exactly the one who needs the help most and who, with it, would do excellent things, the kind that would be a good sign to others, while it lets through someone already in the game who would probably have managed even without the grant.

Here, though, the other side should be said as well, so it does not seem the whole fault lies with the call. However imperfect the filter, an application is, in the end, part of the work. And like any other part of the work, it deserves to be taken seriously. A company that would not let an unfinished product leave the plant has no reason to rush an application in the day or two before the deadline. This, it seems to me, is where many otherwise excellent companies fall short: they approach the application with less care than everything else they do, in a hurry and at the last minute, and so the quality that is there never makes it onto the paper.

It is worth knowing this as well. Wherever support for preparation exists, through mentors, workshops or experts, it almost always comes only after the first written hurdle has been cleared. The company writes the initial concept on its own, and it is precisely that concept which decides whether it will reach any of that help at all. Counting on “someone sorting out the application later” means getting stuck before the help ever becomes available.

So what can a company actually do? First, read a rejection correctly: it speaks to how something was written, and rarely to how much the company is truly worth. Second, start from a concrete problem rather than from equipment or phrases: which problem it solves, for whom, and how one will see that it has been solved. “Today we export a semi-finished part that the buyer finishes and sells for several times more; within two years we want to deliver the finished product ourselves, under our own name” says more than a page of generic superlatives, and it describes exactly what the company knows best about itself. And third, do not let a single person work on the application alone. It is good to have someone else in the company read the concept or the application before it is sent and offer a comment. What is perfectly clear to the writer, because the whole picture is in their head, need not be clear even to colleagues, let alone to an evaluator on the outside. Someone else in the company will quickly notice where a sentence does not hold, where a step in the logic is missing, or where something the reader does not know is being taken for granted. Even this blog will be read by a colleague or two from Eda before it is published, let alone a grant application.

It is also worth looking beyond the company. Everything begins with a clear idea of where the company is heading – how to move out of the contract-manufacturing model and win new markets, how to retain knowledge when people leave, how to digitalise the business. It is around exactly such themes that learning networks are being launched on Umrezi.se – for internationalisation, digitalisation, knowledge management, human resources, energy efficiency and innovation – where companies facing the same challenge exchange experience. Once an idea has been sharpened in that exchange, the application that follows from it comes more easily too.

In the end, what is valued is the substance and the logic of the idea itself: what the company does, which problem it solves, and why it makes sense. Writing is merely the means by which that substance is seen clearly and precisely. The best application is the one through which the quality of the company shows without effort, stated concretely and without the ornament that blurs it. You write in order to be understood. That quality is real; it only needs to be put on paper clearly.

No one expects good companies to become professional applicants. But they are expected, precisely, to set down what they know, what they can do and what they intend clearly enough that even someone who sees them for the first time, only through the application, can understand it.