There is a sentence I have read four hundred times this year, and it goes like this: "We provide tailored solutions for forward-thinking businesses." It is on the homepage of every third B2B website I open. It is grammatical. It is technically true. It is also, I have come to believe, slightly toxic — the verbal equivalent of those scented air fresheners that mask a smell you should probably investigate.
The problem with "solutions" is not that the word is bad in isolation. The problem is what it allows the writer to avoid. Once you write "we provide solutions," you no longer have to say what the thing is, who it is for, or what specifically would be different about a Tuesday afternoon if a customer used it. You are off the hook. The sentence has paid your rent for the morning.
I have started running a small experiment with new clients. On the first call, I read their homepage out loud, and every time I hit the word "solution" or "solutions" I clap once. Most homepages get four to six claps inside the first paragraph. The founders, watching this, look haunted. They wrote those words. Or rather: a junior copywriter wrote them three years ago, and nobody has had the time to rewrite, and the homepage has been quietly costing the company customers ever since.
What goes in the place of "solutions"? Almost anything more specific. The verb the customer would use. The actual outcome on the actual Tuesday. The thing you do that the competitor does not. Replace "we provide tailored solutions for forward-thinking businesses" with "we write the words companies wish they had written themselves" and you have lost a sale to nobody and gained a sentence somebody might remember. That is the trade. That is always the trade.