Company profile

What a company profile is

A company profile is one accurate description of the business, written once and issued in three lengths: about 25 words, about 75 words and about 150 words. It says what the business is, what it does, who for, where, and since when. It is factual, it is checkable, and it is the version that goes anywhere a description of the company is asked for.

It is not an about page. The about page is a page a buyer reads while deciding whether to trust you, and it can be several hundred words with people and history in it. The profile is the block you paste into a form. It is also not a mission statement, not a slogan, and not an argument for buying from you.

Nor is it the same job as boilerplate descriptions, which sit inside the brand-voice work and exist to carry approved marketing language at 50, 100 and 200 words. The profile is the factual layer underneath that: legal name, trade, scale, coverage, credentials. If you already have boilerplate, this work makes sure the facts inside it are right and gives you the short versions the boilerplate does not cover. If you have neither, one owner for both is better than two documents that drift apart.

When you need one

You need one when the business is already describing itself five different ways. The directory entry says one thing, the tender response says another, the footer says a third, and a supplier's website has a description from four years ago that nobody has asked you to check. Every one of them is wrong in a small way, and somebody will eventually notice.

You need one when something has changed: a new trade name, a second location, a certification gained or lost, a service dropped. The description is in twenty places and nobody has a list of them.

You do not need one if the only place a description appears is your own about page and you are happy with it. That is a page rewrite, not a profile. And if what you actually lack is a way of explaining the business out loud, the elevator pitch is the cheaper piece of work.

What goes in it

The three lengths are not the same paragraph trimmed. Each is written for the place it goes.

• The 25-word version. One sentence. What you do and who for. This goes in a directory field, a social profile, a conference programme, an email footer, a sponsorship listing.
• The 75-word version. What you do, who for, where you operate, and the one thing that distinguishes you. This is the workhorse: proposals, partner sites, association listings, the bottom of a press release.
• The 150-word version. The same, plus scale, founding, credentials, and the range of what you offer. This goes in tenders, media kits, award submissions and anywhere a fuller account is expected.
• The fact sheet behind them. The legal and trading names, year founded, locations, headcount band, certifications, licence numbers, insurance, service area and the spelling of everything. Each one confirmed with you rather than copied from an old document.
• A note on where each version goes. So nobody pastes the 150-word version into a field that shows the first line.

What you get

The three versions. One document, the three lengths, each ready to paste, with the word count marked.

The fact sheet. One page of confirmed facts with a date on it, which is the thing that stops the next person inventing a description from memory.

The placement list. Every place I could find that currently carries a description of your business, with what it says now and which version should replace it. Your own site, directories, association pages, supplier and partner sites, social profiles.

A review date. A short note on what triggers a rewrite and when to check it, because a profile that is never reviewed is a profile that is wrong within two years.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A specialist welding shop in Hamilton has been trading for nineteen years and describes itself in seven places. The footer says “custom metal fabrication”. The industry association listing says “structural steel”, which they stopped doing in 2019. A supplier's partner page calls them a distributor, which they have never been. Two directory entries still carry the old company name from before the 2016 incorporation.

The fact sheet takes one call and two emails to confirm, and it turns up two things the owner had not thought about: the welding certifications are listed nowhere at all, and the shop has quietly become a mostly aerospace-adjacent business without ever saying so. The 25-word version names the certifications and the trade. The 75-word version adds the two sectors that now make up most of the work. The 150-word version goes into the association listing and the next three tender responses. The placement list runs to eleven entries, four of which the owner did not know existed, and the office manager works through it in an afternoon.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the business actually does now, what has changed, and where descriptions of it appear. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The scope, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The fact check. A short questionnaire and one follow-up call. Two to three working days, and the slow part is usually finding the certificate numbers.
4. The search. I look for every published description of the business I can reach and record what it says.
5. The drafts. Three to five working days. One round of changes, and the facts are confirmed by you line by line.
6. Delivery. The three versions, the fact sheet, the placement list and the review date.

One to two weeks from the call, unless the fact-gathering stalls on somebody's filing cabinet.

What it costs

A company profile is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work varies with how tangled the existing descriptions are. What moves it is how many places carry a description now, how much fact-checking the claims need, and whether the profile has to serve one legal entity or several trading names. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and how quotes are built, and the number is agreed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Once the facts are settled, the about page is usually the next thing to be brought into line, because it is where the description is longest and oldest. Businesses that found the profile useful often want the marketing language locked down as well, which is boilerplate in the brand-voice pillar. And a profile with no people in it is only half the picture, so short biographies of the team tend to follow. The profile is complete work on its own, and nothing else is assumed.