Team biographies

What a team biography is

A team biography is a short piece of writing about one person that tells a customer who they will be dealing with and why that person can be trusted with the work. Sixty to a hundred and twenty words, in the first person wherever the person will allow it, carrying one specific human detail and one plain statement of what they do for the reader.

It is not a career history. The third-person paragraph that begins “Sarah brings over fifteen years of experience across a variety of sectors” and lists three former employers and a degree is the default on most sites, and nobody outside the company has ever read one to the end. It is not a resume, it is not a LinkedIn summary pasted in, and it is not an exercise in adjectives about passion and dedication.

It is also not the about page, which is about the business. Biographies sit on the about page, and sometimes on service pages and contact pages too, but they are a separate piece of writing with a separate job: to turn an organisation into people.

When you need one

You need biographies when the buyer is buying a person. Professional services, trades, clinics, consultancies, agencies, anywhere the customer's real question is “who will turn up and do this”. If your competitors' sites are anonymous, named people with faces are a straightforward advantage.

You need them again when the team has changed and the site has not: departed staff still listed, promotions not reflected, three people missing. That is a smaller job and belongs with an outdated page refresh if the rest of the page has the same problem.

You do not need them if the customer never meets anyone and never will. A shop selling a boxed product to strangers does not benefit much from six biographies, and the money is better spent on the product pages. One founder biography is usually enough there.

What goes in one

Each biography is built from a short interview and contains four things, in this order.

• What this person does for you. Not their title. The sentence a customer needs: who they talk to, what they handle, when they get involved. “I do the site visits and I write the quote you get.”
• The credential that matters here. One, chosen for relevance rather than impressiveness. The ticket, the licence, the twelve years on the tools. The other five go on a longer page if anyone wants them.
• One specific human detail. Real and particular: the thing they collect, the town they grew up in, the thing they will talk about for too long. This is what makes a reader remember the person, and a general one does not work.
• How to reach them, if they want to be reached. Some people should have a direct line on the site and some should not, and that is a decision made person by person.

First person is the default because it sounds like a human being. Where somebody is genuinely uncomfortable with it, a warm third person is used, but consistently across the whole team rather than half and half.

What you get

The interviews. Fifteen to twenty minutes with each person, on a call or in a room, recorded. Most people cannot write about themselves and most people are perfectly good at talking about the work.

The biographies. One per person, 60 to 120 words, in a single document with each person's name, role and the approved text, ready to be pasted into the site.

A pattern to follow. A one-page note on how the biographies are built, so the next hire gets one that matches rather than one copied from a template.

A photography brief. What the photographs need to show and what to avoid, whether you use a photographer or a phone by a window.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A four-person accounting firm in Saskatoon has an about page with four paragraphs, each beginning with the person's full name and designation, each listing a university and two former firms, each ending with a sentence about a commitment to client service. The page has a stock photograph of a boardroom nobody in the firm has ever sat in.

The interviews take an hour in total. The senior partner's biography now opens with the fact that she takes every first call herself and will tell you in that call whether you need her or a bookkeeper. The second partner's says he handles farm clients and grew up on one near Rosetown. The junior accountant's says she is the person who chases the paperwork and would rather chase it than have anyone miss a deadline, and mentions she plays in a curling league that occupies most of January. The office manager, who is the person clients actually speak to most, gets a biography for the first time. Four paragraphs become four short ones, the boardroom photograph goes, and the firm books an hour with a photographer.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who is on the page, who deals with customers, and whether first person suits the firm. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of people, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The interviews. Fifteen to twenty minutes each, booked in one or two blocks so it costs the team half a morning rather than a week.
4. The drafts. Three to five working days. Each person sees only their own and can change anything about themselves.
5. Delivery. The final document, the pattern note and the photography brief.

A team of four to ten takes one to two weeks, and the delay is almost always getting everyone booked in.

What it costs

Team biographies are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size depends entirely on headcount. What moves the number is how many people are included, whether interviews are needed or you already have usable notes, and whether the biographies have to be written for a set of pages rather than one. The pricing page shows how quotes are built across the four ways of working, and the figure is agreed in writing before the work starts.

What happens next

Once the people read as people, the page around them usually needs to match, which is an about page rewrite. Businesses that have just discovered how much better a first-person voice reads often follow with bringing the rest of the site into one voice. And a biography is only as good as the photograph beside it, so arranging real photographs is the common next step. The biographies stand on their own, and none of that is assumed.