Whenever you attend a business meeting to market your company, the one tool among your ‘must-haves’ is your company profile. This document is extremely important in selling your business to your potential clients.  It should be well-written to convey the predominant values and corporate culture that lends the organization its distinct character. A good company profile must have the following:

• An attractive cover page with your strong company logo, branding, the document name (i.e. Company Profile), and if possible, a summarized/ bulleted list of your products/services. Ensure that this page is not cluttered, and should be presented using your corporate colour scheme/brand guide.
• An About Us section, which should introduce your company in a concise manner to your clients. You need to mention your mandate, i.e. the reason why your business was established, when your business was registered, your area of operation, ownership of the business, e.g. the directors, your mission, vision, core values, objectives, and so on.
• Products/Services Section. You must also detail out the products and services that you offer. You should start with your most important to least important as the case may be, or your area of highest competency to lower ones.
• A ‘Why Choose Us’ section. Your customers and potential clients should have reasons why they should give preference and settle for your company. You must separate yourself from the ‘pack’ of competitors and bring out your unique strengths. It should be presented from your client’s point of view. They should find enough reasons why they should settle on you. Is it because of fair pricing? good customer care? aftersale services? Give your reasons
• Your Staff and Personnel. It is important to provide details about your team and why they are best suited to serve your clients. Where possible provide an organogram/organizational chart which is important in detailing out the strength of your team.
• Your Salient Projects – provide the important projects that you have undertaken in the recent past. these will act as reference points for your business prospects.
• Recommendation from your clients, or key statements that your clients have made about your company that can act as selling points to your prospective customers.
• Achievements and Awards: If your company has been around for a considerable time, you may provide details of any awards you have gained, your achievements, or the successes you have accomplished, which would help establish a solid case for your company’s dependability and suitability for business engagement.
• Your Client Portfolio: provide a list of your critical clients in your company profile if possible. You may also opt for logos of your clients which should give your profile a good visual outlook instead of text only. You should also be careful on who and how to list, as your competitors are also keen to take away your market share. You need to do this with caution.
• A ‘Contact Us’ You must also provide your contact details in case your clients are interested to talk with you or purchase your product/service. Provide your name, postal address, email address, telephone numbers as well as your website. Ensure that this section is updated from time to time to ensure that you are always reachable. This section can be provided in front as well as back page for maximum visibility. Some companies also place key contact details (e.g. telephone numbers and email) as small footers or headers in every page of the company profile. This needs to be done professionally so as not to distract the readers.

As you come up with your profile, ensure that the language you use is simple and straight-forward, but this depends also on your target customers.

In addition to the contents, your company profile must be well-designed in accordance with your brand standards. An attractive company profile design says a lot about the company it presents. It should have a good mix of text and pictures/graphics (well-balanced). Pictures/graphics are very critical especially to clients who may not have a lot of time to read through your entire profile, so they should speak and give someone an idea of what your business is all about. Well-selected and laid out graphics also ‘entice’ someone to take a keen interest and read through the text and get the real details about your company. The work of designing and layout is best given to professionals as they can present your ideas in output very well.

Your company profile can be presented online (on your website, social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook), or printed on a good quality paper (e.g. gloss, matte) with a nice finish, for example, laminating the cover to make it look really impressive.

You can also prepare it and output in PDF (Portable Document Format)  and email to your prospective clients. The reason for outputting in PDF is to ensure that you maintain the impressive design of your company profile. Only that you need to ensure that profiles sent by email should be compressed and made small to ensure that it can be easily downloadable and quick to send/forward. The quality of pictures should not be compromised when compressing for emailing.

If you want us to design a professional company profile for your business, write to us on enquire@kanatechsys.co.ke or call +254 725 959 830.