Company Profile Tips and Tricks
Over the course of my professional construction career, bidding on projects and submitting proposals, the single most valuable tool I have always made sure I had is a company profile.
This document tells the world who you are and how you solve problems. It highlights your achievements, and it summarizes your capacity and capability. But more than anything else, a professional construction company profile tells the world that you are a serious business and that nearly always translates into more business.
Here are my top tips for creating your company profile without spending a fortune, and a bonus video about how you can use it to get more business.
What Goes into a Company Profile?
There are tons of specializations and sub-trades, services, and products in the construction world, so the content of your company profile might differ slightly, but the main sections will probably be the same. I’ve always found that these work well:
Introduction
About a page stating the name of your company, your main industry, how long you’ve been around, and who you help.
About Us
More detail about where you are located, key people in your organization (founder, owner, CEO, President, lead designer, principals etc.), the sectors you serve, and your core values (although you don’t have to spell this part out – a paragraph outlining what really matters to you will get the job done!)
Capacity and Capabilities
How many people do you have working for you? What kind of specialized facilities do you have? How much material do you produce? How many widgets do you make or build in a year? Do you have an impressive fleet of vehicles and machinery or a high-tech assembly line?
Products and Services
What are the main products and services you offer? A page for each, with appropriate images or product drawings, is more than enough.
Safety, Health and Environmental
These three sections should be separate, but they don’t have to be your full plans for those things.
Each of these sections will simply state what you do to address these things, any certifications you have (COR, ISO, etc.), and any vetting agencies that you belong to (Avetta, ComplyWorks, ISNetworld, etc.)
These parts of your company profile are an overview of your processes and compliance, and you can always send the actual program documents along if it’s for a bid, etc.
Current and Completed Projects
Now, knock their socks off! These are usually case studies of the orders or projects you have completed that are most impressive. Largest value. Most unique design. An innovative solution. Include information about who it was for (yes, name drop!), the value, duration, and relevant images.
You don’t need to put EVERY project or order here. Just the ones that will impress people!
Contact Information
I like to put the contact information and another blurb about the company on the outside back page of the company profile. This is a magazine advertising trick I learned. Have you ever noticed how expensive back-page ads are? That’s because a magazine (or company profile) can only lie on a surface one of two ways: front side up or back page up. It’s very valuable real estate!
Preparing a Company Profile
Some people and companies like to have their company profile professionally printed, like a catalog or magazine. I don’t. That’s because you will probably have to have a large quantity printed, and things change fast in the construction world.
The last thing you want is to have a pile of glossy, professionally printed company profiles that you can’t use, gathering dust and reminding you how much they cost! So here are my tips for creating your company profiles, enabling editing and updates when you need them, and still making them look like a million bucks:
- Don’t get the whole book printed. But you can do a custom card stock cover page with a window cutout that you can align with the title of the document. If you do this instead of having the page itself printed, you can use the covers for other things if you need to. Use your corporate colors, and always ensure it’s branded with your logo and tagline.
- Add acetate covers front and back so your company profile doesn’t get dirty, smudged, and dog-eared.
- Invest in a ring binding machine. They cost between 100 and 200 and allow you to do your own binding on demand. No more running to the print shop to get this done!
- Do the layout and formatting in a program you have easy access to, like MSWord. You would be surprised how slick your company profile can look with the right headers and footers, page numbering, a table of contents pulled from headers and subheads, and some basic graphic and layout tricks.
- Do your printing on a high-quality color laser printer. If you don’t have one, do it at your local Staples. It’s decent quality, and you can print a small quantity at a time.
- Make sure that the writing is impeccable, that everything is spell-checked and carefully proofed, and that it’s completely error-free!
- Keep a high-resolution PDF version of your latest company profile so you can send it electronically when needed.
Simple and Relatively Inexpensive, but a Game Changer
As you can see, it doesn’t have to be complicated or very expensive to produce a professional-looking company profile, but I cannot tell you how much of a difference something like this makes.
Done correctly, it looks every bit as professional as a professionally printed catalog style, but you can update it easily, add sections when you need to, and include “extras” like letters of reference from customers and other documents if you like.
Everything in marketing is about presentation. It’s about how the world perceives you, and by using tools like the construction company profile, you can set yourself apart from the crowd. So, if you’re looking for an edge to get noticed and get more business, consider this.