Taking Your Company to the Next Level
The Market is the Message

Wielding Profitable Profiles

A company profile is only half complete in this multimedia world, if it does not assist you to take your company to the next level.   The Ten Minute Business Profiler is intended to bring you from the writing process to the marketing arena. 

A simple, easy to use and flexible Wizard, is designed to help you write a brief, well organized company profile that clearly explains your objectives.

Once you have written a one or two page profile of your company, however, you may then find yourself in possession of a document ready to be read but rarely seen.  At this point, you can transform your profile into myriad formats utilizing a whole gamut of publishing tools and Internet resources. 

Wizard Tips:

·         Use the Business Profiler to introduce your company to decision-makers at meetings, conferences, trade fairs and online.

·         You can turn your profile into a flier, leave-behind, web page, slide show or letter attachment.

You Know Why and Who …. Here’s Where and How

There are literally hundreds of networking events hosted by government agencies like the Small Business Administration  (SBA), nonprofit associations like Chambers of Commerce, and large corporations like the Baby Bells and most of the top banks.  Some organizations, like the SBA, specifically request attendees to bring their business plan - the basic imperative of entrepreneurship today - for general distribution.  Others, like the MIT Entrepreneurship Center conduct an annual competition for the best plan. 

However, in most cases it is inconvenient, and more often inappropriate, to use your business plan to market your company. Imagine the chagrin of a corporate executive watching bound business plans pile up at his booth at a Trade Fair. “Just leave me your business card,” he is apt to say.  In fact, only prospective investors and lenders generally require a business plan, and even they are increasingly requesting a company profile to precede detailed information.  Your company needs more in its arsenal than an unwieldy multi-page business plan or a glamorous $10,000 static media kit that you can afford to update once a year at most.

Printing, Posting and Presenting

Malcolm Forbes who was the patron saint of brevity in his own writing style, and a consummate entrepreneur, gave bonuses to managers for making their business presentations fit on a single page so that they would not waste the time of their audience. The single page rule is a really good one to follow.  On special occasions, you might want a multiple page document – a gatefold flyer for example or a multimedia Microsoft Microsoft® Publisher slide presentation.

In addition, to the standard 8.5x11 letter style-versions generated by the Business Profiler Wizard, you should explore using Microsoft® Publisher to turn your targeted, well-researched and organized single-page presentation into a multi-column flyer -- or an attractive leave-behind that you can disseminate at the next annual industry trade fair – or a web page that you float all over the Internet. 

After you have worked with the wizard a few times, you will have created a whole range of concise descriptives that you can choose from to reproduce on bulletin boards and in business-to-business web sites that provide business matching and search services.

You can save your word document as html. so that you can use it as a web page. To enhance your presentation, import Excel data for those who need to include financial details. Use both Publisher and Power Point to turn your text into nimble messengers that fit any medium

Ten Minute Business Profiler

Resource Center

·         Links to websites for  posting Company Profiles

·         Calendar of Networking Events

·         Additional templates and tools

Striking a Balance

Procurement managers at Fortune 500 companies are as anxious to protect themselves from too much solicitation as they are eager to find a gem of a supplier.  At the same time, with the job crunch in technology and IPO fever, there are an abundance of corporations, investors, list brokers and other middlemen eager to receive information on small and medium size companies.

A small business owner we know posted a company profile on a web site that boasts 50,000 corporate viewers.  It sounded fantastic, and she was even more excited when the very next morning the telephone rang off the hook and she had two dozen e-mail messages in her Inbox.  It took several weeks, however, of sending follow-up details, including her fully executed business plan, to discover a downside to mass marketing your company profile - it seemed that every single response was from a middleman requiring fees ranging from $5000 to $100,000

While exercising discretion, it’s not a bad idea to have some presence for your company where talent hungry corporate executives turn to find suppliers - where creative investors go on fishing expeditions to find a pearl of a start-up company, and where surfing clients can learn about your services.

More to Say

You’ve introduced your company and the Senior Vice President of a major corporation wants more information.  “What exactly will your product or service do for me?” he asks.  Now it’s time to describe your products and services in more depth; or explain in detail how your team manages a contract or the capabilities of your facilities. When you send out a complete kit, you should have a separate, well-organized page for each of your products and services – as well as your company profile.  Look for tips and advice on presenting your products and services in the Ten Minute Business Profiler Resource Center coming soon.