Company description: writing the paragraph everyone reads first

A company description is the short piece of writing that answers who you are, what you do, and for whom — the paragraph that opens the About page, sits in the second section of a business plan, gets pasted into supplier forms and directory listings, and appears above the fold when someone searches your name. Most companies have four versions of it, all slightly different, none of them good.

The fix is to write one properly and derive the rest. A strong description survives being cut to a sentence and expanded to a page, because the structure is the same at every length: what you do, for whom, what makes you the choice, and enough concrete detail that the reader believes it.

What a company description has to say

• What you actually do, in the words a customer would use. Not "solutions" — the thing itself.
• Who it is for, narrowly enough to exclude someone. A description that fits everyone is read as fitting nobody.
• The problem you handle, stated as your customer experiences it rather than as your industry names it.
• What distinguishes you: a capability, a focus, a way of working — one claim, supported.
• Proof: years in business, number of customers, a named client if you may, a certification if it matters in your sector.
• Where you operate, if geography affects who can buy from you.
• The legal facts where the context demands them — registered name, company number, registered address — for plans, tenders and directories.

The most common failure is abstraction. "We deliver innovative solutions that empower businesses to achieve their goals" describes every company that has ever existed. Replace the abstractions with the specific: what, for whom, where, since when. Specificity is what makes a description believable and, incidentally, what makes it findable in search.

Writing it in one sitting

1. Write the one-sentence version first: "We do X for Y." If that sentence is hard, the difficulty is in the business, not the writing.
2. Add the customer's problem in a sentence, in their words. Listen to how customers describe it on a call rather than how your industry describes it.
3. Add your distinguishing claim, one only, and immediately support it with something checkable.
4. Add proof: how long, how many, who — whatever you can say without exaggeration.
5. Read it aloud. Delete every word you would not say to someone at a table.
6. Cut it to a single sentence for directories and forms, and expand it to a page for the business plan. Same spine, three lengths.
7. Put the short version somewhere shared so everyone uses the same one, and review it whenever what you sell changes.

The same description, four places

The business plan version can be a page and should include the legal and structural facts a lender needs. The website version is two or three short paragraphs, written for a visitor deciding whether to keep reading — and it is the one that also has to satisfy a search engine, which means the words a customer would type belong in it naturally. The directory and supplier-form version is a sentence, so lead with what you do and where. The proposal version is the website one with the client's problem substituted in. All four should be recognisably the same company.

Ettex Sites is where the public version lives: a builder with sections, a live canvas, templates and one-click publishing on your own domain, so the About page is something you edit in an afternoon rather than something you file a ticket for — and the forms on the page feed the same suite where your invoices and CRM already sit. The master version and its variants belong in Ettex Docs, with comments when a colleague disagrees with a claim and version history so last year's wording is recoverable. If the description carries claims a client will rely on, the proposal it opens can be signed through Ettex Signature.

The boundary: Ettex has no copywriting service and no AI that will write the description for you, and publishing a page does not by itself get you found — search visibility comes from the content and the links, not from the builder. What Ettex gives you is a site you can edit yourself and a document that keeps the canonical wording in one place.

Signs your description needs rewriting

• It could be pasted onto a competitor's site with no edits.
• It leads with your values rather than with what you sell.
• Nobody in the company can recite the first sentence, which means everyone improvises a different one.
• It names a service you stopped offering, or omits the one that now pays the bills.
• It contains a superlative you cannot support — "leading", "best-in-class", "world-class".
• It is written in the third person on the website, where visitors expect to be spoken to directly.

The paragraph rarely lives alone. It becomes the top of the about page in whatever website builder you use, the opening of a bid, and the description search engines quote — so it is worth running an seo checklist over the page it sits on once, rather than rewriting the paragraph again.

A company description is one paragraph doing four jobs. Write the sentence first, make every claim checkable, cut the words you would not say out loud — and keep one master version so the four places agree.