Can You Define Your Business in One.. Two.. or Even Three Sentences?

Can You Define Your Business in One.. Two.. or Even Three Sentences?

By: Alan Walsh

Recently I asked the owner of an affiliated business to provide a one -to- three sentence statement defining his business.  He responded with about five or six paragraphs of information.  The man’s no dummy, and he’s quite competent at what he does, but he serves to illustrate the plight of many business leaders.  How are you going to “sell” your business to the many parties you must interact with (customers, investors, bankers, etc.) if you can’t clearly and succinctly define it in a brief opening statement?  If you can’t come up with such a statement, then clearly your business strategy needs to be revisited. The two go hand -in- hand.

Most of us are guilty of being too verbose in our communications.  Communicating succinctly is a learned skill.  Listeners and readers rapidly lose interest if we can’t get to the point quickly.

If you have doubts about your defining business statement, sit down with what you have and start playing with it to take out needless verbage and roll together like-statements.  Pare it down until you have clearly defined the purpose of your company in no more than three sentences; preferably fewer.

For example:

Let’s take the example of a business that provides software for home, business, and gaming purposes. Their offerings range from low-cost -to- complex, expensive products. Their product listing might be 100 pages long.

The business statement might read:  ”Provider of diverse software for budget home, home-office productivity, major enterprise,  and gaming applications”.

This brief one-sentence statement defines what they sell and what their products are for.  It informs that they offer a variety of software (“diverse software”). It stresses the positive word “budget” while only alluding to the more “expensive” offerings without using the dreaded “e” word.

Can you come up with a similar statement to define your business?