Before the company exists

There are moments when a company looks more defined in its communication than it is in its internal organization. The company profile presents a business with a clear direction, recognizable competences and well-drawn areas of activity. Inside, meanwhile, some responsibilities are still settling, the management team is taking shape and growth calls for continuous adjustment.

The company exists, of course. It works, wins customers, invests. But the company it is becoming often finds its first full expression in the documents it introduces itself with, while the structure needed to sustain it is still being built.

A Direction to be Shared

The owner’s vision is often very precise. It shows in the opportunities taken, in the investments, in the people chosen, in the contracts turned down. Whoever leads the business knows the reasons behind those decisions and the path that holds them together.

Making it explicit, however, calls for further work. For someone who has built the business through experience, some things are so self-evident they hardly seem worth explaining. Others change as the company grows, before there is time to stop and define them. When growth is especially rapid, the structure finds itself chasing needs that have already become routine.

As long as people work closely alongside the owner, much is passed on through direct conversation. As new figures arrive and responsibilities become more articulated, it grows more important to be able to share the criteria as well: where the company wants to get to, which priorities guide the work, what contribution is expected from each function.

For someone who has built the business through experience, some things are so self-evident they hardly seem worth explaining.

The questions a Company Profile asks

Communication work meets these matters in a very concrete way. Preparing a company profile means choosing how to describe the business to the people it addresses. Doing so calls for answers that ownership and management can both recognize as their own.

Which activities define the company today? Which competences does it already express and which is it developing? How do the different areas connect? Which responsibilities are defined? Which objectives give the path its direction?

Vision and mission, too, take on meaning when they are borne out by actual choices. Declaring where the business is to be taken means distinguishing what has already been built from what is still to be worked on. Describing the organization means engaging with how people work now and how they will need to be able to work in future.

The need to present itself to the outside world creates an occasion to address questions that daily work tends to leave implicit.

The need to present itself to the outside world creates an occasion to address questions that daily work tends to leave implicit.

The Time it takes to find the Words

The answers rarely all arrive in a single meeting. Some emerge while discussing a project, others while reviewing a draft, others again after a first formulation has revealed an ambiguity.

Putting a vision in writing makes it possible to look at it from a certain distance. The owner recognizes their own thinking in it, sharpens a priority, corrects a passage. Management can work through wording that, until then, each person had been interpreting differently. The text becomes something to work on together.

The agency contributes the questions, the listening and the ability to give coherent form to what emerges. Knowledge of the company, built up over time, helps in judging which aspects need further work and which have already been answered in practice. The decisions remain with ownership and management; the discussion required to communicate them can make them more precise and easier to share.

It is a path that can accompany the growth of a business over a long period. Communication is updated along with the company and, at every stage, calls for checking again that the words still match the reality.

The clarity reached in presenting itself also gives a reference point to the people who have to help bring that direction about.

A description that comes back inside

A company profile is written to present the company to customers, partners and others. The work done to build it, however, turns out to be useful internally as well: in bringing new people on board, in discussion between functions, in sharing objectives.

The clarity reached in presenting itself also gives a reference point to the people who have to help bring that direction about. It does not resolve organizational difficulties on its own, but it makes the path more visible and easier to discuss.

It is in this sense that communication can arrive first: it gives a shareable form to the company being worked toward. Growth continues through the decisions, the people and the investments that will let that form find full correspondence in reality.

It often falls to communication to give a first form to the company being built. Building it belongs to ownership and management.