A Formula for Writing a Traditional Business Profile
By: Gerald Grow
Tags: Writing, Writing Tips

Most publications are defined by a recurring set of article formulas

Formulas are useful both to readers and writers. Readers recognize formulas, adapt their reading methods to them, and use the parts of the formula in comprehending and remembering what is read.



Writers use formulas to organize stories — and so do not have to invent a new structure with every article. Working backward from what the formula calls for, the writer can thi nk upthe interview questions needed to elicit the kind of information necessary to fulfill the formula’s demands.



Editors may insist that they want you to be original. But nearly every publication uses a recurring set of article formulas that embody the publication’s purpose, subject matter, and relationship to its audience.

The how-to article, the self-help article, the inspirational article, the travel article, the eccentric personal experience, the book review, the business profile, and others codify a set of methods that authors and editors have devised to reach a particular set of readers. Readers, in turn, learn how to read material expressed through these formulas and build expertise in decoding such articles.

Readers don’t look at recurring article types as boring. They find them helpful, understandable, familiar, even comforting. They look forward to articles that they know how to read. So you have to write them.

There’s another reason to start with a formulaic outline as you begin a new article: It helps you be more creative.

What? — This is subtle, but when you have a map of where you are going, you can begin to discover things that are outside the map, things that are new, unusual, interesting. Without a map showing you what is usual, you can’t know what’s unusual. Indeed, if you don’t have some kind of map, you can’t even get lost!

Story formulas give you that map. They are ways of outlining articles and organizing your approach to writing that you can use to complete all the easy, straightforward parts. That leaves your curious, creative mind more free to notice when you need to go off the trail and explore something unexpected.

Story formulas help you develop the best of both worlds — a well-structured piece of writing and moments of unanticipated creative insight that arose when you thought you were headed somewhere else.

The Formula

The formula depicted in Figure 1 will help you write a profile of a business person, for a publication with an audience of business people. The object of this kind of profile is to present not trends or statistics or analysis but a person who is one of the moving forces behind the business.

Figure 1. The Business Profile Formula

1. Business Opening

Begin with the person. Your opening should give an immediate sense of the presence of that person, like the opening shot of a documentary. But this is an article about a person in business, so do not start with the subject’s past or hobbies or home or philosophy or what she had for breakfast; start with the subject firmly located where she does business. Show her at her desk, in her car talking on the cell phone, leaning over a counter to help a customer, inspecting the structural steel of a new building — or whatever she does.

2. Status Statement

A “status statement” follows immediately after the business opening. In some respects, the status statement is the most important part of the article, because it establishes, for the readers, why they should continue reading about this person. (In other uses, the status statement may be known as a “nut graf,” “billboard,” or “justifier.”)

The status statement tells, in terms that business readers can understand, what positions the subject holds, how much money he has made, what success he has achieved, or some other similar way to indicate how important he is — where he stands in relation to other businesses in the area. Business readers want substantial information, they can handle facts and figures, and they know what it means to run a business.



Example (occurring immediately after the opening):

“He has increased sales tenfold — from $100,000 in 2016 to $10 million and counting today — making Hurricane Shutters one of the biggest manufacturers of this custom window treatment in Florida.”

3. Subject in Business Environment

In the next section — the longest of the article — you describe how the subject handles herself inside the firm.



The ideal way to write this section, and the hardest, is to observe the subject at work for a day. Show what kind of person she is and what she does well on the job. If this is not possible, use quotes from colleagues that characterize the subject’s way of going about business. This is the place to use revealing anecdotes, good description, scenes and dialogue that reveal the nature of the person who is the subject of your article.

Readers will want to know more than what this person does well. They will also want to know about this person’s struggles, difficulties, failures, lawsuits, criminal charges, breakdowns, bankruptcies, etc. These readers know how hard their own lives were. They will want to know what was hard about this person’s life.



A sample:

“The silver-haired Barnes is known as an exacting taskmaster and an aggressive marketer. During my half-hour in his office, he sent back a sample three times for refinement, each time inspecting it with a laser focus, giving a word of encouragement, and specifying just what needed to be changed. His shelves are lined with reference books on fabric, metallurgy, circuitry, and other components of his products. A separate computer is always open to a search of some technical requirement. Yet he never loses sight of the customer, and behind the unending decisions in design and manufacturing and the occasional outbursts of impatience, you hear him prompting employees to keep asking why anyone would be glad they spent money on this product.”

4. Personal History Loop

The Personal History Loop provides a place to sketch the subject’s past and make the transition to talking about his personal life. The Loop starts from the present (you were just describing how the subject does business now) and makes a leap to the distant past — often to birth: “Born in 1938 in Cincinatti, Ohio, he was raised around the automobile industry.”



The loop may start from some other spot from which we can learn important things about his personality: early childhood, high school, college, early career.

But once you choose a starting point, proceed from there to the present. Give highlights of the subject’s life, in chronological order, leading up to and ending again in the present. He did this, then this, then this.



This structure organizes the early biography into a clear-cut subsection that starts with a point in the subject’s past, moves forward through important events, then returns to the same time frame the article was in before the loop began. The return to the present makes the Personal History Loop a satisfyingly self-contained subsection of the overall article.

5. Subject in Home Environment

By means of the personal history loop, you move from the “now” of the business environment to the “now” of the home environment. Now you can tell about your subject’s personal life.



Ideally, you should go home with your subject, describe where she lives, the car she drives, the decor. Treat the home as a mirror of your subject’s personality; use it to show more deeply who she is. This is the place to tell about spouses, children, pets, grandchildren, divorces, therapies, anxieties, hobbies, fitness, gardening. This is also the place to tell about her civic involvements, church activities and philanthropic positions and give a glimpse of her personal philosophy (in contrast to her business philosophy, which presumably you covered earlier).



If you can’t go home with her, ask her about her home and family life. Look for her values and commitments. Ask her colleagues for insights into this. Is she an outgoing activist and frequenter of a tennis club? Or does she spend her evenings reading devotional literature and doing volunteer work through the church? These things matter; they give you more depth about the business person described in the first part of the article.

6. Future Glimpse

The end of the “personal” section is a natural place to offer a glimpse of your subject’s plans. It signals a change from the article’s emphasis on the present tense. It makes a good transition to the ending. Unless your subject is planning major changes, keep the future glimpse down to a few lines and let it emerge as the natural next step in the article.



In nearly all cases, this section will be short and upbeat. It contains your subject’s answer to questions like: “What are your plans for the future?”

7. The Closing Quote

Feature articles need a definite ending. Throughout the research and interviews, you should listen for possible endings. The best ending for the business profile is a quote from the subject herself that sums up, in a fresh way, the essence of the person we have been reading about. A quote by someone else about the subject can also work. If you have to write the ending yourself, that might mean you forgot to listen for it as you carried out your research.



That kind of ending — a few words that sum the person up — is one of places your readers can reach when you write the article using a well constructed formula.