There's a way of writing the "about us" page that everyone has copied from everyone else. It opens with the founding year, moves through the mission and values, mentions steady growth, and ends on the young, dynamic team.
It's the least-read page on any website — and yet one of the most visited, a curious combination. People go there because they want to decide whether they trust you. They leave because they found nothing to help them decide that.
The story is told from the wrong side
That page tells the company's story: we founded it, we grew, we invested in quality. The company is the hero.
Except whoever's reading isn't interested in your journey. They have a problem, and they're trying to work out whether it's worth calling you. The story that holds them is their own — someone like them, with the same problem, who solved it — and the company enters it as the one who helped, not the one who shines.
It's a small inversion, and it changes everything. The same information, told from the customer's side, stops being self-promotion and starts being useful.
Three things, and you already have a story
No technique is required. A story works when it has three things, and it fails whenever one is missing.
Someone with a specific problem. Not "a customer in the industrial sector", but "a four-person workshop that kept losing orders because nobody could answer the phone while working".
A genuine difficulty along the way. It's the part everyone cuts, and it's the part that makes people believe you. If the story is "they came to us and everything went smoothly", it isn't a story, it's an advert. What was hard, what was tried and didn't work, what changed halfway through.
A change that's noticeable. What's different now, in terms an outsider can understand. Not "we improved operational efficiency": "they stopped missing calls and started replying the same day".
What to do with the founding year
None of this means the company's own history doesn't matter. It does — just for different reasons than the ones that usually get it written down.
Having been around for fourteen years is proof you won't vanish halfway through a project. Having started out doing something else explains why you know something others don't. Having weathered a crisis says something about how you work.
Write that, with the dates and with what genuinely happened. What's worthless is the institutional version, with no facts, where the company was born "with the vision of revolutionising the industry".
Where the story lives
It doesn't live on just one page. A brand story that works shows up in three places at once: on the about page, in portfolio case studies — which are complete stories, with a problem, a difficulty and a change — and in sales conversations, when someone asks "have you done this for someone like us before?"
If the answer to that question is always the same, told the same way, it's because the story is already built. If it's improvised every time, it isn't yet.
It's worth looking at your portfolio with this in mind. Most portfolios show the polished result and skip the problem — and it's the problem that makes the next customer recognise themselves.
And what if there's no story at all?
There always is one. What's usually missing is permission to tell it without varnishing it.
Almost every small business has a concrete reason for existing — someone who got tired of working for somebody else, a problem nobody in the area was solving, an order that turned up by chance and gave rise to everything else. That version is always more interesting than the one people assume sounds better written down.
If you want help finding it and putting it into words, that's copywriting; if the question runs deeper than the text, that's branding.
Does your "about" page actually say anything?
Tell us how the company started and what you usually say when a customer asks if you've done this for someone like them. That's usually where the copy comes from.