How to write your own About page without sounding like a robot.

Read enough small-business About pages and you can tell within seconds whether the owner wrote it, or handed it to somebody else (lately, a chatbot nobody checked) and never looked back.

The tell is always the same. It reads like it was translated from English into a slightly stiffer language and then back.

"Founded in 2015, we are a full-service provider dedicated to delivering exceptional experiences and building lasting relationships with our valued clients."

Nobody has ever said that sentence out loud. Nobody has ever read it and thought ah, these are my people. And yet a lot of About pages say a version of it in the first paragraph.

Here's how to not do that.

Stop trying to sound like a company

The whole reason About pages go bad is that the moment somebody sits down to write one, they slip into a voice that isn't theirs. They start writing the way they think a business is supposed to sound. Formal. Third-person. A little bit corporate. Passive verbs everywhere.

The problem: you're a small business. The person reading this page clicked because they want to know if you specifically are somebody they'd hand money to. They already know the company exists — they're on your site. What they don't know is whether there's a real human behind it who's going to answer the phone and do the work.

If you write it like a Fortune 500 annual report, you've hidden the one thing they came looking for.

Write in first person. "I started this in 2015 because…" not "The company was founded in 2015 with a mission to…" The first version tells me who you are. The second one tells me you copied a template.

Answer the actual questions

People land on About pages with a very short list of things they want to know. It's not "our mission, vision, and core values." It's more like:

• Who are you?
• Why do you do this?
• Have you done it long enough that I don't have to worry?
• Do you seem like somebody I'd want to deal with?

That's it. Answer those four questions in order, in your own words, and you have an About page.

Notice what's not on that list. Your company's "story" isn't on it. Your six-point value proposition isn't on it. The stock photo of a diverse team pointing at a laptop isn't on it. Nobody cares.

Say why, specifically

The "why do you do this" answer is where most About pages go completely inert. They say things like "we're passionate about quality" and "we believe in doing things the right way." Which — I hope so? That's the floor, not the ceiling.

Passion for quality is not a differentiator. It's the assumption. When you tell me you're passionate about quality, I hear that you couldn't think of anything more specific to say.

Get specific instead. Say the real thing. (Finding that specific thing is most of what brand strategy is for.) A few made-up examples of the kind of sentence I mean:

"I got tired of watching contractors quote by feel and then argue about the invoice later, so now I write everything down before I start."

"I do this because my mom ran a bakery on a shoestring for twenty years and I saw what it looked like when nobody would give her the time of day."

"I only take on four websites a quarter because I did the math on how long a good one takes, and if I take a fifth one somebody gets the leftovers."

Every one of those tells me something the next contractor's About page doesn't. They give me a reason to remember you.

Include one thing you don't do

This is the single biggest thing you can add, and almost nobody does it.

Somewhere on your About page, name a kind of work you turn down. Not to brag. To draw a line so the reader knows where they stand. A few more made-up examples:

"I don't do e-commerce sites — if that's what you need, I'll refer you to somebody who's actually good at it."

"I don't take rush jobs anymore. I did for years. It always ended badly for both of us."

"I don't work with restaurants. Long story."

Two things happen when you write a sentence like that. The wrong-fit people self-select out and stop wasting your intake time. And the right-fit people — the ones you would've said yes to anyway — lean in, because you've just proven you're a real person with real opinions and not a lead-form-with-a-face.

Keep the credentials, dump the adjectives

Say how long you've been doing it. Say where you learned. Say who you've worked with, if you can name them. Say what you've built.

Those are the credentials. They're worth including.

What's not worth including: the pile of adjectives most About pages wrap around them. "Innovative." "Cutting-edge." "World-class." "Best-in-class." Every one of those words has been used so many times in so many marketing sentences that the reader's eyes now skip over them like ad banners. They add zero information and cost you a little bit of trust every time.

Say what you did. Let the reader decide if it's world-class.

Read it out loud before you publish it

This is the whole test.

Sit down at your desk, pull up the draft, and read it out loud like you're reading it to a customer sitting across from you in a truck. If you get to a sentence that would make you feel weird to say out loud — because it sounds like an ad, or a resume, or a mission statement — cut it. Not fix it. Cut it.

Whatever's left is your About page.

It'll probably be shorter than you expected. That's fine. A short honest About page beats a long polished one every time, and the person on the other end of it is going to feel the difference before they can explain why.

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If your current About page reads like it was written for a company ten times your size, that's usually a symptom of a bigger positioning problem. Tell me what your business actually does and I'll tell you what your site is missing.