Company Profile Template for Deal Calls

What this is for

Pre-call profiles are produced under time pressure and vary enormously depending on who wrote them. A fixed structure means the team knows where to look, and the person producing it knows when they are finished.

When to use it

The structure

Header, four lines. Legal name and trading name. Sector and sub-sector against your taxonomy. Headquarters and main operating locations. Ownership status.

What the business does, two or three sentences. In plain terms. What it sells, to whom, how it makes money. Written so someone outside the sector understands it.

Scale. Latest available revenue and employee count, each with the source and the date. If the figure is old, say so.

Ownership and capital history. Current owners. Funding rounds or transactions, with dates and investors. Where a source disagrees with another, note it rather than picking one.

People. Named leadership relevant to the conversation, with tenure. Recent changes flagged, because a new CFO is often the reason a conversation is timely.

Recent events. Anything in the last twelve months worth knowing: transactions, leadership moves, filings, expansion, notable news. Factual, dated and sourced.

Relationship history. Every prior touchpoint your firm has had, from the CRM. Who spoke to whom, when, and what came of it. This is the section most often missing and the one most likely to cause embarrassment.

Open questions. What could not be established. An honest gap is more useful than a confident guess.

Where it usually goes wrong

Length. Four pages of everything findable is not a profile. If it does not fit a page, the filtering has not been done.

No sources or dates. A revenue figure without a year is unusable, and the reader cannot tell what to trust.

Filling gaps with inference. If ownership is unclear, say it is unclear. Estimates presented as facts get repeated in a meeting.

Skipping the relationship history. Walking into a call unaware that a colleague spoke to them last year is worse than having no profile.

What good looks like

It fits on one page. Every figure carries a source and a date. The reader knows what is not known. Somebody who has never seen the company can hold a sensible conversation after five minutes with it.

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