Same as the first impression on a date, presentation in business is also super important. All the more so during the early phases of your business when you are trying to attract those first prospects and customers. Solid presentation lends your business the legitimacy it crucially needs to convince people to turn to your business.

Business Cards

Independent of what the naysayers think, printed business cards are a must for your business. Business cards show that you are serious about your business and they exude an aura of authority when they are handed out.

Try to keep your business’ logo clean and simple and have a colour scheme that is not overly flashy. Less colours are normally better than more. The same applies to titles, which you also want to keep simple.

With the exception of “Founder & CEO”, limit yourself to a single title. Consider “President”, “CEO” (Chief Executive Officer) or “General Manager” as your title. Overly impressive titles normally backfire as they discredit you and your business rather than instilling confidence. The same goes for humorous or overly original titles. My personal preference for incorporated businesses is “President” and “General Manager” for unincorporated businesses.

As to the business cards themselves, you can have them printed in bulk through a service or you can buy some cardstock and print them yourself at home. Another option is to have the cards printed for you at a printshop on a large piece of cardstock and then cut each of the cards yourself which is normally much cheaper.

I actually did precisely that for one of my first businesses. I designed the business cards myself on CorelDraw (Graphic design software which sells permanent licences not only monthly subscriptions), and then brought the file to a local UPS store where they printed many copies on this large pieces of cardstock from which I cut each of the business cards out using an X-Acto knife and a long ruler.

Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, ThePrintShop and Canva are other good graphic design programs.

Email addresses

One of the easiest ways to give your business the appearance of legitimacy is to have a branded email address with your business’ domain. There is a huge difference between sending an email to an “@gmail.com” or “@hotmail.com” email address and “@yourbusiness.com” email address.

Domain names generally only cost around $20 a year and are well worth it. I like using Namecheap to buy mine as is well organized and not too expensive.

With respect to choosing a domain name, try to have it match your business’ name and be as short as possible. Be mindful of your selected domain extension (“.com”, “.ca”, “.net”, etc). Unless you have a high-tech startup, limit yourself to “.com”, “.ca” (or your country’s equivalent), “.co” and potentially “.net”. Other domain extensions unfortunately either look cheap or worse, lead people to believe that they are some sort of virus (e.g. “.io”).

In order to have your branded email work, you need to host the domain name which you purchased. I use Hostpapa, but I used BGOCloud when I was a starting out as it was cheaper (but less reliable). Most hosting plans include several email addresses. That being said, I personally prefer to have my emails hosted through Zoho Mail (~$15 a year) which is on top of the domain name hosting service since I found that this way, less of my emails ended in my recipient’s spam folder.

In terms of the start of your email address, consider the first letter of your first name followed by your last name or alternatively simply “info”. If you want to have both options, pick one and then make the second option an email alias which just means that the same email account can go by several different email addresses. Also keep in mind that you want to limit hyphens in your email address and try to keep them as short as possible.

Fonts and Typography

The layout and look of your documentation must also be worked on to instill confidence. Thankfully, with common word processing tools such as Microsoft Word, you really don’t need to do too much to make your documents look beautiful and come across as being extremely professional. Typography for Lawyers by Matthew Butterick or his freely available online book Practical Typography are both fantastic guides on how to make your documents look great. He explains the best practices for margins, font selection (he goes a little too hard on this point), font size and spacing, just to mention a few, to give you tried-and-tested techniques to bring your documents to the next level. Some of his fonts are also quite excellent, Concourse of Century Supra being two examples.

But don’t think that you need to purchase fonts in order to have your documents look very impressive. Times New Roman, Giorgia, Arial and Trebuchet are all very good fonts, and these are standard system fonts included with most operating systems.

Consider pairing a serif font, meaning a font with the bars on the end of the different letters, for the body text with a non-serif font, meaning a font without those bars, for the headings. A classic pairing is Times New Roman for the body text and Arial for the headings. If you prefer to limit yourself toa single font, both Georgia and Trebuchet look quite nice on their own with their headings simply being in bold.

Consider widening the page margins and decreasing the font size, also consider setting the spacing to 14 or 15 points to let your text breathe a bit more.

Best of luck putting some of these tricks into practice.