Are you a business owner who wants to share your expertise but is unsure of how to stand out in a crowded marketplace? Maybe you want to write a book or create a course but there’s still the matter of convincing people of why they should trust you. This is where a professional bio comes in.
When you are building a personal brand, every word you use matters. In this article, we’ll break down the parts of a professional bio, walk through the steps of creating one, and share some short bio examples.
This guide for writing a professional bio includes:
What is a professional bio?
Your professional bio is a short, curated snapshot of your education, accomplishments, and career highlights. Similar to an author bio, it gives background information on why you are qualified to do what you do, but unlike an author bio that focuses only on a book, a professional bio is a broader take on who you are as a business owner and your brand.
The best professional bios are streamlined, highly focused, and targeted to your audience. They condense all of your years of experience and knowledge into a bite-sized snippet that you can share across various mass media outlets like your website, podcasts, social media, television interviews, and speaking engagements.
Creating a short bio that resonates with readers and doesn’t sound like a boring list of accomplishments may sound like a tall order, but it’s doable with the right template.
How do you write a professional bio?
The challenge that many career professionals face when trying to write a short bio is that there’s so much information to sift through. What do you include? What do you leave out? When do you use generalities? When do you get specific?
Here are some basic steps for writing a professional bio.
Gather the necessary information. Prewriting is a great way to pull everything together.
- Start with your personal brand. Think specifically about your current offer and the products and services that you sell. Write those down.
- Define your audience. As a business owner, you likely have an avatar or multiple avatars (marketing personas) of your ideal customer. Before writing your professional bio, you’ll need to know who will be reading it.
- Know your why. Where are you in your career currently? Why is now the time to define your personal brand? Knowing this will help you develop the tone for your professional bio. You don’t want your bio to be static and boring. You want it to have personality, and knowing your why will help you create an engaging one.
In this article, we’re focusing on short bios, and one of the best ways to get to a short bio is to start with a longer one. It’s easier to subtract from a short one than to try to make a short bio longer. You’ll need different bio lengths for different purposes, and starting with the longest and narrowing it down to the shortest will help make the process more efficient.
Here’s how to build your main bio.
There are several ways to write a professional bio, but one of the easiest is to use the 5-paragraph structure that's common in personal essays: introduction, body, and conclusion.
Writing it in the third person is standard and often viewed as more formal and professional, but some opt for the first person which has a more casual feel.
- Introduction (1 paragraph) – This opening paragraph sets the stage for the rest of the bio. You can start from your childhood if it’s relevant or whatever point on the timeline when your career focus began to take shape. Some even begin with their current title and position and move on from there. Wherever you start, you want this paragraph to catch everyone up to where you are now so you can tell them where you’re going.
- Body (3 paragraphs) – Your body paragraphs are where you “flesh out” your history. It’s your story. This is where you talk about your education, your accomplishments, and the whys that motivate you to do what you do.
- Conclusion (1 paragraph) – This is where you tell your reader where you are going—your vision for your brand and the people that you serve.
Once you’ve written your full bio (up to 400 words, give or take), you’ll want to cut it to about 200 words to create the shorter version. This is where you go from specifics to generalities. For example, in a longer bio, you might mention the subject of your dissertation as it relates to your current career path, but in the shorter bio, it would suffice to say you received a Ph.D. and from where.
5 short bio examples
Below I’ve shared 5 short bio examples from business owners who've put in the work to create outstanding personal brands. Some are solopreneurs whose personal and company brands are the same, while others head up large companies and have chosen to separate their personal brand from the company's.
The first example from Whitney Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors shows her full bio (pulled from her LinkedIn profile). Underneath you’ll find the shortened version she displays on her website. I found even shorter versions on her YouTube and Twitter (X) pages. This is a good example of how to take a longer bio and shorten it.
1. Whitney Johnson
Area of expertise or Industry: Leadership training
Products / Services: Coaching, public speaking, books, workshops
Full bio (source)
Word count – 372
Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business.
A Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author, Whitney was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021). She is a world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning. She has 1.7 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020. Her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than one million times, and her LinkedIn Lives have more than 1 million cumulative views. In 2017, she was selected from more than 17,000 candidates for the initial cohort of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, and was named as the #1 Talent Coach.
Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, as well as the author of the WSJ bestselling Smart Growth, Build an A Team, a Financial Times Book of the Month, and the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself. In these books, she codifies the S Curve of Learning and the Seven Accelerants of Personal Disruption, both of which operationalize disruption theory by applying it to the individual. Integral to her work is the weekly Disrupt Yourself Podcast which has millions of downloads. Guests have included Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stephen M.R. Covey.
Johnson was the cofounder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, through which they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for South Korea’s Coupang, currently valued at more than $25 billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising and the development of the fund’s strategy.
A former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, Johnson applies her understanding of momentum and growth in stocks to people. She was an Institutional Investor–ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years, rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker. As an equity analyst, stocks under coverage included America Movil (NYSE: AMX), Televisa (NYSE: TV) and Telmex (NYSE: TMX), which accounted for roughly 40% of Mexico's market capitalization.
She is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, Virginia, where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.
Short bio (source)
Word count – 188
Whitney Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Disruption Advisors, is a world-class coach globally recognized thought leader, author, keynote speaker, and consultant helping organizations operationalize a high-growth mindset in their leaders and teams.
Whitney is the WSJ, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press, 2022). She shares her passion for personal disruption, helping individuals transform their lives, careers, teams, and companies through her keynote addresses; her popular podcast Disrupt Yourself; lectures at Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning; the award-winning books How to Build an A Team, Disrupt Yourself, and Dare, Dream, Do; and frequent article contributions to the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.
Whitney is ranked a top talent coach by Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the top 10 leading business thinkers in the world, and named Inc.’s 200 Female Founders of 2023. She is co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen, and a former award-winning stock analyst on Wall Street, Whitney Johnson now applies her understanding of momentum and growth in stocks to people.
2. Tiffany Dufu
Area of expertise or industry: Peer coaching
Products / Services: books, public speaking
Short Bio (source)
Word count: 203
Tiffany Dufu is founder of The Cru, a peer-coaching tech company acquired by Luminary in 2023. Their algorithm matches circles of women who collaborate to meet their personal and professional goals. She’s also the author of the bestselling book Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less. According to foreword contributor Gloria Steinem, Drop the Ball is “important, path-breaking, intimate and brave.”
Named to Entrepreneur's 100 Powerful Women and Fast Company’s League of Extraordinary Women, Tiffany has raised nearly $20 million toward the cause of women and girls. She is a frequent speaker on women’s leadership and has presented at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit, MAKERS and TEDWomen. She was a launch team member to Lean In and was Chief Leadership Officer to Levo, one of the fastest growing millennial professional networks. Prior to that, Tiffany served as President of The White House Project, as a Major Gifts Officer at Simmons University, and as Associate Director of Development at Seattle Girls’ School.
Tiffany is a member of Women’s Forum New York, Delta Sigma Theta, Sorority, Inc. and is a Lifetime Girl Scout. She serves on the board of Simmons University and lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
3. Chris Do
Area of expertise or industry: Brand design
Products / Services: public speaking, courses, workshops
Short Bio (source)
Word count: 123
First-person example
As the Founder and CEO of The Futur, I have over 27 years of experience in brand design, strategy, and consultancy, working with clients such as Microsoft, Sony, Nike, and Starbucks. I am passionate about helping people realize their value and communicate it to others, whether through design, content, education, or coaching.
I am also a sought-after public speaker and mentor, delivering keynote speeches, workshops, and courses at various events, conferences, and organizations around the world. I share my insights and expertise on topics such as branding, business, creativity, and social media marketing, reaching millions of people through my YouTube channel, podcast, and online platform. My mission is to empower the next generation of creative entrepreneurs and leaders to achieve their full potential.
4. Andrew Huberman, Ph.D
Area of expertise or industry: neuroscience
Products / Services: public speaking
Short Bio (source)
Word count: 228
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology, and by courtesy, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning.
Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, given to the scientist making the most significant discoveries in the study of vision. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on brain states such as fear and high attention focus and developing rapid and effective tools for mitigating stress and improving sleep and other physiological metrics.
Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover and other top media outlets.
In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab podcast. The podcast is frequently ranked in the top 10 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked #1 in the categories of Science, Education, and Health & Fitness.
Alongside hosting the Huberman Lab podcast, Andrew Huberman is the co-founder of Scicomm Media, and actively invests in and advises a handful of businesses.
5. Amy Porterfield
Area of expertise or industry: entrepreneurship
Products / Services: public speaking, book, courses
Short Bio (source)
Word count: 204
First-person example
I help entrepreneurs build businesses online. My areas of expertise include how to start and grow an email list, how to create digital courses and how to promote and sell courses online using webinars.
About My Podcast, Online Marketing Made Easy
How do I start an online business? Grow my email list to thousands of subscribers? Sell more and grow faster? These are just some of the big questions that leading online marketing strategist, Amy Porterfield, digs into on the top-ranked Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast.
Featuring insights from A-List online marketing experts (Russell Brunson, Jamie Kern Lima, Rick Mulready, Marie Forleo, etc.) as well as mini marketing masterclasses and step-by-step guides, each episode is designed to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for starting, scaling and automating your online business.
My specialty is getting into the online trenches with you. Thinking about creating an online course? Want to promote with webinars? Need help building your email list? Discover why hundreds of thousands of online business owners turn to me to generate more profits and to make sense of the online marketing space, implement the strategies that really get results, and turn that side hustle into a business that lasts.
Alongside hosting the Huberman Lab podcast, Andrew Huberman is the co-founder of Scicomm Media, and actively invests in and advises a handful of businesses.
Related:
- How to Create a Successful Author Media Kit
- About the Author Pages: Writing a Great One (8 Examples)
Final thoughts
When you are designing your personal brand, how you present yourself to the world will define how the world sees you. A well-written, engaging professional bio will pull newcomers into your world and invite them to stay awhile and look around. A dry, static list of your credentials will do the opposite—push potential followers away.
By using the easy-to-follow guidelines above and learning from the short bio examples shared, you can create a standout professional bio that demands attention.
Are you interested in sharing your expertise with the world as an authorpreneur? Have you given serious thought to writing a book to grow your business? A book makes a great lead magnet to build your audience.
Selfpublishing.com has a team of experts ready to show you how to create a book funnel and start growing your personal brand today!
