Step 1: Check the Limitations
Check with whoever is asking for the bio, and ask if there are limits for word-count or character count. You don’t want to hand in your two-page masterpiece after hours of effort only to find out the bios need to be able to fit in a single Twitter post.Step 2: Make a List
There are basically three questions any good bio must answer. Usually, a bio ends up dedicating a single sentence to answering each question. A good place to start writing your bio is to make a simple, short list of this information for each question:- Who Are You? This generally includes your name, and your relevant title/position. If your bio is for a start-up business, note that your day-job title may or may not be relevant to this question (though it might fit into one of the next two questions).
- Are You Qualified? What qualifications do you have relevant to your title/position (or perhaps aspiring title/position)? This is a great place for relevant education and experience in the field, or even a related field. Relevance is the key word for this question. We aren’t trying to list every qualification and certificate you’ve earned in your lifetime, just the 1-3 most relevant to the audience of the bio.
- What Makes You Different? This is a chance to show some personality and differentiate yourself from others in your field. It’s a great place to showcase hobbies, indirectly-related experiences (particularly military service if it’s not in one of the first two sections), your family, pets, or anything else that you want to be part of your personal branding as an individual.
- Who Are You? Ryan Smith, CEO of EnTRIPreneur Airlines, Retired Veteran.
- Qualifications? 22 years and 5,000 hours flying the C-130, Licensed/Certified Commercial Pilot (for single and multi-engine), Masters in Business Administration from Colorado State University
- Differences? Loves travel, snorkeling, scuba diving, pizza, Denver Broncos
Step 3: Trim To Relevant Data Points
Once you have a list, you can narrow that list down to what you consider the most important highlights for the audience. Ask yourself what action you want someone to take or what you want them to think about you after they read your bio. Try and curate your list as best you can to support that goal and stick to relevant datapoints. You generally want 1-3 items per question to fit in a standard 75-word/3-ish-sentence/400-character bio. Longer bios might fit twice as many items, or even dedicate an entire paragraph or two to each item.A note on military service: For some things you might get asked to do a bio for, it’s important to consider who else is going to be included. For instance, for a Bunker Labs project, every bio we feature probably belongs to a Veteran or military spouse. Because of this, we probably don’t want to just say “Veteran” or “retired Veteran” because it’s just too vague.
Be specific
If you’re a Marine combat Veteran, say so! If you received a medal for heroism (Medal of Honor, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, or a service cross), mention it! Feel free to include your specific job title or duty stations if you think they’re interesting or otherwise relevant. If what you did in the service at all overlaps with your business, get super specific, especially if you’re struggling to find relevant items to list. I know we Veterans don’t like to talk up our service, but this is the time for it. However, if you have a lot of items on your list, you need to get pretty clinical about cutting the list down to just a few. For example, Ryan’s business is an airline, but he won’t be flying C-130s, it’s an executive travel service that uses private jets, so experience with the C-130 specifically isn’t so relevant to the audience. Similarly, the differences list has three hobbies that are all sort of related (travel, snorkeling, and scuba diving), so let’s just pick scuba-diving, which might be his favorite of the three. And let’s ditch pizza, too, since it’s a little generic. So now Ryan’s list looks like this:- Who Are You? Ryan Smith, CEO of EnTRIPreneur Airlines, Retired Naval Aviator (24 years)
- Qualifications? Licensed/Certified Commercial Pilot (for single and multi-engine), Masters in Business Administration from Colorado State University
- Differences? Loves scuba diving, Denver Broncos
Step 4: Making Sentences
So now that we have our list of relevant data points, we’re going to group them into sentences. Generally, we just want to make a sentence that answers each of the three original questions. So, one sentence will answer “Who Are You?” the next will answer “What are your Qualifications?” and the third will answer “What Makes You Different?”, typically in that order. In the writing, you might decide one piece of information fits better in another section; that’s fine! Feel free to shuffle and move things around if necessary.Important Note: Bios are always written in the third person, which means you use your own name, or he/she/they pronouns when referring to yourself as appropriate. The words “I” or “me” should never appear in a bio.
- Who Are You? So, with the trimmed list I had in Step 2, I might try something like: “A Retired Naval Aviator of 24 years, Ryan Smith is now the CEO of EnTRIPreneur Airlines, an executive travel service.”
- Qualifications? And my second sentence might be something like: “Ryan earned his Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Colorado State University, and maintains a Commercial Pilot’s License for single and multi-engine aircraft.”
- Differences? My final sentence(s) might be: “When Ryan isn’t cheering on his Denver Broncos, he’s mapping out his next scuba diving trip! His next stop is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.”
A note on adding humor: Some people want their bio to be funny. This goes wrong far more often than it goes right. Our best advice: avoid adding humor to your bio.