Corporate Stationery That Your Small Business Needs

If you are just starting out in business, why would you need to spend money on high-quality corporate stationery? Don't you have better things to worry about and spend your limited resources on?

There's a great story about Garibaldi, the modern day liberator of Italy and this story will tell you something important. One day Garibaldi was facing a huge governmental army which was coming to crush his much smaller army. He was forced up into the mountains. What he didn't know was that the governmental army was demoralized and not terribly eager to fight him in the first place but of course he had to assume that they were.

What Garibaldi did was to place some cannon at one end of a mountain ridge and some cannon at the other end. He let his artillerists do some practice firing, as though they were testing their range.

To the opposing army, it looked like Garibaldi's army was so large that it stretched from one end of the mountain ridge to the other. They let their imaginations take over, and they concluded that his army was huge, well-equipped, and well dug in along an entire mountain ridge. They retreated and Garibaldi was able to continue building his small army into a large one. Eventually he succeeded completely.

And so that's why your fledgling business needs top quality stationery!

(....You do see the connection, don't you?)

To make sure that others think you are serious.

To make sure others think you are established and prepared to do business.

To make sure any competitors understand that you are dug in and ready to do battle!

All that from some stationery? Of course! Your letterhead says a lot. As one very well-known example, look at the letterhead of a law firm: it's all business. It lists names, addresses, phone numbers, overseas fax numbers, and perhaps the names of a few key partners. Black print on white paper. And nothing else. There are no purple polka dots or smiley faces on a letterhead like that.

To make that kind of an impression, you want a serious letterhead with no frills and you want it on high-quality paper.

In what case might you want to deviate from this approach?

If you are a business which deals in the creative crafts, you may want to showcase your skills with a design of some sort. But you have to be careful. Such a design would work best if it is sort of low-key and doesn't dominate the entire page. It ought to be something that would look appropriate no matter what the subject of your letter: good news or bad. It needs to be a design that stands the test of time.

Your stationery goes into offices and it sends a separate message other than the message which you write. Be sure that your stationery sets the right tone and you will increase the odds that you are taken seriously right from the start.