Business card specification

This is the one piece on the site that should not be self-printed. Not the perforated kind you pop out of a sheet from your own printer — it is better to turn up without a card than to leave one of those behind, and turning up without a card is already a bad idea. Even a free Vistaprint card with their advertising on the back beats it. Spend the few dollars and have it done properly.

The reason is tactile rather than visual. By some distance, the feel of the card in the person’s hand matters more than the look of it in their eye. So the sheet below is a specification to hand a printer or a designer, with the card drawn at its true 3.5 × 2 inches so you can check the copy fits — it is not artwork to put through a laser printer.

Your name, your license number, your title, your phone number, the address of your office, your fax number for referrals — and nothing else. Legible, neat, informative, in that order.

• Your name. As you introduce yourself. Not a clinic name in place of a person.
• Your license number. It is also what tells the office you are a therapist, which is why the title does not have to.
• Your title. “Community Liaison” unless you have a better one. See below.
• Your phone number. The one that reaches a person during office hours.
• The address of your office. A card with no address reads as somebody without an office.
• Your fax number for referrals. Labelled as being for referrals, so it is not mistaken for a second phone line.

Do not feel the card has to carry a bright logo. Use colour sparingly and with purpose; this is the medical world, and what reads as quality in it is not what reads as quality in the consumer world. If you cannot afford a designer to draw you a logo image, use no image at all — a logotype is enough, and a logotype is nothing more than one typeface you always set your business name in.

The best title to put after your name is Community Liaison. It tells a prospect immediately that you are someone who is there for them, and that your first job is to be a point of connection. If you are also the therapist at the clinic you can say so in conversation; what lasts is the impression of outreach.

The reasoning matters more than the phrase. You are not in that office to sell anything — you are there to build a relationship, so a title that says Sales undermines everything else you do that day. Massage Therapist is not damaging, merely redundant: the license number already says it. Any title that does not work against the relationship is fine.

Check how your state requires a license to be displayed on advertising before you order five hundred of anything. Some want the number, some want a specific abbreviation after your name, and a few want the licensing board named — and a business card counts as advertising in most of them.

Order the cards early. They take longer than everything else on this list to get right, and there is no version of a first office call that goes well without one. Keep a stack in your folder alongside the initial flyer, so an office that asks for several has them the same day.