Three separate things now ask a small business for a video introduction, and most firms produce none of them.
Job adverts on the major boards rank listings with video higher and get materially better response from them. Tender and framework submissions increasingly include an optional supplier introduction. Professional profile pages, directory listings and local business schemes all offer a video slot that sits empty on the majority of entries.
The obstacle is rarely the idea. A joiner who has been trading for eighteen years can explain what the firm does in ninety seconds without preparation. What stops the video existing is everything around that ninety seconds.
Why the About page reads the same everywhere
Written business introductions converge on the same three paragraphs because they are written under the same constraints.
The first paragraph establishes longevity, the second lists services, the third mentions customer focus. Each is defensible, and together they describe every firm in the sector. A prospective employee reading twelve of these cannot separate them, and neither can a procurement officer scoring a supplier list.
What separates one firm from another is specific and slightly awkward to write down: the kind of job they turn away, how they handle the thing that always goes wrong, what the working day is actually like. People say these things readily and write them reluctantly, which is one argument for a spoken format.
The three uses, and how they differ
They are not the same video, and firms that produce one and use it everywhere get poor results from at least two of the three.
Recruitment. The audience is deciding whether they want to work somewhere. What matters is the working environment and who they would report to. This is the version that benefits most from real footage, discussed further below.
Tenders and supplier submissions. The audience is scoring against criteria. What matters is scope, capacity, accreditations held and geographic coverage, delivered in the order the scoring sheet uses. Personality is close to irrelevant here and can count against a submission that appears to be substituting it for substance.
Profile and directory listings. The audience is deciding whether to make contact at all. This version is short, specific about services and area, and its job is to be less generic than the eleven entries around it.
What producing one actually involves now
The traditional route requires a videographer, a half day, a location that does not sound like a workshop, and someone willing to be filmed who does not freeze.
The alternative route is that a still photograph becomes the presenter. Tools offering an AI video introduction generate mouth movement, head movement and expression around the face in a single image, driven by a script that the business writes.
The photograph constrains what follows, so it is worth choosing carefully. Leadde asks for a clear image reflecting the person’s current appearance, and excludes group photographs, hats, sunglasses, pets in frame, heavy filters, low resolution files and screenshots. A recent headshot works. A cropped photograph from a wedding does not.
The script is the part that determines whether the result is any good, and it is the part most likely to be rushed. Ninety seconds is roughly two hundred words. Written as three specific claims rather than as a summary of the business, it produces something worth watching. Written as the About page read aloud, it produces the About page read aloud.
One technical constraint affects structure. Leadde’s expressive animation mode, which infers head movement and gesture from the script, is capped at sixty seconds per video, so longer introductions are built as segments rather than as one continuous piece.
Accent is not a small detail here
For a business trading in a defined area, the voice carries information that the script does not.
Synthetic narration defaults to a neutral register that reads as national or as American, and for a firm whose entire proposition is that it is local and has been for a long time, that undercuts the message before the content arrives. Leadde exposes fifteen English dialect variants and allows a regional accent to be selected, which is a thirty second adjustment with a disproportionate effect on how the result lands.
The same reasoning applies in the other direction. A firm bidding for national contracts may reasonably prefer the neutral register.
The community the business already serves
Many small firms in the North West serve customers whose first language is not English, and almost none of them communicate in those languages, because doing so previously required hiring a speaker.
A finished video can be translated into another language with the narration and the on screen text handled together, producing a separate version rather than replacing the original. Leadde supports 88 languages and 175 dialects, and regenerates the presenter’s mouth movement to match the translated audio.
For a firm with a substantial Polish or Urdu speaking customer base, a version in that language is now a script and a check rather than a hiring decision. The check matters: machine translation handles ordinary prose well and handles trade terminology and place names less well, so someone who speaks the language should watch it before it goes out.
What still needs filming
Recruitment video is the clearest case. Someone deciding whether to take a job wants to see the workshop, the yard, the office and the people in it, and a generated presenter against a generated background communicates nothing about any of that. The useful pattern is a generated introduction combined with genuine footage of the premises, which a phone can capture adequately.
Anything demonstrating workmanship needs the work in shot. A description of finish quality is not evidence of it.
Anything responding to a specific local event needs a person, because the point of that message is that someone at the firm chose to make it.
There is also a disclosure question. Viewers should be able to tell that a presenter is synthetic, and for a firm whose proposition rests on being straightforward with people, being caught not saying so is a worse outcome than saying so.
Practical points before publishing
Captions should be on from the first version. Video on job boards and social feeds is watched with the sound off more often than not, and captions for prerecorded video are a WCAG success criterion rather than a nicety.
Anything used in a tender should be checked against the same standard as the written submission. Claims about accreditations, coverage and capacity carry the same weight spoken as written, and guidance on what small firms must be able to substantiate is set out on gov.uk.
Any figure likely to change, including staff numbers and years trading, is better left out than left to go stale, since a video is not something anyone remembers to update.
Start with the listing that is currently empty
The lowest risk first attempt is the directory or profile entry with a blank video slot, at sixty seconds, with three specific claims and the local accent selected.
It costs an afternoon including the script. If it produces enquiries, the recruitment and tender versions are worth building properly. If it does not, nothing has been committed beyond the afternoon.