Most people like the company they work for. Many are even proud of it. But far fewer can talk about the company in a way that sounds specific and credible when there’s no slide deck or formal pitch involved.

Ask someone casually what their company does well and you’ll often hear generalities. “We really care.” “We do great work.” “Our people are amazing.” None of that’s false. It’s just not very persuasive.

That’s the problem a Differentiation Brag Sheet is designed to solve.

A brag sheet is an internal document, usually one to three pages long, that gives everyone in the organization a shared set of facts and stories they can draw from if they want to talk about the company. It is not a formal speech to memorize. Rather, it’s a collection of discrete pieces of information. Think “LEGO bricks,” not a single script. People don’t need to use all of it at once. They only need to know a few pieces well enough to use them naturally. Let me give you an example.

Picture yourself standing in line at Starbucks, or sitting at a neighborhood bar. Someone you’ve just met asks where you work. They don’t know your company well, but they’re curious. They may even be a potential client. At some point, they say, half-joking and half-serious, “So do you guys actually know what you’re doing?”

In that moment, the answer doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be concrete.

“You bet we do. I mean, we’ve been in business for 20 years. In 20 years we’ve completed almost 4,000 projects. We have 214 repeat clients, and our repeat clients hire us, on average, for 16 projects each. You don’t do that kind of long-term work without knowing what you’re doing.”

Those aren’t marketing claims. They’re evidence.

A strong brag sheet also includes a small number of stories that substantiate the position the company is claiming. Not hero stories. Just real incidents that show how the company behaves when something is at stake.

I worked on a Differentiation Brag Sheet for an industrial architecture firm whose founder believed the market viewed industrial architects as unreliable businesspeople. Creative, yes. But inclined to go over budget and miss deadlines. Fair or not, that perception existed, and it was hurting them.

So we built the brag sheet around a single idea: reliability. Every fact, number, and story had to reinforce that idea. Here’s one of the stories the founder told me.

Late one rainy Sunday night, around 10:30, his phone rang. The caller was a prospect, not a client. The man was almost in tears. He was scheduled to sell his current building the next morning at 9 a.m. That sale was going to fund the purchase of a larger, better building in a more desirable part of town later that same day. The timing, though, was unforgiving. If the morning sale was delayed, the funds wouldn’t be available in time, and other buyers would step in and purchase the new building.

As he reviewed the closing documents that night, he saw a problem with the sale of his building that he hadn’t noticed before. There was a blank space asking for the building’s height and width. He didn’t know them. And he had no idea how to get them on a rainy Sunday night.

Panicking, he called the industrial architect out of desperation. He figured an architect might know whether there was anything he could do, or whether the whole deal was about to collapse.

The architect listened and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll meet you tonight at your building, and bring an umbrella because it’s pouring.” They met at the building, went up to the roof, and the architect brought a laser measuring device. In the rain, just after midnight, he measured the height and width of the building and carefully wrote the numbers into the closing documents by hand. The next morning, the sale went through without a hitch. The purchase happened that afternoon. The prospect became a client.

That story earned its place on the brag sheet because it made the firm’s position undeniable. Reliability wasn’t a slogan. It was a behavior demonstrated for someone who hadn’t even hired them yet.

That’s the real purpose of a Differentiation Brag Sheet. Decide what you want your company to stand for. Gather the facts, figures, and stories that support that idea. Write them down. Share them internally. Let people use them when it’s useful. Over time, your company will start to sound like it knows exactly who it is, because it does.

I learned this approach to strategic messaging from people like Jaynie Smith, along with others who focus on helping organizations align what they say with what they actually do.