Building a website for a consulting firm is more challenging than building a website for an independent consultant.
People buy from people, not brands. When you're an independent consultant, it's much easier to design a website around helping your prospects trust a single person -- you.
As a small consulting firm, you're faced with the challenge of presenting a website that helps your prospect gain trust in your brand -- multiple people at your firm.
How can you use your consulting website to enhance your visibility, generate trust and credibility, and ultimately grow your consulting firm?
In this article, I feature 11 of the best boutique consulting firm websites, and how each of these firms use their website to help their business and their clients.
Here's what I asked decision members of each firm:
- What is your firm, and who do you serve in your business?
- How does your website help your firm?
- How does your website help your current and potential clients?
And my criteria for evaluating small firm websites:
- Is the website professionally designed? Is it modern, responsive, user-friendly?
- Is the website resource-rich? Does it have recent articles, insights, and expertise?
- Is the website well-written? Is it "you-focused" instead of "we-focused?"
- Is the website built and designed to help the firm generate leads?
These three points are at the core of what makes an effective consulting website -- small firm or independent. I predicted that it would be much easier to find small consulting firm websites that fit this criterion -- but I was wrong.
Like independent consulting websites, 80% of them did not fit the above criteria.
That said, the ones that did were very well done.
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Best Small Consulting Firm Websites
Listed below are 10 of the best small (50 person max) consulting firm websites, listed in no particular order. I included one firm with one person (Inscape Consulting), which is built around the name Inscape Consulting as opposed to their principle to demonstrate how an independent consultant can build a website around their brand instead of themselves.
All highlights and bolding is my own, done for emphasis.
Ignition Consulting Group
Tim Williams, Founding Partner at Ignition Consulting Group
"Ignition Consulting Group is a focused consultancy with a global footprint devoted to helping agencies and other professional firms create and capture more value. For almost two decades Ignition has worked with firms around the world to help them optimize their business strategy and transform their pricing practices.
The Ignition website is designed to provide useful information and insights to leaders of agencies and other professional service firms. While we regard our intellectual property as unique and valuable, our practice is to share it as widely as possible rather than protecting it behind a paywall or asking for information in return for access to white papers.
Listed below are 10 of the best small (50 person max) consulting firm websites, listed in no particular order. I included one firm with one person (Inscape Consulting), which is built around the name Inscape Consulting as opposed to their principle to demonstrate how an independent consultant can build a website around their brand instead of themselves.
All highlights and bolding is my own, done for emphasis.
Fix My Churn
Val Geisler, Chief Email Officer at Fix My Churn
The entire goal of our website is to help you know if you're in or you're out. It's a pre-qualifier for working with us. Does everything here line up with what you're looking for? Great! Let's take the next steps. If anything feels off (goals, mindset, methodology, budget) it's all there out in the open so you can walk away with almost no skin in the game. It's incredibly helpful for our business because prospects who take the time to complete our intake form have already read everything they need to know. They're in and ready to roll; aka: they're highly qualified leads."
Jamie Cochran, Director of Operations at Echelon Front
"Echelon Front is a premier leadership consultancy, offering unmatched solutions in leadership, tested and proven in combat. We work with leaders, companies, and organizations in every industry and at every level.
We use our website in a variety of ways; providing information to interested clients about the services we offer, share with our followers details about the leadership conferences we host, as well as provide a place for leaders at every level to engage with one another, talk tactics and leadership challenges and find solutions to help leaders build high-performance, winning teams.
John Ferris, CEO at inVisionEdge
"The pace of change is faster than ever. It can be challenging to keep up. At inVision Edge, we help leaders and their teams make innovation happen. We believe that a system to drive innovation, a radically clear strategy, and engaged and aligned leaders are the keys to building a culture of innovation.
Our website helps to clearly define what we do and how we can help. Our blog is a great source of information for leaders who are looking for practical, applicable tips and information on how to build innovation capacity in their organization, align their leadership team, and build a clear and executable strategic plan.
Ron Carucci, Managing Partner at Navalent
"At Navalent, we accompany leaders on the most turbulent journeys of change - whether strategic, organizational, or leadership, we help build solutions that help leaders and their companies realize their ambitions to transform.
We want our website to be a "destination" website where there is always dynamic content, relevant and engaging material, and ultimately, the right client-centric information to help prospective clients make informed choices about how to engage us, or ask the right questions about their circumstances.
Jason Merschat, CEO of Advanced Process Optimization
"Advanced Process Optimization, Inc. is a Process Improvement Consultancy focused on permanently eliminating problems in your business processes, and drastically improving process and team performance using Lean, Six Sigma, Simulation Modeling, Training, and Organizational Change Management. We are Process Improvement Experts.
Describing our services can be a bit complex; so we rely on our website to help tell our story. We believe the multi-mode communication methods such as video, testimonials, segmented solution sections, and case studies help prospective clients learn about APO to make the decision to hire us easier.
Brad Farris,
Anchor Advisors
"Anchor Advisors helps small businesses (10 - 50 employees) to grow by helping them to clarify their purpose, develop consistent processes, get more out of their people and identify their key performance measures. AnchorAdvisors.com provides our customers and prospects with thought leadership (the blog) and ideas about how other business owners have found success (case studies). It gives people a chance to meet our team before we work with them. It's our #1 source of leads!
Bruna Sofia Simoes, Marketing and Sales Manager at The Burnie Group
"The Burnie Group is a highly specialized operations consulting firm that helps clients improve their businesses through the application of innovative strategy, rigorous analysis, world-class technology, and top-tier domain expertise. The Burnie Group specializes in Strategy, Operations, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Blockchain, and Workforce Management (WFM).
Our website is designed with the potential customer in mind. We try to think of the questions that our clientele are looking to answer, and provide those answers either in the form of articles in our blog, or in detailed descriptions of each of our practice areas.
Greg Nichvalodoff, President at Inscape Consulting
"Inscape Consulting is in business of developing “super-effective" leaders and profitable companies. Delivering practical knowledge to effect the kind of behavioral change that drives real–world results, our coaching empowers executives to overcome obstacles that lead to improved personal performance. We challenge the status quo is by designing coaching approaches and organizational interventions that achieve maximum benefit and success.
We believe our website quickly establishes our brand, credibility, experience and genuine desire to assist our clients in achieving their personal and organizational goals.
Tim McAlpine, Owner at Currency Marketing
"Currency Marketing is a credit union-focused marketing firm. We offer programs that help credit unions connect with young adults—It’s a Money Thing and Young & Free. It’s a Money Thing provides credit unions with a library of financial literacy content that enables them to supercharge their education efforts. Young & Free is a spokesperson-driven program that gives a young person the tools to create content and build awareness of a region’s credit union, its products and its services.
All of our new business comes through our website. Credit union prospects typically learn about our programs on our website and then sign up to attend a monthly webinar. I am a big believer in specialization and showing everything including pricing. It's worked really well for us. We now have more than 100 credit unions that subscribe to our programs including 80% in the U.S. and 20% in Canada.
Mirko Jens Luebke, Principle at Luebke Associates
"We believe in continuous advancement. Therefore, our shared mission is to elevate successful people and organizations. Our client portfolio covers a broad band, from international artists and soccer club managers to leaders in multinational corporations or family entrepreneurs feeling personally responsible for a couple of hundred people.
Within this context, our web presence is a real estate which is serving different purposes. In particular, in the professional services sector the online presence is the collateral people can see and perceive without being guided by a person. The primary purpose is not to generate leads and channel customers into your order books. Especially after handing out your business card during a visit or meeting, the intended goal is to build and support your brand, convey the intended message and educate the customer while, at the same time, reducing potential cognitive dissonance of existing and potential clients. This needs to be done very well to work well.
Key Takeaways:
- Each of these firms has invested in professional design. These websites work because they aren't using boilerplate, generic templates -- but the firms have invested in a design that establishes their brand and unique value proposition.
- Each of these websites are helpful to the firm. They help them generate trust, build credibility, and foster interactions with their potential clients.
- They are helpful to their clients. All of the websites in this article are much more than "brochure" websites. Instead, they serve as useful resource centers for their current and potential clients.
Action Steps
What is your favorite website featured on this list?
Which of the answers surprised you?
Did any of them challenge the way you thought about how best to use the website for your small firm?
What is the key takeaway or action step that you're going to take and apply to your consulting website?
(If you're interested in improving your firm's consulting website, check out my Consultant Website Template Kit. It will help you write, design, and build a high-converting consultant website for your firm.)
Start the discussion and leave your comment in the comment section below.