Consulting Growth Insights
How I think about positioning, clarity, and growth — for firm owners who want to be the low-risk choice in their market. Browse by the problem you’re solving, then filter by your situation.
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A good positioning document tells you who you are, who you want to be, and how to close that gap. But it doesn't tell anyone what to do day-to-day. It's like a fancy architectural blueprint of a building that never gets built.
Your proudest claim is the one the buyer discounts. It's also the one that makes your firm seem like a commodity.
It's also your firm's infrastructure layer underpinning whatever delivery model you choose.
The standard playbook says productize to scale. But for boutique firms whose value is judgment, relationships, and bespoke thinking: that advice can destroy exactly what your clients pay for.
Recovery rituals treat the symptom. The root cause is a misalignment between you and your business. Here's what actually works.
The Perception Gap doesn't open overnight. It opens because nobody is measuring whether the firm's actions still match its position. Here's how to build the scoreboard.
Most founders don't notice the perception gap until a prospect asks them point-blank: "What are you really best at?" By then, the gap has been building for years.
Everyone tells you to pull yourself out of the day-to-day. Nobody tells you what happens when you actually do.
Most boutique consulting firms compete on the same two words: "our people." Abelian Partners was no different, until they discovered that their real differentiator wasn't who they were, but how they made their clients' buying decision safer than the...
You're already making the decisions that define your firm's position. The problem is, you're making them without a positioning filter, either because you think positioning is someone else's job, or because you don't have the personal clarity yet, to...
Most firms treat positioning like a marketing exercise. They choose a niche, update the website, and call it done. Then they wonder why nothing actually changes. The truth is harder. Positioning is a business strategy decision, and the moment you...
Your burnout isn't a mindset problem. It's a positioning problem. The standard advice—niche down, productize, remove yourself from the day-to-day—isn't wrong. It's just missing the most important context. You. This guide introduces the...
His firm was profitable. His growth had stalled. And he'd just launched an internship program that made no sense for the business. All three things were connected.
Every ownership transition is a positioning transition. The market already knows who you are, based on years of consistent delivery and reputation. Your team already believes in a different version of the firm than the one you're trying to build....
Client expansion may be easier, but net new acquisition creates the optionality required for a successful boutique.
I analyzed trends across my entire client roster, business development conversations, and Consulting Growth Insights Live interviews and here are the trends that are true across the most successful firms.
A new framework for understanding founder burnout through the lens of positioning.
If your answer to “what makes you different?” sounds like everybody else, you don’t have a messaging issue. You have an indecision issue. Pick a position. Prove it with behavior. Then say it loudly.
Most “growth problems” trace back to something simpler and more uncomfortable: the business keeps violating the owner’s constraints. The firm can look healthy on paper while the owner slowly checks out. And once that starts, the...
Stop blaming the buyer. When a prospect stalls, ghosts, or pulls in three more stakeholders, it's easy to get annoyed and think the can't make a decision. The reality is that the decision doesn't feel safe. Your positioning is muddy. Your...
Stop screaming gibberish into the microphone. More people hearing you is only good news when those people understand you. If the market still can't place your firm, hiring a marketer now will probably create more output than traction. It will make...
A lot of boutique firms say they grow through referrals, but what they really mean is they got lucky from relationship leftovers and market momentum.
Boutique firms lose to large firms for a reason that has very little to do with sales skill. Many boutiques keep walking into deals where scale and CYA are the selection criteria, then act surprised when don't win. While extremely frustrating, this...
The issue, at least in part, stems from a massive conflation of terms in the B2B space. Marketing leaders, agencies, and even self-proclaimed "experts" use the terms Positioning, Narrative, and Messaging interchangeably.They are not the same...
The question isn't "Relationships vs. Positioning." It’s about using positioning as a force multiplier for your relationships.
The assumption founders often operate under is that price is a dependent variable and it's mostly out of their control. They operate from a place of fear and impostor syndrome. This article is all about getting you to realize that it doesn't have to...
When it’s a choice between an hour of business development at 8pm and a new Netflix season of Stranger Things, most founders pick the couch. I’m not saying do BD instead of delivery; I’m saying schedule BD in the part of your day...
As a founder of a boutique firm, you need to first be personally excited about the direction of the firm before anything else can happen. This means ensuring there is alignment between your personal purpose and values, and that of your firm. No...
In an environment where risk and volatility are ever increasing, the premium on providing clarity to improve decision velocity is at an all-time high.
Developing your POV is key to building a successful, profitable boutique firm. Firms that choose to invest in this work will create leverage, authority, and pricing power. Without a POV, you are a commodity. With one, you're magnetic for your ideal...
If your expertise isn’t specific and recent, it’s not credible. And in consulting, credibility is everything. Clients look at specificity as proof of competence, and at recency as a marker of confidence.
If you are positioning your firm strictly based on capabilities, you are falling into the service commoditization trap, and setting yourself up on the lowest-price competition hampster wheel. Learn how to own your story instead of competing on price.
This is about the misunderstanding of how many boutique firm founders and partners view relationships as core to their growth strategy. They aren't wrong in the belief that relationships are critical to growth, but their understanding of how...
Thought leadership is business development. Yet founders and partners at boutique firms often see time spent on thought leadership as a trade-off on BD activity.
You don't have a demand problem. Story time... The day that referrals stopped rolling in for my first agency is seered into my mind. Things were...
A process isn't a framework, and a framework isn't a methodology. Those words are often used interchangeably, and often to the detriment of boutique firms. Your "proven process" only matters in context of your methodology and related frameworks.
Building a larger firm, doesn't necessarily mean having to linnearly increase headcount. THe trick is creating leverage by developing your IP.
When things are fine financially, positioning doesn't usually get into the conversation. Even when a firm first begins to struggle, most questions and proposed solutions are surface-level tactics. Only when the struggles become more systemic, do...
word-of-mouth doesn’t scale on its own. Without marketing and business development it’s unpredictable, passive, and dependent on external variables you don’t control.
Even though hiring based on big firm experience may sound attractive, it may not be the right thing for your firm. Pedigree isn't everything.
First article in a multi-part series about the lies that boutique consulting firm founders tell themselves, which stifle growth.
Often discounting happens because the purchase seems risky for the prospective buyer, and lowering the price is one way to decrease that risk....
While catregory design isn't completely unheard of in consulting, it isn't a terribly common strategy, and it's for a good reason - in most cases it isn't necessary.
Positioning isn't a marketing exercise, and treating it as such will create a perception gap that will actually end up hurting your position in the market.
Owner's intent is what success looks like in owning this business now and in the future. It needs to be specific. It needs to be measurable. It needs to be personal. Owner's intent is important because it gives you, the owner, focus by painting a...
If I asked you "Is your firm a risky bet for your ideal clients?" what would you say? Would you tell me "no because our people have incredibly deep...
Their book was a sales pitch. Their discovery call was a sales pitch. Their email nurture was a sales pitch. This was going to be a $75,000...
We had just gotten verbally spanked by the client during a QBR - We had missed the mark on a key deliverable. I was debriefing with my boss at the...
I still remember it like it was yesterday. The energy startup I had been working for went belly up over night because the owner embezzled millions of...
It happened again. It was a hot summer evening, and the monsoon rain was coming down hard against my office window. The phone rang, and the vibration...
There are actually 3 layers of differentiation, yet in most cases only one - functional differentiation is talked about and implemented. This contributes to the risk perception of your firm.
Just because you can create more content, doesn't mean you should. And as everyone seems to be focused on increasing quantity, a renewed focus on quality can be incredibly benefitial.
Hiring a dedicated business development team may not be the solution to your growth problems. Hiring business developers is a linear, but scaling your existing business development rainmakers is exponential.
Transactional sales and marketing don’t work for consulting firms. Firms that don’t adjust their go-to-market approach will lose millions on outdated tactics and missed opportunities. Trust is built through relationships, and...
Every investment comes with a risk disclaimer, something along the lines of "Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All investments...
Do you believe that the target market your firm serves is well-defined? Do your colleagues believe that? Many consulting and advisory firm leaders...
Consulting firms often face a common challenge - fluctuating profits and the feast-or-famine revenue cycle. I recently had the pleasure of speaking...
Consulting firm founders and go-to-market leaders (aka marketing and business development leaders) aren't doing themselves and each other any favors...
For consulting and advisory firms, sustainable growth year after year can be a challenge. The typical model delivers unpredictable, feast-or-famine...
When I ask consulting firm CEOs where their best business opportunities come from, they inevitably tell me "relationships." Most often it's clients...
There are more than 1,300,000 consulting firms in the United States . This number spans a variety of specialties and includes everything for the...
A few years ago a prospective reached out. They were an AWS partner - literally their entire business was based on AWS, and they had grown fairly...
The Challenge A boutique management consulting firm that had grown through reputation and great relationships but had always struggled to build a...
Most boutique offshore staffing firms compete on the same two factors: price per head and placement speed. Atticus Solutions was no different, until they discovered that the infrastructure they'd already built to de-risk offshore delivery was worth...
The Challenge KeyTech, A boutique med device product development and engineering firm looking for incremental growth as the founders retire, and the...
The Challenge A spin-off boutique consultancy with an amazing array of clients, but very little brand awareness and market affinity of its own, in...
Alignment isn’t a one-and-done exercise; it’s an ongoing discipline. As your life and your firm evolve, so too must the match between them. Clarity about who you are and why you do this work will keep you—and everyone you...
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