Before You Take the Cheapest Quote for Your Consulting Site

The cheapest quote in your inbox is the one that will cost you the most money.

That isn’t true. Not the way I just wrote it, anyway, and I’ve been on both ends of that sentence often enough to know better.

I’ve built cheap websites that ran happily for years and earned consultants a proper living. I’ve also watched people hand over serious money for a site that did nothing whatsoever except load quickly.

The honest version is duller. What you pay has almost no bearing on whether the thing works, and every quote in front of you, cheap or dear, is a list of the parts that were never going to decide it.

So consider this a letter to you, sitting there with three of them open.

Read all three again

You already know how they look. The pages are the same on all three, two of them use the words “mobile friendly” in the same sentence, and one costs a third of what the others do.

You’re leaning that way. I would be too, and I’d have a hard time telling you not to.

Read them once more anyway, and this time hunt for the line that says who’s going to get you reviewed.

It isn’t there. It isn’t on mine either.

Why would it be? Who would ever quote you for a job they can’t finish without your clients?

The thing consulting is worst at

Across everything I audit, 88% of businesses have picked up a Google review. In consulting it’s 75.9%.

That’s the lowest this trade lands on anything I check, and I check a lot of things.

The consultants who do have reviews tend to be rated well, which makes an empty profile stand out more, not less. A client asked me to find her a consultant, and five perfectly good ones lost the job on a blank profile.

When I put all 47 trades in order on that column, the only ones sitting underneath consulting were the accountants, the software companies, the psychologists and the financial services firms. Everyone else came out above, right the way up to the heating and cooling companies at the top of it.

Your competition for a stranger’s attention isn’t the consultant across town, either. It’s every other decision she’s made this year, and she chose her plumber off a wall of stars without thinking about it for more than a minute.

What did you check before you booked yours?

Everything on the quote is the easy half

Look at what a builder can honestly promise you. Pages. A design. Something that behaves on a phone. Hosting. A form on the homepage.

All of that is real work, I charge for it, and I’d defend every hour of it in a room full of people who think websites should be free.

It’s also the half of the job with a fixed end date, which is exactly why it’s the half that fits on a quote in the first place.

Sometimes the quoted half isn’t even the half you need. A contractor in Toronto emailed me on a Sunday to ask what a rebuild would run him, and what he was missing was one line of text he could write himself.

Nobody quotes for the other half, because the other half needs your clients, and your clients don’t work for me.

So who at your company is supposed to ask them?

40.4% of consulting sites run on WordPress, and whichever of the three you sign, there’s a fair chance you’ll end up there yourself. That’s fine by me, because the software sitting underneath was never the reason a stranger did or didn’t call you.

The client of mine who had nothing to look at

Two winters ago I took on a consultant who’d been buying ads for eleven months.

He couldn’t tell me whether one human being had ever clicked on one, because his website carried no analytics at all. Nothing recording who turned up, which pages they opened, or the moment they gave up and went somewhere else.

He’d been guessing for a year and calling it a strategy, and I don’t hold it against him. 54.2% of consulting sites run analytics, against 58% of everything I audited.

His cheap build wasn’t the villain there, either. Adding it is a twenty minute job, and it had simply never turned up on anybody’s list, so nobody ever did it.

Most of the upkeep a site needs after launch goes the same way. Small jobs, ten minutes each, nobody’s name against them.

Do you know where your last three enquiries came from, or are you doing what he was doing?

His site was quick, mind you. Consulting averages 59 out of 100 for mobile speed, a hair over the 58 I see nationally, and speed is the sort of thing that arrives free with a decent build.

Fast, tidy, invisible, and impossible for a stranger to verify.

He had bought the half of the internet a supplier can deliver on a schedule, and he was still holding the half that only his own customers were ever going to hand him.

What she does before she ever calls you

Your next client is going to check you before she picks up a phone. She’ll type your name, she’ll glance at whatever other people wrote about you, and she’ll make her mind up in about four seconds.

Blank doesn’t read as new to her. Blank reads as a name she can’t check, and a name she can’t check goes back in the pile with the rest.

Would you hire a name you couldn’t check, with your own money, on a Thursday afternoon?

I know the objection, because I’ve heard it in about forty different accents. Your best work is confidential, your clients are senior people, and none of them are going to write paragraphs on Google about the woman who fixed their supply chain.

Some of that is completely fair. It’s also the same thing I hear from accountants and psychologists, which is interesting, because those two are among the only trades keeping you company down at the bottom of that column.

Discretion is a real reason. It just isn’t a free pass, because your buyer doesn’t grade you on a curve against other consultants. She grades you against the last stranger she trusted with money.

The line I can’t put on a quote

If I could sell you the thing that actually moves this, it would fit in one sentence. For the next six months, every time a client tells you that you saved her, ask her to say so on Google before the feeling wears off.

I can’t sell that. I can’t do it for you either, because your clients have never met me, and a request from me lands like a request from a stranger.

How many of last year’s clients would say yes tonight if you sent them a short note with their own name at the top?

So it has no price, no delivery date and no place on anybody’s quote, which is how the most valuable thing in your trade ends up being the one thing nobody is selling you.

I build websites for consultants and I lose bids like yours regularly. I’m not the cheapest, I’ve never pretended to be, and what I charge sits on the site so nobody has to email me to find out.

Go back to the three quotes

Open them again. Read the cheap one line by line, this time for what isn’t on it.

Then read the expensive one. Same gap, longer document, nicer typeface.

If you want a second opinion on the site you already own before you sign any of them, send it over and I’ll go through it for nothing.

Write the fourth quote first, though. The one nobody sent you, with one line on it and no price, due this week: ask the last client who thanked you to say so somewhere a stranger can read it.

Accept that one. Then go and pick whichever of the other three you like.