Consultants Are Rated Well, or Not Rated at All

Last week a client asked me to find her a consultant.

Not build a website for one. Find one, for her own company, because she was about to hire two more people and had no clear idea how to arrange them, and a month earlier I had cheerfully told her I knew someone.

I did not know someone.

So I did what she would have done if I’d been honest with her, which was open Google, type her city and the kind of help she needed, and start opening tabs.

Nine names came back, and I went down the row the way you’d shop for a kettle.

Four of them had a line of stars sitting under the name. The other five had a name, a map pin, a phone number, and a blank space where the stars are supposed to be.

I sent her three of the four. Eleven minutes, start to finish, and I never mentioned the other five to her at all.

The five I skipped might have been the best of them

A week later that still bothers me.

Nothing on my screen suggested those five were any worse at the job than the ones I forwarded. One of them had a lovely website. Another had written a book.

I skipped them anyway, at nine at night, doing a favor for a friend, with nothing to check them against.

That isn’t research. It’s a shortcut, and every person who has ever hired you took one just like it.

When did you last pick a professional properly, with a shortlist and a fair hearing for everybody on it?

What this trade is quietly good at

The reviews consultants do collect are excellent.

A consulting business that has a rating at all averages 4.7 stars. I’ve watched owners in this trade lose two weeks of sleep over a single four-star review, which is an odd place to spend your worry when stars are the one place consulting lands 17 of 47 across everything I score, and nothing else about the trade comes anywhere near that.

That makes sense when you think about how the work ends. A project closes with a client who feels relieved and slightly smarter than she was in the spring, and relief writes generous sentences.

How many people finished a piece of work with you this year feeling exactly like that?

The average listing carries 26 reviews. A small pile, and kind words sitting in it.

How many you need is the question I get next, and the count is the wrong end of it.

So the writing isn’t the problem in this trade. The blank space is.

The check that decides whether you get looked at

75.9% of consulting businesses hold at least one Google review, against 88% of every business I counted.

The rest of them turn up the way my five did. Name, pin, number, nothing.

A rating only does its job on a stranger who can actually see it, and 4.7 of nothing is nothing.

So a trade that gets written about more warmly than most, while sitting 43 of 47 on my list for whether it gets written about at all, is walking around with a reputation that no new client can reach.

Which of those two numbers have you looked at this year?

Nobody can photograph advice

The gap does more damage in consulting than in most trades, and I think the reason is what you’re actually selling.

A bakery has a window. A landscaper has a before and an after, and he can hand you a dozen of them on his phone while you’re standing in your own driveway.

You have a slide deck nobody outside the room is allowed to see, and a client list you’re mostly not allowed to say out loud.

Everything that proves you’re good at this happened in private, under an agreement, with people who signed something before you started. So what’s left for a stranger who has never met you?

Other people’s sentences, and in this trade there often aren’t any.

I’ve sat with consultants who could describe, in detail, the two years of profit they saved a manufacturer up the road, and who couldn’t point me at one public word about it. The whole story lives in their head and in the head of a client who moved to another company in March.

So what would a stranger have to take purely on faith to hire you tomorrow morning?

They build the website. They skip the witness.

None of this comes from a trade that ignores the web. 84.6% of consultants have a website, which is better than most of what I count, while 17% of small businesses in my data have nothing at all.

The money got spent. It got spent on the half of the problem you can solve on your own, in an afternoon, without asking anybody for a favor.

That is the half a builder can put on a quote. The half that needs your clients is missing from every quote I have ever sent a consultant, and from every one I have lost to.

Three things are going on, I think, and my data can’t prove a single one of them.

Referrals first. Work arrives by introduction, so the Google profile never appears to be doing anything for anyone, and a thing that appears to be doing nothing never gets tended.

Silence second. Plenty of your clients can’t say who they hired, and if I brought someone in to tell me my own company was badly run, I wouldn’t be signing my name under that in public either.

Then there’s the missing doorway. A restaurant gets reviewed by accident, by a woman who came in for lunch and had opinions about the soup. Nobody reviews a consultant by accident.

A shop owner in Indianapolis moved a rating he had stopped looking at with one text message sent while the job was still fresh.

Which leaves the asking to you, and when did you last do it?

I build websites for consultants for a living, so believe me when I tell you the website was not what stopped those five names from reaching my client that night.

What your site has to carry instead

With the stars missing, your website becomes the only witness you have left, and it’s a witness with an obvious interest in the verdict.

Which is why the small outward signals matter more than they ought to. Where else you exist, who else carries your name, whether the whole thing looks tended or abandoned.

61.4% of consulting sites link out to a social profile, against 66% of everyone else I audited.

Meanwhile 39.9% of them publish a blog, which is better than the 37% I get nationally, and writing a blog is the harder job by a distance.

Put those two together and you have the entire trade in one line.

They’ll write. They just won’t be written about.

Your blog cost you a weekend. What did the blank space under your name cost you?

If you’d rather find out what a stranger meets before you learn it the expensive way, my free website audit is me doing to your name exactly what I did to those nine, then writing down every place I got stuck.

Tonight

Search your own name and your own city on your phone, the way my client would have done if I’d told her the truth in the first place.

Look at the space under the name.

If it’s empty, open your email and write to the client whose work you finished most recently, the one who thanked you twice on the last call, and ask her for two lines on Google.

Plenty of them will say yes and never do it, which is a problem with the asking rather than the client.

One client. One email. Before you talk yourself out of it.