Positioning a New Consultancy That Has No Case Studies Yet

Most founders who leave a firm or a corporate role to start a consultancy meet the same wall. Sooner or later a serious prospect asks, politely, “Who else have you done this for?” The honest answer is “nobody yet, under this name”, and the conversation goes cold.

A common reaction is to fill the gap with a long list of services, a logo wall of former employers, or vague claims of “decades of combined experience”. None of these answers the question the buyer is really asking, which is whether this specific firm can solve this specific problem without wasting their time. This article sets out a different route to the question behind most searches for how to get clients for a new consulting business: build credibility from sharp positioning, a packaged first offer, a visible point of view and a method buyers can inspect, and plan from day one to turn early engagements into proof you can publish.

Why a missing case-study page matters less than you think

Case studies are one form of evidence, not the only one. Buyers of professional services judge you mostly through what you send and publish, because they spend little time with you: Gartner’s research says buyers spend only 17% of their buying time meeting potential suppliers. Several people usually weigh in on the decision, most of them without ever meeting you; our guide to selling to a B2B buying committee sets out who they are and what each one reads.

That means your profile, your proposal and the founder’s published thinking carry much of the selling. Survey data suggests buyers take that material seriously. In the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, nearly 73% of decision-makers agreed that an organisation’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets, and 86% said they were moderately or very likely to invite an organisation that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership into an RFP process.

Our reading: a new consultancy can earn a place on the shortlist by being clear and visibly expert. Case studies then confirm the decision later.

Narrow the niche until your experience counts as proof

A broad position (“management consulting for growing companies”) forces the buyer to compare you with every established firm in the market, and on that comparison a firm without a client list usually loses. A narrow position changes the comparison. If you are one of very few firms focused on, say, procurement set-up for family-owned contracting companies, your previous employment and the problems you have solved inside other organisations become directly relevant evidence. The same logic underpins B2B positioning that technical buyers believe.

A useful test is to write your position as one sentence with four parts: who you serve, which problem you solve, what result they are buying, and why you are credible on it.

The examples in this table are hypothetical illustrations, not recommendations or real clients; the right niche comes from where your experience is deepest and where buyers already feel the problem. Two checks we find useful before you commit:

• Can you name ten real organisations that fit? If not, the niche is either too small or too abstract.
• Can you describe three problems they have that you have personally handled? These become your proof points, even before you have clients under your own name.

On “personally handled”: you can describe the type of problem and your role in solving it, but do not name former employers’ clients or share confidential figures without permission. A credible consultancy is visibly careful with information from its first day.

Package a first offer a buyer can say yes to

“We can help with anything in this area” is a hard offer to buy from an unknown firm, because the buyer cannot judge the risk. A packaged first offer, with a defined scope, output and duration, lowers that risk. It also gives you a repeatable engagement that will later produce comparable case studies.

In our experience a good entry offer is usually a diagnostic or a contained project that leads naturally into larger work. Define it in plain terms:

Write this as a one-page offer sheet as well as a section on your website. When a prospect asks for experience, you can answer with the method and the output: “Here is exactly what you would receive, and how we would get there.” In our view that is a stronger answer than an unrelated logo.

Make the founder’s point of view the first piece of evidence

For a new consultancy, the founder’s thinking is the product sample. Published regularly, it shows how you diagnose problems before a buyer has paid for anything. The same Edelman-LinkedIn report shows why quality matters more than volume: only 48% of decision-makers rated the overall quality of the thought leadership they read as good, and just 15% as very good or excellent. Generic posts add to the noise; a specific argument stands out.

In our judgement, content that works as evidence for a new firm shares three features:

1. It takes a position. “Most companies of this size set salary bands too early” (a hypothetical example) is a view a buyer can agree or disagree with. “Salary bands are important” is not.
2. It shows the working. Walk through how you would assess a situation: the questions, the data you would request, the trade-offs.
3. It stays inside the niche. Every piece should be useful to the buyer described in your position sentence.

For B2B consultancies in the Gulf and Egypt, LinkedIn is often the natural home for this work, since it is a likely place for a buyer to look up a founder after an introduction. Start with the profile itself: a headline that states the niche, an About section that explains the method, and a featured section linking to the offer sheet and your best article. Our guide to LinkedIn for Gulf executives covers what a founder or CEO should and should not post, and RX’s LinkedIn and personal branding service builds and, if wanted, manages these profiles, with the founder approving every post.

A company profile that explains the method, not the client list

Expect many buyers, especially in procurement-led organisations, still to ask for a company profile. A new consultancy should not try to make its profile look like an established firm’s. It should make the method so clear that the missing client list matters less. A structure we would suggest:

1. The problem you solve, in the buyer’s language, in one page.
2. Who you work with: the niche, stated plainly.
3. Your method: the named stages, what happens in each, and what the client receives at the end of each.
4. The entry offer: scope, output and next step, taken from your offer sheet.
5. The people: relevant experience described as problems handled and roles held, with qualifications that can be checked.
6. How you work: confidentiality, reporting rhythm, who the client deals with day to day.
7. Proof as it arrives: an honest section that grows over time, starting with published articles or talks.

RX’s brand and positioning work runs through four stages, Understand, Position, Build and Support, and in our view the same logic suits a consultancy profile: a buyer can see what happens before anything is delivered. If your profile needs Arabic and English versions, settle the bilingual format before design starts.

The visual identity should support the same message. A new firm does not need to look large; it needs to look deliberate. For Career Advising Service, an online career-consulting service in Egypt, RX designed a badge logo carrying the English and Arabic names in one mark, with covers, profile images, launch posts and ads delivered as one kit; the launch material was built around the service’s real video consultations. The project page describes the work, not business results. The point for a new consultancy: showing how the service actually runs is a form of proof you can produce before the first case study.

Turn the first three engagements into publishable proof

Most new firms finish their first projects and only then discover they cannot publish anything, because nobody asked for permission and nothing was measured at the start. Plan the proof before the work begins:

• Ask for publication rights in the engagement letter. Offer options: a named case study, an anonymised one (for example, “a Riyadh-based distribution company with 80 staff”), or a short testimonial only. Some clients who decline a named case study will agree to an anonymised one.
• Record a baseline on day one. Write down the starting situation in measurable terms where possible: process time, error rate, number of approvals, revenue mix. Without a baseline you can only describe activity, not change.
• Agree the client quote at the end, in writing. Draft it from their own words in the final meeting and send it for approval. Never publish wording the client has not approved.
• Capture artefacts as you go. Anonymised frameworks, before-and-after process maps and workshop outputs can make a stronger case study than prose.
• Use one format for every case. Situation, problem, method, output, result, client comment. Consistent cases are easier to compare and reuse in proposals.

A first engagement can also be a discounted pilot in return for a named case study, but be careful: in our view a heavily discounted project can set a price anchor that is hard to move, and the client may value the work less. If you do it, state the full price on the proposal and show the pilot terms as a separate line, so the real value of the work is on record.

A suggested 30-day order of work

1. Week 1: write the position sentence and test it against ten named target organisations.
2. Week 2: define the entry offer and write the one-page offer sheet.
3. Week 3: rebuild the founder’s LinkedIn profile and publish the first point-of-view article.
4. Week 4: produce the method-led company profile and add the publication-rights clause to your engagement letter.

None of this replaces the case studies you will publish later. It makes sure the first buyers have enough to say yes, and that their projects become the proof the next buyers ask for. Put one date in the diary now: the end of your third engagement. By then each project should have a signed publication option, a result the client recognises and a short draft write-up waiting for the client’s approval.