A personal website for consultants and independents

A consultant's website usually reads like a CV that got a better font. Headline with your name and title, an About paragraph in the third person, a list of skills, a row of company logos you worked for, and a contact form at the bottom. It is not a bad page. It is just answering a question nobody who lands on it is asking.

The person who finds a consultant's site is not evaluating whether to hire them for a role. They are deciding whether to spend money on a specific problem, right now, with someone they have never worked with. That is a different decision from the one a CV is built to support, and it comes with its own checklist — a shorter one than most consultants think, and one that a skills list does not touch. We laid out the general version of this argument in the piece on how personal websites vary by profession: the reader arrives with two to four items they are scanning for, and everything else is noise until those are answered. For a consultant, the items are almost always the same three.

The three questions a prospect is actually asking

Is this the right person. What does an engagement with them look like. What does it cost. In that order, and usually within the first thirty seconds.

The first question is not "are they qualified" in the abstract — it is "have they solved my specific problem before, for someone roughly like me." A logo wall answers a weaker question than this one. Seeing that you worked with a bank tells a prospect nothing about whether you have solved pricing problems, retention problems, or operations problems for banks, and they will not do the work of guessing. Naming the problem alongside the sector does the job a logo cannot.

The second question is about risk, not competence. Buying a consultant is buying an unknown quantity for a defined period, and the anxiety is less "will they be good" than "what happens after I say yes." Will there be a proposal, a call, a fixed scope? How long does a typical engagement run? What does the client have to do versus what you do alone? A page that answers this removes the single biggest reason people who are genuinely interested still don't send the first email — they don't know what saying yes commits them to.

The third question, cost, is the one most consultants dodge, and dodging it is a choice with real consequences, covered on its own below.

None of this requires more content than a CV-style page already has. It requires different content, ordered by what the reader needs rather than by what feels natural to write about yourself.

Name the problem, not the skill set

The single most common failure on a consultant's site is a list of capabilities where a sentence about a problem should be. "Strategy, operations, change management, stakeholder alignment" describes a person who can do many things, which is true of almost every competent consultant and therefore proves nothing to a prospect deciding between people.

The fix is not cleverer wording. It is specificity about who you are hired for and why. A pricing consultant who writes "I help SaaS companies fix pricing that hasn't kept pace with their product" has told a reader, in one sentence, whether this page is for them. Someone whose problem is exactly that reads on. Everyone else self-selects out in the first five seconds, which is the entire point — a page that filters badly wastes both your time and theirs on a call that was never going to lead anywhere.

This is harder to write than a skills list because it requires deciding what you actually do, narrowly, rather than what you are capable of, broadly. Most consultants can do more than the one thing their best clients hire them for. The page should describe the one thing, not the range, because the range is what you demonstrate on the call, not what gets you to the call.

Publish a rate, or explain why you can't

Consultants argue about this more than almost anything else on the page, and both sides have a real case.

The argument for publishing a starting figure is straightforward: it is a filter, and filters save time on both ends. A prospect whose budget is a fifth of your minimum engagement finds out in five seconds instead of after a thirty-minute call neither of you wanted to have. The enquiries that do come in have already cleared the bar, which means the average conversation is worth having. The cost is real too — a number on the page can anchor a negotiation before it starts, and it says nothing about the value delivered, only the entry price.

The argument against is that consulting work is often genuinely unscoped until a diagnostic conversation happens, and a number stated too early either undersells complex work or oversells simple work, both of which cost you a client for the wrong reason. This is a legitimate position, not a dodge — for engagements that vary by an order of magnitude depending on scope, a single figure would mislead more than it informs.

What is not defensible is silence with no explanation. A page that says nothing about cost, with no acknowledgment that it says nothing, reads as evasive rather than bespoke — the prospect assumes the worst and moves on rather than emailing to ask. If you cannot state a number, say what determines the number: "engagements typically run six to twelve weeks depending on scope" tells a reader almost as much as a figure would, and it costs you nothing to write.

Credibility that holds up when someone checks

Client logos are the default credibility signal on a consultant's page and they are weaker than they look, because a logo alone claims nothing checkable. Anyone can put a recognisable name on a page; the reader has no way to verify what the actual relationship was, and increasingly they assume the weakest interpretation — a single call, a minor project, a name collected for exactly this purpose.

What survives scrutiny is specificity that would be strange to fabricate: the sector, the size of the organisation, the duration of the engagement, and the shape of the problem, even without the company's name. "Six-month engagement with a Series B fintech, rebuilding their usage-based pricing after a failed self-serve launch" tells a reader more than a logo does, and it is the kind of detail that is awkward to invent because it is specific enough to be checked in conversation. This is the anonymised-case format the conventions across professions piece pointed to for consulting specifically, and it works because confidentiality and evidence are not actually opposed — you can honor an NDA and still be specific about everything except the name.

Named clients, where you have permission to use them, are still worth including. The point is not that logos are useless, it is that a logo without any of the surrounding detail is closer to decoration than proof, and the detail is what most consultants leave out because it takes longer to write than pasting an image.

Where a CV-based generator gets you the fastest

Most of what makes a consultant's page work is not visual design, it is getting a first draft of the problem statement, the engagement shape, and the credibility section onto a page instead of a blank document — the same blank-canvas problem that kills most personal sites regardless of profession. reach is built for exactly that first step: you upload a CV and a photo, answer a short profile form, pick a look, and it composes a finished one-page site. The generation itself takes about twenty seconds, and you can be live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes — a draft to edit into the offer-page shape this piece describes, rather than a template you fill in from nothing.

That speed is real but it does not extend to everything a consulting practice eventually needs. reach makes exactly one page — one index.html, no sub-pages, no site structure — so anything that needs a separate proposal page or a resources section outgrows it fast. There is no contact form; the contact section is a mail link and your profile links, not a form that posts a lead anywhere, which matters if your workflow depends on capturing enquiries in a CRM. There is no booking flow and no shop, so a scheduling link has to live somewhere else and get pasted in. And you cannot connect a domain you already own — the only route to a custom domain is buying one through reach, which is a genuine blocker if your name is already registered at a different registrar. A custom domain also requires reach's Premium plan, $4.99 a month or $49 a year — Prices checked August 2026. For a solo practice selling one clear engagement, none of that is disqualifying. For a practice that has grown past one offer, it is the first thing to outgrow.

The page is a sales asset, not a résumé

Everything above points at the same reframe. A CV lists what you have done, in chronological order, because that is the format a hiring manager expects when comparing candidates for a role. A consultant's website is not competing for a role. It is answering a prospect's specific, three-part question — right person, what happens next, what it costs — and every paragraph that does not move one of those three forward is taking up space that should be doing that work instead.

The founders' version of this same problem, where the page has to carry credibility for a company rather than a practice, is covered in why founders need a personal website — the questions a prospect asks are different, but the underlying discipline, answer what the specific reader needs before anything else, is the same one. It shows up again, in yet another shape, for anyone selling judgment inside a company rather than to a client — the case we make for personal websites for product managers turns on the same substitution, a track record of decisions in place of a title.