Every boutique firm I've ever worked with says some vatiation of the same thing: "We have the best people who've sat in your seat."
It's not wrong. It's just not a differentiator.
Abelian Partners came to me because they were tired of losing the deals they really wanted. They'd win the small audit or the narrow-scope project, and the big strategy engagement would go to a name-brand firm. Every. Single. Time. What we uncovered over the following months wasn't a marketing problem. It was a risk problem. And the solution wasn't a new tagline. It was a shift in how the firm creates safety for the buyer before the first conversation ever happens.
Here's how it played out.
The Challenge
Abelian Partners is a commercial banking consultancy. Their team is stacked with former banking executives. People who've sat in the seat, managed the portfolios, and navigated the regulatory gauntlet. They know commercial banking inside and out.
And yet, they couldn't break through against the Big Four and MBB.
The pattern was predictable: a regional bank would have a modernization problem. They'd bring in Abelian for a small diagnostic or audit. Abelian would do great work. Then the real implementation — the multi-year, multi-million-dollar engagement — would go to Deloitte or PwC. The "safe" choice.
When Charles Rierson, Abelian's founder, first reached out, he told me the thing that resonated most with him from my content was the concept of de-risking as a competitive strategy. A boutique firm, compared to a name-brand incumbent, is always the riskier proposition for the buyer. Not because the work is worse — often it's better — but because the buyer has to stake their personal reputation on the decision. That insight became the lens for everything that followed.
The Work
The engagement followed the full Positioning Clarity Sprint — a three-part process I've developed that aligns who the founder is, how they want the firm to be seen, and what the market actually needs.
Part 1: Owner's Clarity
Before we touched anything market-facing, I spent three weeks with Charles — first virtually, then in person — working through what I call Owner's Clarity.
It's a hard look at what the founder actually wants from the business, not just financially but emotionally. This work gets very personal, so I can't get into it here, but what's important is that we identified why it was so important for Charles that his firm be known as being "practitioner-led", and we made sure to work that into the rest of the positioning work.
Part 2: Positioning Reality
While we worked on the internal alignment, I ran a parallel track: qualitative buyer research. We interviewed nine commercial banking executives, Abelian's exact ICP, to understand how they actually think about hiring consulting firms.
What came back validated what Abelian's partners already felt, and shed light on a few key insights they hadn't yet uncovered.
Yes, these executives understood that specialty boutiques often do better work than the big firms. They said so explicitly. But they also described a personal risk calculus that no amount of capability-bragging could overcome.
When an EVP, CRO or CFO at a regional bank signs off on a multimillion-dollar engagement with an unknown firm, they're not just spending budget. They're staking their reputation. If it goes sideways, it's their reputation on the line. And in a regulated industry like commercial banking, one of the most critical factors was whether the firm was known by the regional regulators.
We also learned that the buyers most willing to try a new firm were looking for innovative solutions and opportunities, that they could test out within their existing legacy systems and processes. They were looking for Practical Innovation.
This research gave us something most positioning exercises lack: external truth. We weren't guessing what the market wanted. We knew.
Part 3: Positioning Intent
With Owner's Clarity as the internal anchor and Positioning Reality as the external compass, we ran a full-day Positioning Intent workshop, followed by several virtual sessions, to define exactly how Abelian would be seen in the market.
Here's what we landed.
The old positioning was "practitioner-led financial services firm." Fine, but undifferentiated. Every boutique says that.
The new positioning: Practical Commercial Banking Innovation for Growth-Minded Financial Services Firms.
Not a tagline. An organizing principle. And it rests on two pillars:
- Explicit: Practical. Abelian's team are bankers who became consultants. They speak bank. They ground every recommendation in real economics — revenue, cost, capital, workflow. No abstract transformation rhetoric.
- Implicit: Empowerment. The reason Abelian succeeds where others fail is that they don't just deliver recommendations — they equip the client's internal team to execute. You can't pitch "empowerment" directly. But it has to be present in the service design, the sales process, and every client interaction.
From there, we defined the full infrastructure, and the roadmap to build it:
Intellectual Property: we codified their Practical Innovation methodology, planned a few specific thought leadership pieces to bring it to market in a tangible and non-threatening way, and then planned a commercial banking innovation research study (which is currently in development).
Functional Differentiation: we mapped out an innovation readiness assessment along with a Practical Innovation Sprint which then turns into a way to run annual innovation planning for existing clients, and all of that feeds into modular implementation workstreams. Standardized enough to deliver consistent quality across a core set of use cases, but flexible enough to offer the practical bespoke service they are already known for.
Go-to-Market: we developed their strategic narrative, framing the problem definition and mothodology interms of the major shift that's happening. We structured a personal brand program for the partners, and a research-driven conversation engine, built around the research study amongst other things. And all of it culminating in a planned summit that Abelian will host in late 2027.
The Deliverables and Their Value:
- Owner's Clarity Workbook A single-page personal mandate that aligned Charles's life goals with the firm's strategic direction. Prevented us from building a firm he wouldn't want to run.
- Buyer Research Report Nine qualitative interviews that revealed the actual risk calculus of commercial banking executives. Replaced guesswork with evidence.
- Positioning Strategy ICP definition, psychographic profile, risk perception matrix, explicit/implicit positioning framework, and IP/GTM/Functional strategy pillars. The master blueprint.
- Strategic Narrative A narrative document that reframes the market problem, introduces Practical Innovation, and positions Abelian as the obvious lowest-risk choice. The source text for all go-to-market content.
- Positioning Activation Roadmap An operating plan with prioritized workstreams, timelines, owners, budget modeling and success metrics. Turned strategy into an executable quarter-by-quarter plan.
The Impact
Here's what happened once the positioning infrastructure started taking shape.
While we were still building out the activation plan, Abelian began testing the Practical Innovation Sprint with existing prospects. The response was immediate. Prospects who had been stuck in "maybe" territory started moving. The Sprint gave them a low-risk way to experience Abelian's methodology without committing to a major engagement.
Dormant pipeline was reactivated.
On LinkedIn, the shift was equally measurable. Once the strategic narrative was being tested across partner profiles and content, the types of engagement and conversations changed, with more ICP-qualified executives engaging with specific methodology content.
"Raymond changed his script a bit based on our positioning workshops 2 weeks back and that it really landed well with prospects."
The Stumbling Blocks
It wasn't all clean. Three challenges are worth naming because they're the ones most boutique firms will hit.
1. The Founder's Self-Concept
Charles was more self-aware than most founders I work with, but there were still moments where my assessment landed differently on paper than it did in person. We went through multiple iterations on the Owner's Clarity deliverable where he'd agree in the room, then push back after reading the written version. I had to learn where to press and where to let the written record reflect what he was ready to own publicly versus what we'd discussed privately.
This is normal. Owner's Clarity is deeply personal. If the founder isn't a little uncomfortable, you probably haven't gone deep enough.
2. Senior Team Alignment
A few senior executives brought into the project were at very different levels of understanding about the purpose and how it would play out. We had to rehash and re-clarify several times to bring everyone back to alignment. Positioning work can't just live with the founder. The people who have to sell and deliver it need to internalize it too.
3. Budget Constraints on Implementation
Abelian had limited budget for the implementation phase. A full retainer-based advisory engagement wasn't in the cards. The solution was a highly detailed activation roadmap with extensive advisory notes baked in, plus direct introductions to trusted, affordable execution partners for specific workstreams (like the research study). Not ideal, but practical. Which, fittingly, is the whole point.
The Framework: Positioning Clarity Sprint
The context and the implementation are different, but the path to clarity is always the same:
- Owner's Clarity answers: Who is the founder, what do they actually want, and what kind of firm would they actually run?
- Positioning Intent answers: How do we want to be seen, and what infrastructure (IP, services, GTM) makes that real?
- Positioning Reality answers: What does the market actually need, how do buyers perceive risk, and what would make us the safest choice?
When all three align, you get more than a clever tagline. You get truth and resiliency. True to the founder. True to the market. True to the capabilities you actually have.
Most firms skip Owner's Clarity entirely, they often ignore Positioning Reality, and they sometimes intentionally position based on capabilities (which are generally commodities) instead of real differentiators. That's why most messaging sounds the same. You can't differentiate on "our people and our process" because everyone says that. You differentiate by being specific about what you believe, how you work, and why that makes the buyer safer.
What This Means for You
If you're running a boutique consulting or advisory firm and you're tired of winning the small stuff while the big engagements go to the name-brand players, the problem probably isn't your capabilities. It's that you haven't made yourself the lowest-risk choice.
The fix isn't a better tagline. It's infrastructure: codified IP that builds credibility before the sale, entry-level offers that let buyers test you without staking their reputation, and a strategic narrative that reframes the problem in a way only you can solve.
That's what Positioning Clarity does. And it starts with the founder, not the market.
If this resonated, I'd love to hear what you're wrestling with. book a call, or forward this to a peer who's in the thick of the same challenge. These case studies only work if they spark real conversations.
