Make a Great HQ - Showcase your niche, validate your experiences, and close clients

What's included in this write-up of how to make your HQ great:

• Your Hero Header
• Your Hero Subheader
• Your Top Accomplishments
• Your Bio and Interests
• Skills & Tools
• Professional Expereince
• Testamonials
• Case Studies
• A Few More Items to Finish Your HQ

Congratulations! Launching your HQ is a huge step to legitimizing and growing your consulting business. We want you to get the most out of your new HQ and empower business growth, so we put together this guide to optimizing your HQ to get leads and grow your business!

This resource is all about converting opportunities into high paying clients. To do that, you need to do two things well with your HQ:

1. Communicate the value you add
2. Legitimize yourself through your experiences

Every section of your HQ helps you accomplish these two things for potential clients. Let's make your HQ stand out in the market.

Your Hero Header

This first part of your HQ with your picture and first two sentences is your Hero. Your Hero headers are crucial. This is the first thing a client will see, and first impressions are important. This Hero section is the quick summary of "what do you do?"

If someone reads nothing else on your page, they can read your header and know what you do. The average consultant might put "SEO" or "Marketing." A great consultant takes this opportunity to communicate the unique value where he/she is the top 1-3% in their field. To do this well, you'll want to be super niche in your area. The more niche, the better. It not only differentiates you, but it also does a better job of communicating your value.

As an example, let's use our CEO Bradley Jacobs. He worked in Operations and Launch at Uber. If he writes in his header "I specialize in Operations and Launch," a potential client really has no idea what he actually does, and would have to go digging a lot further, or might just leave his page and move on.

However, if he writes "I specialize in launching and scaling two-sided, B2B and B2C marketplaces for early stage start-ups" it achieves two things:

1. He's differentiated from other Operations experts out there, and
2. A potential client has a very clear idea of what he can do for them.
   

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Your Hero Subheader

This is a chance to immediately earn credibility, and should support your Hero Header by adding a "how" statement. The header is "what" you do. The subheader provides context into how, or backing up your "what."

For Bradley, he might talk about how he can see the big picture, and set up products and process to enable scale. Or, he can give examples that back up what his niche statement says he's capable of to further support his statement.

In Bradley's case, he's going to use one hard-hitting statement about what he did for a brand name company. It's okay if you don't have a brand name company, but he since he does, he's going to use it to his advantage: "given my experience launching Uber Eats in Miami and Milan, and launching Uber Freight in the US."

If you don't have a brand to mention by name, focus on making this statement actionable and about the outcomes you delivered from your work or previous projects

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Take this opportunity to make your client say "wow!"

To figure out what to put here, you can ask yourself "what is unique about me that enables me to be good at what I do?"

If you're having trouble - think about what you've done in your life / career thus far. You've had accomplishments. You've helped people and companies. You've done impressive things. What about you made those things happen? If you're not sure, start brainstorming by writing down these accomplishments and the skills you have that made them possible.

When this section is set up correctly, even if it's all a clients sees, it's a win. They know what you're capable of doing, and they know what you've done in the past that validates you. When they have a need that arises in your area of expertise, you'll be top of mind and they'll want to hire YOU for that high paying gig!

Your Top Accomplishments

The next thing we want to communicate to a potential client are the industries where you have specific expertise, and what you've done in those industries that support that experience.

Under each industry you have experience is a place to add what you've done that's made the biggest impact. It's one thing to say that you have experience in an industry. It's far more powerful to instead point to something you accomplished in that arena, and the impact it made.

This impact is key→ let the reader visualize what you accomplished for a company. Don't just say that you grew revenue or launched a business. Share how much you grew revenue by or how many users you launched to. The more numbers, the better. Make yourself stand out - this is no time to be humble!

Revisiting our example, for Bradley, he can dive a bit deeper into his experiences at Uber. The key here is to focus on the impact of his work. It's great that he launched Uber Eats and Uber Freight, but what did he accomplish along the way? He can use numbers (1,000 orders on the first day and $1B in value) to quantify his impact and make it easy for a client to see the tangible output of his work.

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Your Bio and Interests

It's time to leverage your personality and character. Your bio is what makes you human, fun, and interesting. Of course a client wants to hire someone that can get the job done, but they also want someone they can connect with, relate to, and enjoy working alongside.

Your bio humanizes you in front of a potential client. Our recommendation for this space is to summarize the work you've done, and share some personal anecdotes or hobbies. In addition to a summary of his previous work, Bradley has included a few topics that a client might relate to or find interesting.

Skills & Tools

Managers don't just want to hire smart people. They want to hire smart people with previous experience and skills, and mastery of tools. Take a minute to add the skills you have and the tools you've worked with. Be comprehensive here - it's okay to add 5-10 skills / tools where you have extensive experience.

For Bradley, this list is:

• Two and three-sided marketplace launches
• B2B and B2C marketplace launches
• SQL
• Process automation
• Process improvement
• Business modeling

Professional Experience

This is essentially your resume, and should be pulled in from LinkedIn. Look through this and make sure it's up to date, has the jobs you want listed on there, and has additional context for each job, which you can see in the small plus sign on the bottom right.

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Testimonials

There's no better way to validate yourself than having people you've worked with vouch for you. The hardest part is getting folks you've worked with to actually do this. So your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to write one. You can remove friction for them in a few ways:

1. Tell them why you need it. If it's someone you've worked with who likes you, they're going to be happy to help you out, they just need some help.
2. Bullet out some traits or projects they could endorse you for.
3. Draft up a testimonial for them that they can revise to make true for them.

You might not hear back immediately - it's okay to be a little annoying here. Shoot them a reminder if you don't hear back in a few days, and ask them politely if they could take a few seconds to do this for you. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to do it.

In the meantime, you can pull some testimonials from LinkedIn if you have them already on there.

Send some notes to request one, we've started a draft for you:

Hi {{first name}},

Hope you're doing well! I enjoyed working with you and all we were able to accomplish together at {{company name here}}. As a quick favor, would you mind writing a brief testimonial I could share with potential consulting clients? It can be a short audio or written message. Thanks so much in advance for your help!

If helpful, feel free to use some language I've included below about our time together.

{{Sentences written from their point of view about what you accomplished together}}.

Thanks so much!

Bradley

When you're uploading these to your HQ you'll want to pull their picture to humanize the person giving you the testimonial. You can ask them for one or simply grab (right click, download) their picture from their LinkedIn profile.

Case Studies

Further legitimize yourself by showcasing how you added value to a company or individual in the form of a case study. You can structure this similarly to a consulting proposal:

• What were the company's challenges?
• What was their beginning state?
• What deliverables did you execute on?
• What was the impact on the company?

If you do nothing else, focus on the impact of the company. If you're having trouble visualizing this, start with the following formula:

"While working at {{company name or type}}, I {{completed this action}} which accomplished {{tangible metrics driven}}."

Example: "While working at AutoX, a Series A self-driving company, I managed their Ops team while we launched a restaurant and grocery delivery marketplace which drove $5,000 worth of orders in our first month."

When answering these questions, avoid vague statements like "worked with stakeholders" or "aligned strategy." Make statements that start with tangible verbs like "created," "grew," "generated," and "captured."

Showcase numbers where you made a real difference for the company. Did you grow revenue? Reduce costs? Get eyeballs on their website? Improve the cost per acquired customer? Reduced churn? Anything you can point to for that company will give a potential client an idea of what you can do for them.

It may take an hour or two to write up a good case study, but you'll use it dozens if not hundreds of times to help qualify yourself. A relevant case study will more than pay for itself in value.

A few more items to finish up your HQ

• Add a scheduling link like Calendly so potential clients can book directly with you
• Social Links - add what you want clients to see. The most common options are LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, and Medium
• Check for typos - review your HQ in detail to catch any errors or typos

Your HQ is now optimized and ready to convert! It's time to share with potential clients to get the word out there.