Culture is not a soft extra for consultancies—it is a powerful growth accelerator. A clear, authentic culture attracts top talent, guides behaviour without bureaucracy, and differentiates smaller firms from vanilla competitors. The most successful consultancies deliberately define values that shape how people work, lead, and serve clients, embedding them into everyday behaviour. When aligned with strategy and lived by leadership, culture strengthens performance, reduces turnover, enhances buyer appeal, and becomes a decisive advantage as firms scale.
Key Takeaways
- Culture’s Crucial Role: A well-defined culture is essential for attracting talent, guiding behavior, and maintaining consistency within consultancies.
- Success Stories: Successful firms like Elixirr, Solidiance, and Secure State highlight how diverse cultural values can drive performance and brand identity.
- Small Firm Advantage: Strong culture is vital for small firms to differentiate from larger competitors and attract top talent.
- Defining Values: Focus on honesty, uniqueness, and practicality when establishing core values. Avoid being generic.
- Consistency is Key: Align culture with the firm’s Unique Value Proposition and ensure leadership exemplifies desired behaviors.
- Managing Growth: Middle management plays a crucial role in maintaining culture as the firm grows.
- Risks of Conformity: A strong culture must remain adaptable to avoid the pitfalls of groupthink and ethical blind spots.
The Importance of Culture in Consultancies
If you think culture is, as an old boss of mine put it, ‘for sandal-wearing yoghurt-munchers’, you won’t get an absence of culture, but you will develop one that is inconsistent and damaging to your performance and brand.
Culture is crucial to the growing firm not only because it attracts and maintains great talent, but also because it ensures people act in the right way without having to create rules and monitoring for all situations. In my view, creating and articulating a strong culture can benefit a firm as much as any financial, marketing or pricing strategy.
Examples of Successful Consultancy Cultures
For my latest book, I interviewed 80 consulting-firm founders who successfully grew and sold their companies, often at valuations around eight times EBITDA. The most successful firms I interviewed not only had strong cultures but were great at communicating cultural values in their messaging, brand and marketing.
- Elixirr’s culture emphasises innovation: ‘We help our clients break away from the pack. We craft tailored, state-of-the-art solutions. Never copy and paste’.
- Solidiance’s was more aggressive – ‘We fight to win’, ‘We punch above our weight’ ‘We like dirty, dangerous work’.
- Secure State promoted a fun, laid-back culture, featuring a beer fridge at work and welcoming employees to bring their dogs.
For others, culture emphasized practicality, hands-on execution, market leadership, intellectual rigor, ambition for clients, and honest, direct communication.
The Role of Culture in Small Firms
Culture is especially important for the small firm because it cannot rely on its brand to win in the two markets crucial for consulting success: employees and clients.
You must deliver exceptional consultants a value proposition outperforming big firms and solo startups across compensation, autonomy, impact, growth, and flexibility. In addition, a strong culture means that people know how to behave without detailed rules and prescriptions: this is especially important when you scale and the risk of bureaucracy stifling innovation increases.
A great culture distinguishes your firm from the vanilla cultures of larger firms. If you examine the espoused values of the large firms, they are loosely the same: ‘integrity, team-work, diversity, blah blah’.
This is because they need to play safe and appeal to the mass market. You don’t face this problem, and if you try to compete with vanilla, you will likely fail. So, discuss your values and desired culture honestly; the world will quickly expose and share any inauthenticity online.
Principles for Defining Your Consultancy’s Values
There are some basic principles when thinking about the values you prize:
- Be honest
- Don’t have a long list. Five is better than ten, and three is better than five.
- Think about what you don’t want on the list
- Focus on what makes you unique
- Think about what clients you love working with (and those you don’t)
- Think about what type of people you want with you (and those you don’t!)
- Don’t be vanilla
Embed values by having leaders model them consistently and integrating them into hiring, promotions, client choices, and firm branding.
Traditions, competences, symbols, and artefacts reinforce values, but behaviour reinforces them most, as an old story illustrates.
The Power of Consistent Behavior in Shaping Culture
In 1966, researchers put 5 monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading to some bananas hanging at the top of the cage. Every time a monkey climbed the ladder, the whole troupe were sprayed with icy water.
Eventually, no monkeys tried to get the banana s. When a new monkey replaced the original, it attempted to climb the ladder but was attacked by the other monkeys.
Eventually, the new monkey knew not to try. One by one, each original monkey was substituted with a new monkey and the cycle of climbing, icy showers and learning was repeated each time.
Eventually, five monkeys, never sprayed with water, still refused to climb the ladder despite all prior lessons and attempts. None of them knew why. The lesson is that consistent behaviour creates norms, and you are one of the first monkeys.
The most important thing is a strong sense of consistency between Unique Value Proposition, your niche and your culture. There is no point saying you have a culture which values work-life balance if your high-leverage business model means that juniors are hammered or saying that ethics is fundamental to the company if you do PR for the coal industry. Clients and employees can sniff out disingenuous firms, and you are likely to lose both.
The Impact of Culture on Business Success
As Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, put it, ‘culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value’. Successful firms almost all mentioned their culture or values as a fundamental pillar of their growth. Creating a great culture has huge advantages.
It can lower turnover and attract quality new candidates, make the firm more attractive to buyers, and reduce the overall need for mentoring, management and supervision. Perhaps most importantly, it guides the actions of employees instead of relying on a host of rules and regulations.
Although I have found little correlation between growing and selling a consultancy and the job satisfaction of the employees within that consultancy , unsurprisingly, those with happier employees had much lower turnover, which is especially important for small firms struggling to attract quality talent.
Generally speaking, it is necessary to treat employees who are highly skilled in a rare area very well indeed, especially if their deliverables are ambiguous and thus dependent upon their good-will or work ‘beyond contract’.
A great culture does not happen spontaneously. It is something that has to be fostered and also articulated. In effect, it is a (relatively) Unique Value Proposition for employees.
It is managed by both hard and soft mechanisms which include:
- Clearly articulated and communicated non-negotiable values
- Consistency between UVP, strategy, branding and marketing
- Consistency between articulated values and actual practice (rhetoric vs. reality!)
- A clear link between cultural priorities and recruitment, training, reward, and promotion.
- Clear symbols, rituals and stories representing and reinforcing your culture
- Strong emphasis on company and team camaraderie and ethos
- Leaders who consistently exemplify the desired cultural behaviours
- Some form of democratic participation of employees in forming & reforming cultural priorities
By developing a specific culture you attract some but also repel others. However, being vanilla is not an option. Vanilla people go to vanilla brands like Deloitte or Accenture, so there is no point competing in that space. You are better off nailing your colours to your mast and attracting people who think like you.
Maintaining Culture During Business Growth
The challenge, however, is how to maintain a strong culture when the firm grows beyond 30-40 employees. The key to this, in my experience, is middle management. All the points above should be maintained, but in addition, middle management need to be incentivised and encouraged to be champions for culture if it is going to permeate a larger organisation.
Of course, there is a risk to a strong culture, which is that it can promote conformity and a bias against change and innovation. I feel this is what happened to McKinsey & Co. in the 2000s, when an incredibly strong traditional culture no longer matched the shifting values of clients and wider public.
The series of ethical scandals and how they were handled, to me, showed that McKinsey & Co. did not only have a problem with ethical practice, but were incapable of seeing how bad it was. The cultural and economic dangers of ‘groupthink’ emphasise the importance of a culture that is both strong, but also reflective and open to change.
