What Not Publishing Clients Actually Costs

A small private-advisory practice that publishes no client names, no testimonials, and no case studies carries a particular discipline. The discipline is visible only by its absence. A note on what it involves.

Every conversation about marketing private advisory work eventually arrives at the same question: how do prospective clients know what the practice has done? The honest answer is that, in the private-advisory world, they do not learn from published material. They learn from the advisers, counsel, and bankers in their network who recommend the practice or do not.

What this implies operationally is that the practice must be acceptable, in a way that admits of no exception, to the advisers in its network. An adviser who introduces a client to the desk and is then embarrassed by some aspect of the desk's conduct will not introduce a second client. The aggregation of such introductions, and the aggregation of advisers who introduce confidently, is the practice's growth path. There is no other path that operates at this scale of work.

The discipline of not publishing clients also imposes a kind of editorial restraint on what the practice writes generally. The desk publishes a great deal of material; it publishes no material that draws on client engagements. The material it publishes draws on the wider information environment, on regulatory developments, on the desk's own methodology, and on observations that any thoughtful observer of the relevant fields could make. None of it leaks any client's circumstances.

What the practice loses by this is the ability to demonstrate, in concrete terms, what its work looks like. What it gains is the only thing that matters in this kind of work: complete confidence on the part of clients and advisers that the engagement they take is not material for the practice's marketing.

The trade-off is heavily in favour of the gain. It would not be possible for a serious private-advisory practice to operate any other way.