We’re an independent company, set up in 2007 and based in London, UK.

sourceforconsulting.com was founded by Fiona Czerniawksa and Joy Burnford. Fiona is one of the world’s leading experts on the consulting industry. Her books include: The Intelligent Client and The Economist book, Business Consulting: A Guide to How it Works and How to Make it Work. Joy Burnford has worked in senior marketing and operations positions at the Management Consultancies Association since 2003. Joy and Fiona have a combined 30 years of experience in marketing consultancy services.

We want to help clients make better decisions about which consulting firm to use – decisions based on information about a firm’s track record not what it may claim to have done in its marketing brochure. We also want to help consulting firms market their services more effectively: a lot of time and money is still being wasted sending generic messages out indiscriminately, and we’d like to change that. We believe that consultants add value, but only when they’re used properly and when clients are in a position to make informed choices between firms that superficially look very similar. We also believe that clients haven’t helped themselves in the past by keeping their cards close to their chest and not discussing potential consulting projects with other users of consultancy.

You can sign up for our informal, monthly newsletter – contact joy.burnford@sourceforconsulting.com.

Leading consulting firms and organisations that spend substantial amounts on consulting each year.

We hold only the bare minimum of information about individuals. Because sourceforconsulting.com is aimed at the buyers and sellers of relatively large-scale consulting services, we’ve a pre-specified list of organisations we are working with or want to work with. If you work in one of these organisations, we’ll simply ask you for your name, job title and email address. We use this information to understand how people are using the website, but we NEVER pass on your personal details to anyone else, unless you explicitly want us to (for example, if you want to send a document to a short-list of firms you’ve selected). We’ll also give you the opportunity to register for our email alerts in specific areas you may be interested in. We may occasionally use your company name, but only in a way that accurately represents our involvement with your company. If you don’t work in one of these organisations, then we’ll ask you for a bit more information about the organisation you do work for. Sometimes this means we have to contact you before we let you have access the website because we want to ensure that we’ve only got genuine users.

We charge consulting firms and annual membership subscription for marketing services relating to the website. However, we make no charge to consulting firms for putting content onto the website, provided they meet our eligibility criteria. Our searches will tell you which piece of work done by a consulting firm meets a client’s requirements most precisely. Some pages have paid-for advertisements on them, but these are clearly marked.

A category is the basic building block of our database. It’s a combination of a consulting service (eg change management) with a sector (eg utilities). By allocating all the material we have to a specific category, we make the database much easier for clients to search and browse and we’re also able to highlight the areas a consulting firm tends to specialise in.

To put material onto the website, you have to start off with a case study. You assign that case study to a particular sector and service (a category in our terms), and clients will then see your case study when they carry out a search within the category. Contact Joy Burnford at joy.burnford@sourceforconsulting.com for more information, or to be taken through the process.

This provides confidentiality to our clients and ensures the quality of all our consulting firms listed.

A client is a decision maker, usually either an end user of consultancy or a consultancy procurement professional, who is looking to buy consulting services.

No. What’s more, because consulting projects are often a mixture of different services, you can assign one case study in anything up to a maximum of five categories. If you want to use the same project in more than five categories, you will need to re-write it so that it highlights these other aspects of the project. What we don't want (because it doesn't help clients) is to have consulting firms putting a small number of generic case studies in a lot of categories.