Most professional services firms describe themselves in the same words. That isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s the predictable result of how partnerships agree.

Take the websites of five firms competing in the same market. Remove the names and the logos. Then try to work out which firm is which.

It’s usually harder than it should be. The language converges. Excellence. Client service. Deep expertise. A collaborative culture. Every one of these claims is true, and every one is made, in very similar words, by the four firms alongside it.

This isn’t a problem of quality. Firms rarely lose work because they lack technical competence. In most premium markets, competence is assumed. They lose, or win at lower fees, because buyers can’t see why one firm is better than another. And when buyers can’t see the difference, they fall back on what they can see: who they already know and what each firm charges.

‘Excellence’ survives the partnership because nobody can object to it. And that’s why it’s worthless.

Why intelligent firms end up sounding the same

It’s tempting to blame weak copywriting. It’s almost never that. Sameness is the rational output of a partnership deciding how to describe itself.

Every claim a firm might make has to survive a room full of people professionally trained to find the flaw. A specific claim invites specific questions. Is that true of every practice? Every office? What happens when a client holds us to it? Each question is reasonable, and each round of qualification moves the claim a little closer to the centre. That same reasonableness makes branding a partnership so difficult in the first place.

‘Excellence’ survives that process because nobody can object to it. And that’s why it’s worthless. The firm hasn’t failed to articulate a position. It has succeeded, very efficiently, in articulating the absence of one.

What makes this hard to spot is how coherent it can look. A firm may be entirely agreed on how it describes itself, with every partner saying the same thing in every pitch. Consistency isn’t the problem. The problem is that what everyone says so consistently is what everyone else is saying too.

For a successful firm, the cost of sameness is drag rather than decline.

What sameness costs a successful firm

For most firms, none of this feels like a crisis. Work keeps arriving. Partners stay busy. Profits are respectable. That’s what makes the cost so easy to miss. It’s drag rather than decline, often felt when a peer firm appears to be moving ahead quicker and further than seems fair.

It shows up in procurement, where buying teams reduce qualitative claims to spreadsheet comparisons. A firm that positions itself identically to its competitors gets judged on the one column where differences are easy to read: the fee. It shows up, too, in pitches only won on relationships, rarely on reason, which means they’re won far less often beyond the firm’s existing networks.

The drag is getting heavier. Firms now publish more than ever, much of it drafted with tools trained on what everyone else has already said. Buyers, meanwhile, increasingly use similar tools to research and shortlist advisers. Generic language gets averaged out. What remains legible is what’s specific.

A position is what a firm is prepared to be held to.

Anatomy of a position

Positioning is the space a firm occupies in the mind of a buyer. It isn’t a slogan or a visual identity, and it lives in your Big B Brand, not your little b brand. A position that holds has to do three things at once. It has to be true of the firm, something it genuinely does better rather than something it aspires to. It has to matter to clients, rather than flatter the partners. And it can’t already belong to a credible competitor.

Lose any one of those and the position collapses. True and distinctive but irrelevant is a curiosity. Relevant and distinctive but untrue is a liability. True and relevant but shared is simply ‘excellence’ again, which is where most firms live.

The positions that work are usually narrower than firms expect. Kirkland & Ellis is known first for private equity, Quinn Emanuel for business litigation, PA Consulting for innovation, Simon-Kucher for pricing. None of them does only one thing. But each is known for one thing first, and that reputation carries much of what follows.

What changes when a firm chooses

A highly regarded European law firm I worked with illustrates the point. Its lawyers were outstanding, and its clients knew it. But in competitive pitches for the largest mandates, where buyers didn’t already know the firm, it was described in much the same terms as its rivals, and procurement teams saw little reason to pay a premium or take a risk beyond existing relationships.

What changed was a willingness to choose. The firm committed to what it was distinctively good at: depth in fast-growing technology sectors, and a cross-border team model its closest competitors couldn’t easily replicate. The quality of the work didn’t change. What changed was that buyers could finally see it. Within a year, pitch conversion had risen by a third and average fees by seventeen per cent.

Positioning doesn’t manufacture results like that on its own. It closes the gap between excellence and perceived excellence, where much of a firm’s value is often won or lost.

Back to the websites

So go back to those five websites. If the firm’s own description could sit on any of the other four without anyone noticing, it isn’t telling the market it’s excellent. It’s telling the market it hasn’t yet decided what it wants to be chosen for.

The firms that stand out aren’t always ‘better’ than their rivals. They’ve simply been willing to commit to something their rivals would rather qualify.

Excellence is what every firm claims. A position is what a firm is prepared to be held to.