Building an effective marketing engine for a new business startup.
Start as you mean to go on with a website built for marketing
What did Leadership Lift need?
A new leadership development consultancy with a genuinely differentiated offer – and a website that needed to prove it from day one.
Rich Adams founded Leadership Lift to do something most leadership training providers are not doing: neuroscience-backed, cohort-based coaching delivered remotely to managers in mid-to-large UK organisations. Not an away day. Not a one-off workshop. A structured programme with lasting results.
The problem with launching a consultancy like this is that the market is full of competitors who all look and sound the same. Generic leadership language, stock photography of people in boardrooms, vague promises about unlocking potential. Leadership Lift needed to look and feel different from the moment anyone landed on the site.
The brief was to build the brand, design the site, and get it live in a way that would hold up in conversations with HR and L&D decision-makers at serious organisations.
What the project needed to deliver:
- A brand identity that signalled authority without looking like every other consultancy
- Clear, confident messaging around a specialist offer that needed careful explanation
- Content structured for HR and L&D decision-makers, not a general audience
- A focused site with minimal navigation and a direct path to enquiry
- A platform Rich could manage independently as the business grew
- Technical SEO foundations in place and ready for future content investment
Our approach
Project overview
A brand and website project built from scratch for a new consultancy entering a competitive market. Brand identity, content strategy, site architecture, design and bespoke WordPress build – all handled as a single joined-up project.
Content and messaging
- Worked closely with Rich to shape messaging around services, audience and value proposition
- Competitor research to understand how the market was positioning itself – and where the gaps were
- Content written specifically for HR and L&D decision-makers, not generic business language
- Neuroscience-backed methodology explained clearly without becoming academic or inaccessible
Branding and design
- Custom logo and visual identity developed as part of the project
- Design approach focused on authority and professionalism without defaulting to corporate cliché
- Site structure kept intentionally minimal – focused navigation, clear hierarchy, no unnecessary pages
- Every layout designed to move an HR or L&D professional towards making contact
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme. Purpose-built ACF content blocks give Rich full control over every page without needing technical support. Default Gutenberg blocks disabled entirely – the site stays on-brand and consistent however many updates are made.
Built for performance from the start, with clean code and no third-party framework overhead slowing things down.
SEO foundations
Clean markup, logical page structure and on-page SEO configuration built in throughout. Leadership Lift launched with a site that is ready for content marketing and search investment the moment Rich decides to pursue it – no remedial work required first.
For a consultancy whose clients are likely to search for specific leadership development solutions, being visible in those searches will matter as the brand grows.
Launching a new consultancy?
If you are starting something new and need a brand and website that will hold up in front of serious clients from day one – we should talk.
Tell us what you are building and we will tell you what we would do with it.
The results
This was a brand new site, so we have no comparison data.
95
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Delivered
Brand identity, content strategy and website delivered together as a single joined-up project
Zero
Third-party page builders or plugin frameworks – built entirely on our own custom theme
100%
Of content manageable by Rich directly – no developer needed for updates or new pages
Differentiated
Positioning built around the neuroscience methodology – not generic leadership development language
Ready
SEO and content foundations in place from launch – no remedial work before growth activity can begin
I asked Toast to create a website for a new company. They listened deeply to the brief and created fantastic material which really encapsulated what we wanted to go for.
Dave and the team were responsive and knowledgeable, bringing great ideas to our project that resulted in a polished-looking website and a great product. Their service was excellent, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Branding deliverables
Custom logo supplied in SVG, PNG and PDF formats across full colour, reversed and single colour variations. Digital styling guidelines covering colour palette and typography – everything Rich needs to keep the brand consistent across pitch decks, proposals and any other materials the business produces.
SEO configuration
Page titles, meta descriptions and on-page structure configured throughout the build. Clean markup and logical URL hierarchy from the start – so when Rich is ready to invest in content marketing to reach HR and L&D audiences, the foundations are already there.
Why WordPress was the right platform for Leadership Lift.
Consultancy websites have a specific problem: the work is intangible, the clients are sceptical, and everyone in the space is saying roughly the same thing.
Leadership development is a crowded market. Rich Adams had a genuinely differentiated offer – neuroscience-backed, cohort-based, remote – but without a website that could communicate that clearly and credibly, it would just look like another provider of the same thing everyone else does.
WordPress gave us the control to build something that matched the seriousness of the offer. The content architecture, the page structure, the way the methodology is explained – none of that works on a template. Templates are built for the average case. Leadership Lift is not the average case.
There is also a longer-term argument here. Rich is building a consultancy that will grow through reputation, referrals and content. When he is ready to publish thought leadership, target specific search terms, or build out new programme pages, WordPress will accommodate all of it without migration, without workarounds and without starting again. That is exactly the kind of platform a serious consultancy needs from day one.
