Haswell Creative — Case Study 16

Northbridge Advisory · Financial Services

Selling judgment, on a site with none

Northbridge sells strategic financial judgment to growing companies — the kind of hire a founder makes once they're past guessing. Their own site read like the generic ‘expert accounting services’ page it was built from, with no evidence any of that judgment existed.

Role
Website redesign, UX, build
Year
2025
Deliverables
Responsive site, service pages, strategy call booking, results page
The Northbridge Advisory homepage shown on a laptop and a phone, a photograph of professionals in a meeting with the headline Expert Accounting Services.
A perfectly competent stock photo and headline that could have belonged to any accounting firm in any city — nothing said fractional CFO, or why a founder should call specifically them.

The problem

A fractional CFO practice sells on judgment earned across other companies' balance sheets — the pitch is essentially “hire someone who has already seen your problem before.” Northbridge's site never made that case. It read as generic bookkeeping copy, no different from a firm that files quarterly returns.

Founders considering a fractional CFO are usually comparing a short list of specific candidates, and they're looking for evidence: past results, a clear scope of what “fractional” actually means week to week, and enough specificity to trust someone with financial forecasting rather than just tax compliance.

None of that existed on the site. There was no results page, no distinction between the services Northbridge offered and what any accountant could do, and no clear next step beyond a generic contact form that gave no sense of what a first call would cover.


The approach

Three moves, in order.

01

Name the fractional CFO services specifically

Fractional CFO, Financial Forecasting and Board Reporting replaced generic accounting language, making clear this is strategic work, not bookkeeping.

02

Put real results on the page

A results page with concrete figures — revenue growth, time to profitability, companies advised — gives a founder something to evaluate beyond a promise.

03

Qualify the strategy call before it happens

The booking form asks for revenue range and primary goal, so the first conversation is scoped to the founder's actual stage rather than a generic sales pitch.

The work

What we built.

The new homepage

The new Northbridge homepage on desktop and mobile: a dark slate hero reading The CFO you hire once, with three large emerald statistics beneath.
The homepage, leading with evidence. Results appear as oversized numbers — what a founder is actually comparing candidates on.
The services page on a dark slate background: a three-card grid for Fractional CFO, Financial Forecasting and Board Reporting, each with a thin emerald line icon.
Strategic services, named as strategic services — not folded into generic accounting language.
The book a strategy call page: a dark form card with company name, annual revenue range and primary goal fields, and a Request Call button.
A call scoped to the founder's stage before it's even booked.
The client results page: three large stat numbers on a dark background — 38% revenue growth, 4 months to profitability, 12 companies advised — each with a short caption.
Concrete numbers, the kind of evidence a founder is actually comparing candidates on.

Also delivered

A short case study format the firm can reuse for each new engagement, since one of the biggest gaps was having zero record of past work anywhere a prospective client could see it.

Results

First two quarters on the new site.

+57%

Strategy calls booked with revenue range attached

2.2×

Average deal size of new engagements

+33%

Founders citing the results page as a deciding factor

1

Site that finally reads as strategic, not generic

“We were losing founders to firms with worse judgment but a better website. Once ours actually showed results instead of a stock photo, the conversations changed — people arrived already sold on the strategic part.”

Imani ColeFounder, Northbridge Advisory

Figures are illustrative of the outcomes this engagement was designed to produce and are shown here for portfolio purposes.