The fifth of May is a festival in our home – a day for big hats, Mexican food, and celebrating my son Joshua’s (easy to remember) birthday. It’s also a time of optimism and renewal here in New England as the sunshine returns, and cool rains (not snow!) usher in a start and stop spring. Days like these help me to recharge my business and life – as I hope they do yours. So, out this morning (one foot in front of the other) I worked on priorities for my business and yours. Here are my thoughts – five projects to focus on now -in pushing for extraordinary:
1) Update the business plan. If your firm is like most there’ve been plenty of changes, challenges, and distractions over the last two years. Your business plan may seem hopeless off track, or perhaps just in need of renewal. Whatever the case, a challenging, competitive, and uncertain outlook is no excuse for not planning – it’s just the opposite. However in the new era you must refocus your planning tactics – a shorter ‘long term’ horizon, simplified objectives, focus on real priorities, and a madness for getting things done.
2) Push for alignment of leadership. Always a challenge in professional firms, the consensus and alignment firm’s principals has probably been pressured further of late. And these problems won’t go away or solve themselves – they must be addressed openly, honestly, and candidly – hard work that must be done (an outside facilitator helps a lot). AEE firms will not achieve extraordinary objectives without strong alignment of senior leaders around the big stuff – mission, vision, values, and business strategy.
3) Check in with the marketing plan. Another area where the firm’s efforts may have veered off plan. Some marketing initiatives (that seemed like gold two years ago) don’t seem so sensible today. Perhaps the firm has lost courage in investing for the future, and is instead busy chasing the obvious and available projects (whether they fit or not). It’s probably time for your team to take a breath, look at what’s working and what isn’t, and recommit to a sustainable and future focused effort with marketing and business development.
4) Crank up the business development fitness. Your firm relies on owners, principals, and managers – seller-doers – to find and develop the company’s project work. But there aren’t enough of these that do it well (there never are), and everyone can become better at it. It’s time to stop accepting average (or less) performance with business development. Invest in effective, pragmatic, and industry-focused training for your core team, help them to get organized and focused, and create individualized business development plans that drive real change in behavior and results. [And keep in mind that a 10-15% improvement in business development results will drop a 100% improvement to the bottom line of most AEE firms].
5) Reengineer an operational process (or two). The downturn has exposed our organization’s shortcomings, and reminded many of the importance of operational efficiency. The problems are obvious, but the solutions less so. And too many companies have made the wrong moves – downsizing staff rather than improving processes, systems, and operations in the firm. Leaders know they can’t grow and sustain without a great team, and that top talent will always be in short supply. Now is the time to rethink how things are done (and why). You know what needs work, and the average professional services firm is rife with opportunity for improvement. A few suggestions: project management procedures, employee appraisal and feedback, firm-wide training initiatives, client relationship management, internal meetings and other time management, information and knowledge sharing. Reengineering offers an organized methodology for identifying, analyzing, redesigning, and implementing organizational change and improvement. Pick a process, build a team, and get them busy (and energized) in making the firm a better place.
The choices that leaders make today – on strategies, people, message, and priorities – will set the table for tomorrow, and in large part define company success. Fewer firms will survive simply by showing up, and only those who act now to prepare for success will achieve truly extraordinary outcomes. The sun is shining this morning – let’s be on our way.
Cheers!
