We help professional services firms break away from the pack
Managing partners and Practice Leaders want to define their markets, punch above their weight, and play offense—not defense. Doing so requires a more sophisticated sales and marketing approach than most firms can deliver. That’s where we come in—literally.
There are two Marketing Schools of Thought in Professional Services
The one your firm has chosen is delivering your current results. Did you choose the right school?
We serve managing partners of middle-market professional services firms who want to own their markets.
Our clients sell sophisticated solutions to sophisticated buyers through complex buying cycles. Their markets are competitive, demanding, and dynamic. Their employees are intelligent, driven, and client-centric. Their organizational structures are matrixed and geographically dispersed. These firms are complex hybrids that provide a dynamic combination of professional services, software, and data.
These leaders want guidance and demand prudent, proven solutions that raise revenue significantly and define the market on their terms.
After 20 years in the marketing hot seat helping top global consulting firms grow, I created Prudent Pedal to help professional services firms realize their full potential.
How We Do It
Drop the “ing.” To steal a line, “It’s Market Strategy, stupid.”
Like Jobs at Apple, Knight at Nike, and Musk at Tesla, our best clients know that Marketing’s job is NOT communications or making things pretty.
Finance counts and disperses the money. HR recruits and pays people. IT runs the gears of the modern machine. Legal reduces risk. Sales closes the deal. Marketing does what the rest of the organization either does not do, cannot do, or will not do. It identifies the client to “get,” determines what it takes to “get” them, and guides the firm to “keep” them.
Marketing is the business. Everything else is Marketing’s lever.
We pull the levers that enable your firm to deliver above-industry growth rates, reduce sales cycle time, and deliver a differentiated client experience.
Get greater returns for the energy invested
Marketing is simple. What makes it difficult is all the sand in the unique professional services firm gears.
All professional services firms share innate growth hurdles: matrix structures, partnership heirarchies, conflicting incentives, fungible offerings, hyper-competitive markets, and recalcitrant partners. We call this the BS of PS. Top firms turn these barriers into opportunities by making different, smarter strategic choices that recognize the uniqueness of the firm and the people it attracts. Then, they deploy those choices through action-oriented sales and marketing approaches that play to THEIR capabilities and cultures.
Firms that fail to address the BS of PS waste billable time, squander sales and marketing investments, and limit their own growth potential. Ultimately, firms who refuse to address it get left behind.
What We Do
Fractional CMO
We provide proven marketing thinking and leadership capability.
Consulting
We help firms build on strengths or address the causes of underperformance—not the symptoms.
Coaching
We help talented, but unseasoned, marketers become CMOs who have a strategic impact on firm performance.
You want to grow, but is your firm ready?
Self-score your firm’s effectiveness in 11 critical growth areas.
Jeff contributed far more to the organization than we could have dared to ask: he stepped in and led the marketing team as if he had been there for years, serving as mentor to support their professional development; he successfully ran and improved the marketing processes during a series of high pressure and time-sensitive work supporting several large software releases; and he provided strategic consultative guidance to the management team…
…few people know how to actively listen, ask provocative questions and penetrate to the heart of a matter…Perhaps, that is why most marketing strategists seem stuck; they can’t explore, search and understand businesses the way Jeff McKay does.
Ready to breakaway from the pack?
Set up a 30-minute conversation. No charge. No pressure. No strings.