Latest posts
The Purpose of a Leader
In my 20 years working with some of the world’s top professional services firms, I have seen firms fly high and I have watched firms crash and burn. All the firms had highly educated people, great client relationships, and money coming in the door, but so many of them...
Are You Building the Reputation You Really Want?
I advise my coaching clients to ask others a peculiar and uncomfortable question for feedback:
How Much Should a Professional Services Firm Spend on Marketing?
This is one of the most popular questions asked among practice leaders and marketers in professional services. An agency colleague told me recently that the correct answer from most marketers is always “more.” Yet, most partners and busines…
Fear and Life Inside the Professional Services Firm
Let’s take a little test about an unseen driver of your firm’s culture and performance.
I am going to give you a list of adjectives that describe you. When you get to one that puts a lump in your throat, makes you sigh, or triggers you to …
Stupid Sh*t Professional Services Marketing Should Not Do
If you’re a practice leader or partner, you’ve probably received your sales “number” for this year. Your primary goal is hitting it. If you want your marketing team to improve your chances of hitting it, then stop asking them to do stupid s…
How Professional Services Firms Can Evaluate Marketing Budgets
As firms divvy up budgets for next year, I thought it a good time to share a framework that firms and practices to evaluate and prioritize marketing programs before money starts flying around.
6 Tips for Assessing Growth Opportunities in Professional Services Firms
Planning for next year is well underway in firms around the world. Soon performance goals and marketing budgets will be allocated in hopes of achieving desired growth. It is an exciting and exhilarating time. Over the years, I’ve seen many zealous practice leaders...
How to Become a More Strategic Thinker
Immersing yourself in business books will never make you a strategic thinker. Not in million years. Clients and friends often ask me how I developed my “strategic thinking ability”—what they sometimes describe as my way of connecting seemingly disconnected things into...
Does Your Firm Have the Confidence To Be an Industry Leader?
Firms often label themselves as “…a Leading (fill in the blank) firm.” I suspect they believe that saying as much will speak the result into being. Unfortunately, as most of us already know, being an industry leader requires much more than saying you are one. When I...
Confusing Brand Awareness and Brand Relevance: Brand Mistake No. 8
More money, time and resources are squandered rebranding entire firms when all firms need to do to drive growth is to build familiarity of the firm’s capability in a smaller, well-defined market segment, service or industry. At the heart of this mistake is confusing...
Using Your Intellectual Capital Agenda to Drive Growth in a Digitized World
In The Marketing Trend Devouring Your Core Business, I described how SaaS companies are using content marketing to aggressively commoditize traditional professional services firms. This week I offer some suggestions firms can put in place to immunize themselves...
Is Your Firm Suffering from Brand Envy? Mistake No. 4
One of the most common refrains I hear from partners who are feeling the rebrand bug is that they feel their firm’s brand is not “cool” or "hip" enough. They want to be associated with a cool brand like Apple, Nike, Facebook, or “Fill in the blank.” Every time a...