Latest posts
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 a 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...
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...
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...
The Marketing Trend Devouring Your Firm’s Core Business
There is much talk about digitization’s impact on blue-collar jobs, including job elimination, skill depletion, and role obsolescence. From my vantage point, the risk is just as high, if not higher, for many “white-collar” jobs. The phenomenon is hitting some experts...
Why I am Building a New Firm
If you have been reading my blog for some time, you know that one of the key tenets of my growth philosophy is that firms must align their core capabilities, market opportunities, and brand relevance if they want to set a smart growth strategy in motion. Today, we are...
Don’t Make This Big Mistake With Your Brand Values: Branding Mistake No. 11
Many firms don’t formally define values until an agency tells them during a branding initiative that it is important to articulate "brand values." Of course, all agencies have some methodology to facilitate brand values discussions and build consensus (See Mistake No....
How to Avoid Mismanaging Personal Brands: Branding Mistake No. 21
You can tell a lot about a firm when the topic of "personal brands" comes up. Among intelligent, driven people, discussions about personal brands can get a little heated. There are firms that quash personal brands and firms that buy them as a growth strategy. Both...
LISTEN to the Only Podcast Addressing “The BS of PS”
Rattle and Pedal, hosted by Jeff McKay and Jason Mlicki, offers divergent thinking on growing professional services firms. Be prepared for an unorthodox exchange on life in professional services.
