Golden Practices Blog

Set People Up For Success. Be a Bob.

Setting people up for success is something of an art.

Bob had it down pat; he was the consummate professional. He’s retired now, but his reputation of wisdom and effectiveness was earned over decades of consistently demonstrating both of these traits. In his role as a senior partner of his midsized CPA firm, he was kind but firm, and always sincere. Bob never said something unless he meant it.

Bob’s exactly the kind of guy you don’t want to disappoint. And exactly the kind of guy people want to hire.

It was almost noon and I stood in his firm’s lobby awaiting my lunch mates. As I waited, I witnessed one of the finest business lessons I’ve seen.

A somewhat shy new guy—a bright young auditor right out of college—stood near me. Let’s call him Dan. It was Dan’s first day so he’d been hurriedly introduced to everyone in the office. Now he was waiting for some of his team members to take him to lunch.

Bob entered the lobby from the interior offices right as a couple people came in the front door. Bob warmly greeted the clients who appeared to be meeting him for lunch. Always thoughtful, Bob turned and introduced the receptionist, then me. Then, he did something pretty extraordinary.

Without missing a beat, Bob took a couple steps positioning himself beside Dan and, in a fatherly sort of way, put his hand on Dan’s back, kind of behind his shoulder. Smiling, he announced proudly:

“And this is Dan! He is going to be on your audit team this year and you’ll be in excellent hands with him.”

Several great things had just happened.

Top 10 Marketing & Sales FAQs for CPA and Law Firm Partners

I wrote these FAQs several years ago for my original website and, when renovating that site, I posted it on a magazine site I used to contribute to. But I just discovered this content is no longer online. Yikes!

It's evergreen material and lots of partners and marketing professionals have said that it's useful so I'm happy to share it again for your reference. 

Top 10 Marketing and Sales FAQs

1. Why do we need to market when we can barely staff the work we have?
2. What is the difference between “marketing” and “selling?”
3. Can I expect a marketer to generate new business leads?
4. How should sales and marketing functions be aligned?
5. What does a marketing person do?
6. How can I tell if our firm needs an in-house marketing person?
7. What level of marketer does my firm need?
8. To whom should the marketer report?
9. When can we expect to see marketing results?
10. How might marketing’s cultural changes affect my firm?

Why do we need to market when we can barely staff the work we have?

Perhaps you don’t.

The Original Accounting and Law Marketing Professional, Bruce Marcus, Releases 16th Book

A few months ago, I had one of those career shock-and-honor moments. 

Bruce Marcus (of The Marcus Report and Marcus Letter fame) called to ask me if I would write the introduction for his sixteenth book Professional Services Marketing 3.0.

I've long been a reader of Bruce's musings and admirer of his no-holds-barred views about firms and their operations. I particularly appreciate that he never tried to separate marketing from ops; he agrees they are integral. 

Allow me to tell you a little about Bruce. He joined Peat Marwick Mitchell in 1951 (after serving the our country during a fairly major event) and his career includes law as well as public accounting.

With his keen eyes open—his majors were econ and philosophy—he experienced, first hand, the dramatic evolution of professional service firms from "we don't market" to post-Bates decision assertions of "we'll advertise over my dead body" to fairly sophisticated modern marketing including the social web (which Bruce, an octogenarian, uses daily).

He was, quite literally, the very first communications director at a then Big-Eight CPA firm. He's done much in his prestigious career: http://www.marcusletter.com/Background.htm

Because Bruce has an incredibly open mind and reflects in order to advance, there really is no one better to help us envision where the professions need to be. He's watched from the birth of professional firm marketing, through its toddlerhood, and into its rocky teens. Professional firm marketing is now entering adulthood and we need perspective. This book provides it.

Here are a few excerpts from the introduction that can be read in full here.

Bruce Marcus’ newest book documents an important evolution in professional firms and the way law and accounting firms interact with current and prospective buyers. These interactions include serving the client, but also—quite importantly—reflecting how people working in firms present themselves in terms of their ability to bring true value to those who hire them.

The future of marketing is enhanced by understanding the past and present. It’s extremely rare to meet and learn from someone with the vast experiences of Mr. Marcus. It’s rarer yet to come upon a person who also maintains an extraordinarily open mind to new perspectives on the art and science of which he is already a master many times over.

To study the lessons within this book is an investment well worth making; may your mind be as open as the author’s as you explore the pages that follow.

Professional Services Marketing 3.0 is the story no one but Bruce could be in a position to tell. Enjoy...

Fly On The Wall #6: The Apprentice Who Can't Take Over the Practice

This is my first Fly On The Wall (FOTW) post in a while. 

My initial FOTW post describes what inspired the series. And maybe you'll enjoy some of the others:

FOTW #1: Respect, Referrals & Cross-selling
FOTW #2: If Internal Communication is Poor, Can You Still Have a "Great Culture"?
FOTW #3: "We Don't Have the Right People."
FOTW #4: What Happens When People Are in Your Lobby?
FOTW #5: "It's Not Us." (All About Sam)

Today, I want to talk about a recent revelation I've had that a problem I thought I just observed "here and there" is actually so common that I now estimate it occurs in about a third of the 100+ firms I've been exposed to during the past 12 years that I've spent consulting.

Here's the scenario.

Introducing the Partner and the Apprentice

There's a dynamic, successful partner with some of these traits:

• A natural at marketing.
  By that, I mean that she makes friends readily and plants seeds with just about everyone she meets. She exudes confidence and is pleasant to interact with. She burns through a box of business cards ten times faster than anyone else. She'll go in for surgery and leave the hospital with a new client or two.
• An expert or niche-practice specialist.
  He is considered one of the leaders among peers. Unquestionable that he's good at what he does—solid credentials back up any claims of quality, and happy clients abound.
• Recurring referrals from the same sources.
  Referrals keep coming from the same people because the work is that good and the quality is that consistent. Her referrals feed the firm well and the practice area grows. Team members are added to support the practice and do the work that she brings in. 
• Meticulous about work and service quality.
  He may believe that few people can perform to his level, and trust is limited to a few key people that work particularly closely with him. It makes sense! Quality is how he built the practice and keeping that reputation intact is essential to the continuity of the happy clients and referral sources.
• Tight control of relationships.
  She's worked hard to earn the business. The most trusted team members have some client contact, but aren't perceived to be truly "in charge" of the work—she's the primary contact for the key decision makers. Her referral sources either haven't met any of the other team members, or aren't encouraged to communicate directly with them.

Then there's someone junior to that partner. This person has some of these traits:

• Highly valued right arm to the partner. 
  She's reliable, conscientious, and very competent. Her strong technical skills, consistent delivery, and unquestionable dedication are why the partner relies on her so heavily.
• No book of business.
  He was handpicked to work for the partner and support the growing practice. The partner brings in plenty of work and, as the first person the partner turns to for leading the project, there's been no need for him to develop business of his own. In fact, the partner hasn't encouraged him to get involved with the firm's marketing and might even discourage it saying, "we have so much going on, don't worry about that right now."
• Full plate.
  Work's lined up for the foreseeable future. There's no need to "shop" internally for other projects to work on, thus no chance to participate in other practice areas. Others in the firm don't consider her as a resource because she never has time to do anything but the partner's work. They may even be a little jealous of how important she is to the partner and how she seems exempted from activites the others are expected to participate in (like marketing).
• Non-equity partner or forever manager or associate.
  Maybe he's never been worried about becoming partner or was made partner without meeting some otherwise key criteria (like having a book of business or demonstrating the abililty to bring in clients). The senior partner might have lobbied for the promotion explaining he'd be able to bring in business once "partner" was on the business card. An underlying reason for this hope promotion might have been to keep this important worker from defecting. 
• Subdued personality.
  She has a reserved nature, rather the opposite of the natural-marketer tendencies of the senior partner. She's happy to have such a great role and the respect of the dynamic partner. And she's glad she doesn't have to do that marketing stuff because it would be uncomfortable and maybe even a little beneath her to do it. Quite frankly, though people in the firm know she's a pro, she doesn't exactly exude "confidence" to strangers. This might be a reason she's not introduced to referral sources.

 

What's Actually Happening

An apprentice is someone who invests in learning a craft from the skilled employer. And if you learn well, you can earn the privilege of being groomed to eventually take over the practice. There is nothing wrong with this model. 

The problem I keep seeing in the accounting and legal professions is that there are too many partner-apprentice situations similar to the one I described.

The "grooming" part is more or less missing.

For years the team approach works well for both people, but what's frighteningly absent is self-sufficiency of the junior person. It's a co-dependency. And everyone ends up hurt in the long run: the junior person, the clients, the firm, and possibly even the senior partner if she really did hope to build a legacy practice (sometimes she doesn't actually hope to).

When the partner retires or leaves, continuity of client relationships in this well-established practice area is impaired or in jeopardy. And new work slows to a trickle because the most logical "next in line" hasn't learned the skills and developed the contacts to keep the pipeline full. 

How can this unfortunate situation be avoided?

If You're the Junior

Understand that, even though you probably didn't choose law or accounting in order to get involved in "sales," business development is an absolutely requisite skill set (unless you elect to work in industry rather than practice in a firm). 

Without the skill set, you will forever rely on others to create your work. You'll have less control of your workload, less opportunity to explore other areas of practice, and much less marketability to move as a lateral. Your odds of earning an equity owner position are slim without at least a modest book of business and the ability to grow one.

Maybe that's okay with you—you don't aspire to be an equity owner. That's fine.

But it doesn't change the fact that, essentially, your career future is beyond your control and perhaps threatened when your other half retires or moves on.

If you stay but can't lead the practice group, the firm has to either bring in a new senior partner (pray you get along with him and that he respects and values you like the other one did) or the practice group dries up. Maybe you can start working in another practice area, but you then have to start all over learning a new trade. It's too bad you didn't have much exposure to other practice areas in the past. 

If you look for a position elsewhere, you're now competing with other professionals who do what you do and have a book, or the skills to develop one. Your only remaining option may be an industry position.

Bottom line: don't permit yourself to become dependent on another practitioner to fill your work plate; become proficient at building contacts and discussing your capabilities with confidence as early in your career as possible. These are skills that can be learned with practice.

You may never by the dynamic marketing type that the partner is, but successful marketing doesn't always look like her. Lots of quiet types are very successful at developing business! 

Remember this as you progress in your career: it's far better to get to the point where you bring in work that you don't do than it is to always be doing work that you don't bring in. 

If You're the Partner

If you're the partner, you are doing your colleague a disservice by not urging him or her to obtain the skills and confidence to be self-sufficient in a practice without you.

Even if you don't consider this person to be the ideal future successor, he or she is your right-hand person and if the proverbial bus came along, your cherished clients would all be left in a lurch. Your firm would face the threat of a completely disrupted, significant practice area. And your valued colleague would be stuck in the situation I just described. 

To avoid this, begin introducing your protégé to clients and referral sources. If she really doesn't have what it takes to impress, help her acquire greater confidence by creating opportunities to present to people she's comfortable with on topics she's a master of. Practice is critically important. Few people rock at this without repeat performances. 

If needed, consider some outside skill development. Toastmasters and the like. He probably won't ever be the dynamo you are and that's okay. He doesn't need to be. Enough confidence to instill trust and to be personable and helpful is the minimum you're looking for.

She should have some exposure to clients, new prospect meetings, and get to know your referral sources and their successors. Your demonstration of confidence in your protégé to include her in these meetings will also go a long way toward instilling a sense of (internal) confidence in her. 

In general, if you do expect the person to eventually replace you, be cognizant of the inherent problems when you hire someone "opposite of you" in personality. You're probably setting yourself up for disappointment. The opposite of you is a great worker bee but is not usually successor material unless you are committed to helping him obtain the skills to keep the practice growing long after you are gone.

Seek out a strong worker who is also a people person. He might be harder to tame, but an entrepreneurial spirit will ensure the continuity of your practice.

Building Trust

Super quick blog post for firm owners, mangers and employees. And, well, everyone, really.

Please buy and read this book. 

Buy it for all your partners and managers. Read it before your next retreat or meeting. In fact, you should create a retreat specifically to discuss it.

The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work 

by Charles Feltman

It's 68 pages of brilliance and life-changing perspective from a wise man who claims "there are no new ideas in this book." Well, he does a beautiful job, then, of taking nuggets we need to know and putting them into a form we can apply to our business and personal lives. 

I met Charles when I took his full day session in April at the International Association of Facilitator's conference. It was a day of learning that changed my thinking significantly. But more importantly, it struck me how absolutely helpful this book will be for professional firms.

It's as applicable to customer relationships as it is to firm management. 

After you read it, please let me know what you thought of it. 

Vote Clients "Off the Island" To Make Room for New Ones

 I had made a post to my AccountingWEB blog a few months ago entitled, "Why Do We Need to Market When We Can Barely Staff the Work We Have?"  

Admittedly, capacity isn't as big a problem now as it was just a year or two or three ago. But client quality and profitability are ongoing issues. Here's the whole post:

Why do you need to market? Perhaps you don’t.

Marketing to increase business volume so you can work harder doesn’t sound appealing if you’re already at capacity. However, even if you don’t want more work, you may still want to increase your firm’s health and improve morale. Beefing up the marketing function can help you do these things.

One way to tell if marketing will benefit your firm is to ask yourself these questions:

• Are we meeting our profitability goals? 
• Are we in heaviest demand by our ideal client-types? 
• Do we receive frequent referrals from our clients? 
• Is the work that we do stimulating and enjoyable? 
• Is our personnel retention above average? 
• Are we attracting personnel whom we trust to succeed us? 
• Are we attractively positioned for acquisition?

If you answered “no” to any of the above, marketing can help.

• Do we serve too many problem clients? 
• Are we doing too much low realization work and not enough high realization work? 
• Do we ever set (or reduce) the price after we’ve done the work? 
• Are some partners eager to market while others are content, or even complacent?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, marketing can help.

I just love the comment that fellow blogger Bill Kennedy posted. He wrote (emphasis mine):

Great blog, particularly that comment about too many problem clients. A friend told me about a practice at their firm:  they would get the staff together once a quarter and vote one client "off the island." It didn't mean necessarily severing relations with that client, but it told the partners that they needed to pay some attention to that relationship.

I would absolutely let my team help choose which clients "go." 

Years ago, I attended the Results Accountants Systems 4-day Bootcamp then led by the brilliant Paul Dunn and Ric Payne. And they talked about firms who pass the client list around letting team members "red circle" clients they thought weren't so great to work with. Sometimes the partners had no idea that clients treated team members poorly or failed to be prepared, etc. 

Similarly, in his book True Professionalism, David Maister has a chapter called "Are We Having Fun Yet?" A blog post of his refers to it describing that 20 years of surveying professionals across varying fields shows alarmingly consistent results: only 20-30% of the work we do is work we enjoy, and only 10-20% of clients we serve are clients we really enjoy working with. That's equivalent to about one day of our work week. Life's too short for that!

Also, do you think these other clients can't tell you don't enjoy them and their work? Of course they can! And in this climate of "sharing" on the social web, we simply cannot afford to be mediocre. 

These are great conversations to have in your firm.

Help make room for more clients you enjoy and who appreciate you back.

Photo credit: Craig Anderson, Hamilton Island 2005 on Flickr

Policies for Emerging Technologies

This topic keeps coming up. People have differing comfort levels with newish technologies and therefore have very different tolerance levels for others using it.

True that some people just don't "get it" when it comes to being polite. The cell-phone screamers and mid-conversation texters or email-checkers come to mind.

The common reaction seems to be "We need a company policy for [fill in technology here]?"

For everything from listening to ipods (wrote "iPods Are Not the Enemy") and blogging ("Blogging Policies" post) to streaming video watching at work or accessing facebook, business leaders want policies. Especially accounting and law types. We want to control it!

I've written an article that was just published in Practical Accountant and WebCPA, but it applies across many industries. It's called, "Charting a Firm's Social Media & Communications Policy" and I hope you'll check it out. 

Basically it explores a facilitated session I led with managing partners to explore how to deal with emerging technology urging them to take the time to fully understand it... hopefully BEFORE cranking out a policy banning or stifling its use.

I just read lawyer Jay Shepherd's blog post on Gruntled Employees called Does Your Company Need a Smartphone Policy and he raises some of the same issues and links to three other terrific posts. My favorite is A Two-Word Corporate Blogging Policy.

Something you'll find in my article, above, is that getting the partners/owners on the same page about your policy approach, in order to make policies that make sense, requires giving them the opportunity to hash through what REALLY concerns them, and dealing with those concerns, rather than jumping to policy FIRST.

It's Time

It's, well, time for a LOT of things. But it's high time for two things as I write this:

1) MUST introduce you to Debra Helwig's blog, Service Minded. Debra is the chief evangelist of many things for CPA firm association, IGAF Worldwide. She is committed to the core of continously advancing her association's offerings, quality, and "experiences" for every single member. And she promotes wise practices for every level employee...owner, marketer, receptionist... 

Best of all, she totally practices what she preaches--no easy thing for a busy evangelist and mom. If you are a service provider and you don't read any other blog, you must read hers!

2) You'll see in Debra's recent post, Letting Go, a stark reminder that surrendering less-than-perfect relationships is not just best for you but better for the client, too. We sometimes hang on to client relationships believing we are doing the client a favor, but in many cases, we aren't!

Check out her post. Then subscribe to her blog.

Don't Just Recruit Cool, BE Cool

Rita Keller brings up being "cool" if a firm is going to remain competitive. I agree and expand the point to emphasize it's a two-parter!

The first step is attracting great people. The second and more important part (and much more difficult one) is inspiring them to want to STAY so your firm has the talent AND attitude to continue to do great things for clients.

Rita's post, "Do you speak their language" talks about texting. Specifically, texting used in an accounting firm's recruiting ad. And, sure, it's a clever ad. I don't know the firm, but I hope they have the second part down-pat, too.

Just this month, I've been privvy (with great disapproval) to several firms' conversations about their policies on ipods, text messaging, and so forth. Basically, they say "don't" because "it interferes with productivity." 

Funny. How many of those staffers jammed to their favorite tunes through every homework assignment they've had while they earned their grades that qualified them to join the firm. (Take yourself back a few years...there was definitely a stereo, maybe even a favorite record or cassette, cranked up while I did MY studies. How about you?)

Maybe they're just trying to tune out the office chatter-box so they can get some work done! (Is there a no office chatter-box policy??)

And when I spoke in June at the AAM conference about blogs, a number of attendees said their firms' internet security won't let them access blogs from the office!

A number of firms also deny access to Linked In, Facebook, YouTube and other social networking sites in order to "control timewasting." Blogs and social media tools facilitate some of the most effective marketing and networking going on these days. And firms are blocking them!!

This lockout occurs among roughly 25% of businesses, so it's not just accounting firms who are short-sighted. See David Meerman Scott for that figure on his excellent (and sad) post called "Facebook and YouTube blocked by paranoid corporations at their own peril."

A commenter on David's post says people take advantage and waste hours on the internet to which David wisely responds:

... it is a management issue, not a technology issue. If people mess around at work, it doesn't really matter if it is on Facebook, or chatting by the water cooler, or taking a three hour "shopping lunch". It's all the same - people not doing what they've been paid to do.

I would deal with the behavior. If required, fire the employee who is not working.

Amen.

At any rate, policies like these stink. Most contradict what firms are trying to claim they are: great places to work. These policies (attire, perfume, internet use, ipods...) are insulting because they treat every person on your team as the worst behaved child by making everyone "pay" for the sins of one or two who show poor judgment and ought to just receive a talking to, and maybe a boot, if the talk doesn't work.

I'm picking up Rita's post today because I want to reinforce, all the great "cool" recruiting in the world won't solve the talent crisis. The problem is people leaving once they came, they saw, and they experienced. A lot of firms DO have amazing and cool cultures. And those firms are not seeing the turnover like the ones who get uptight about ipods and blog-reading.

Treat all the people like grown-ups and if some don't choose to act like it, then deal with them individually! But stop punishing the masses or you won't have a mass...there are too many other places for them to go.

It's time to get with the program.

Boredom

I've been thinking a lot about personal responsibility because of David Bohl's great post that I picked up in my recent Carnival of Trust post.

This morning, my daughter and I were having an interesting conversation. She's a couple weeks away from turning six which means she's constantly thinking about a lot of weird stuff and asks a lot of seemingly random questions. She asked me what "bored" means.

She's my fourth (and last) kid. Having three other kids (ages 14, 15 and 23) I've heard at least a couple hundred thousand (rough estimate) exasperated "I'm so bored" statements. Why do kids expect us, their parents, to fix their boredom?

So, I thought, wow, maybe if I define this for her right, I won't have to hear "I'm bored" another hundred thousand times in the next ten or so years.

Somewhat pleased with myself, and inspired by that above-mentioned post on responsibility, I answered her: "Bored is how you feel when you haven't yet decided what you're going to do next."

This makes me think about boredom in jobs, boredom with where we are in life. Has a lot to do with proactivity and decisiveness, doesn't it?

Also has me thinking about needing to teach our kids to rely on themselves more. If we leap to entertain them when they're bored (and what parent hasn't, even if just to shut them up??) how will they learn to be responsible for their own feelings and take action?

Aside from my 'boring' example, are there other ways we unitentionally help kids or employees, or even bosses, be less personally responsible?

A Younger, Hipper Accounting Firm

Great interview on BusinessGears.com picked up from Business Opportunities Blog which publicized two 24 year-old women who started an accounting practice in the UK (Cardiff to be exact).

Sophie Hughes and Lucy Cohen are closing in on revenues (turnover) of almost £120k (about $240K USD) nearing the end of their second year in practice. They have two team members and plans to expand into another city, soon, a few more in due time.

Is this another step in a trend toward breaking free of traditional firms and their stodgy ways? Look at their website and decide for yourself www.MazumaMoney.co.uk.

Their site explains:

Their idea behind setting up the company was to put to rest the stereotypical idea of accountancy and to bring the profession to the attention of young businesses and established companies alike.

Of course, their pricing policy caught my attention, too.

...All these are offered on a “mix and match” basis with a bespoke price to suit your needs. You can even pay monthly so you don’t have to worry about a big accountant’s bill at the end of the year.

"Bespoke" if you're unfamiliar with the mostly British term, means tailored or customized to your EXACT specifications.

The interviewer asked: "It’s quite unusual to have a female-owned and run accountancy…"

Sophie: Definitely, and that’s probably why we’ve had a fairly good reception.

A lot of younger businesses definitely like us, although we don’t just want to appeal to women. There is a solicitor’s firm local to us which only has women working for it, but we’re all equals so we don’t want to come across like that.

But we do think women are attracted to us because we are female. And younger people seem to like us because we’re on the same wavelength.

When asked: "What advice would you give to someone starting a business?"

Sophie: Make sure you do a business plan. It gives you something to measure against what you’ve done.

Another one which Lucy always says is that a lot of people tend to work part-time when they’re setting up their business. But if you do that you can’t focus on your business and it’s never going to be as good as you want it to be. If possible just plunge into it, and if after three months you’re not making any money then fine, get a part-time job. But if you don’t give it 100% commitment right from the beginning then it’s not going to give you 100% reward.

Lucy: Don’t be wishy washy. You have to put in 100% effort, but you also have to be 100% sure. There will inevitably be a time, when you first quit your job, when you wake up at three in the morning thinking “Oh my God, what have I done?”

And money will be tight. You’re always one month away from not being able to pay your mortgage when you’re on a salary so it can be difficult if you have a month without that.

But this is where the planning comes into it. You’ve got to be so good at planning and commit yourself fully to it. You’ve got to go for it.

Good luck ladies, I suspect you'll do quite well!

On Trust

In a comment to a post on the VeraSage blog about micromanaging behaviors, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan pretty much sums up firm trust issues:

So, the basic premise is that the firm must build trust with clients. And I believe it's very hard to trust a group of people who fail to trust each other.

I don't trust my people because they're not trustworthy, but I ask my clients to trust us and give us money. This is a pretty pervert perspective.

What do you think?

Oh, and the post he commented on, Why Don't CPA Firm Leaders Trust Their People? is worth the read!

Recruiting Magnets: Firms of the Future

There's so much more to this story than the recruiting angle. This story is about the future of professional service firms.

But now that I have your attention let me tell you about Brendon Harrex, a senior fellow of VeraSage Institute. He's another innovator turning the professional firm business model upside down!

Brendon, at the age of 31, became the first Chief Value Officer (ever) in his 100-person accounting firm. This means HE was solely in charge of ALL pricing. Read more about this in Ron Baker's post Who's In Charge of Value in Your Firm? where he describes Brendon's role:

If you worked at Ward Wilson, a four-office, ten-partner, one-hundred team member firm in Invercargill, New Zealand, your answer would be Brendon Harrex, who was recently appointed Chief Value Officer, responsible for creating and capturing value across the entire firm. Brendon, at age 31, is the youngest partner in the firm, and is an amazing visionary, bringing leadership not only to his firm, but our entire profession.

Then, at age 33, Brendon was elected chairman of Ward Wilson--the firm had amazing vision. But it also had aging partners who, apparently, were more concerned with their retirement than with the posterity of the profession (my words, not Brendon's!).

Ward Wilson sold to a consolidator. Brendon's window of opportunity opened and he bought out one of WW's offices, the one he led before becoming Chairman. Below is the e-mail he shared with Ron Baker and me about this.

His brilliant ad (pictured, click to enlarge) says:

"If you have get up and go and know you should have got up and left before now, consider the Harrex Group."

Now Brendon has a WAITING LIST of future employees who WANT to come work for him. Read on, the emphasis is mine:

Is Owning Synonymous With Managing

In a recent meeting with Howard Wilkinson, Mercer & Hole's managing partner, we discussed the way decisions are made in many firms. His firm approaches things a bit differently than most.

Discussing this further, he wisely observed that, typically:

"Partnerships confuse management with ownership."

His firm does not. How does your firm approach management and decision-making?

Don't Separate Marketing from Strategy!

A cool marketing blog, Unconventional Thinking, makes a fantastic point about separation of "marketing" from a company's strategies and operations. The post is called The Most Dangerous Term In Business and that term is "marketing department."

Never mind that most marketing actually sucks and fails to stay focused on those key goals. There is another equally ominous danger here. That is, establishing a marketing department effectively balkanizes marketing ideation and implementation from the development and execution of the company’s core business strategy. This cannot be allowed to happen. Marketing is the process of growing a business. To separate it from the development and execution of business strategy means that you are effectively diminishing the impact marketing can have on the company.

I see this soooooo often. Some firms struggle to understand my frustration at their approaches to strategic planning that are many steps removed from their marketing professionals. I've even had a law partner tell me that "marketing has nothing to do with strategic planning." HUH??

Mark continues:

You know how it goes: the top people in the company, be it the president or a management team, develops a plan for how they want to grow the business, and once that is set in stone, they turn to the marketing folks (some think of them as marketing flakes, which they often deserve, because they do not force themselves into the business-building process). The tools and initiatives required to grow the company have to get force-fed into a strategy that has already been signed, sealed and delivered by the powers that be. What an idiotic mistake.

What to do about it?  Mark's first three suggestions:

• Stop allowing your marketing people to be balkanized into a department.
• Instead, make the marketing people part of the management team.
• Weave the marketing people through all of the company’s processes from the beginning

His whole post, and the comments, are worth a read.  (And if you're a marketer, don't let yourself be a "marketing flake"!!)

Can Business Learn From the Military?

I saw something last night that I don't see very often. It was moving and impressive.

Last night, a St Louis news channel ran a story exposing various instances of military recruiters (several branches) who were misleading potential recruits or saying inappropriate things.

Most of the incidents picked up on the 'secret cameras' used by undercover reporters regarded the downplay of danger in serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Certainly, these techniques aren't acceptable and no one in their right mind would try to defend what was blatant misinformation caught on camera.

Or would they? In the corporate and business world, it seems that we often see footage or photos and hear spoken words, yet corporate representatives stand up and make statements that refute what we've seen and heard with our own eyes. Sometimes it's blatant denial and sometimes it's fuzzy logic attempting to explain or justify away what observation or logic tells us is so. 

But do you know what the military did upon being confronted with this troubling news story?

One human, one man, took complete responsibility for the whole thing and took immediate action to correct it. I quote the news:

Lt. Col. Junio-Omaru Barber is the Army recruiting commander for Missouri and southern Illinois....After learning about the I-Team's findings, Barber ordered retraining of all 180 recruiters under his command.

"I'm responsible. I take full responsibility for everything that happens in the St. Louis recruiting battalion," said Barber.

I commend Col. Barber and admire the accountability he demonstrates. Wouldn't the business world do well to emulate this level of responsibility more often?

Measuring What Matters

Those who've read me for awhile probably know that I'm a strong supporter of the writing, research and theories of my brilliant colleague at VeraSage Institute, Ron Baker.

Well, he's done it again. One of the messages Ron has been delivering to professional service firms, since long before I met him in 1999, is that timesheets measure the wrong stuff in professional service firms.

"If I don't use timesheets, how will I know how much to charge?" That's the first question we PSFs ask Ron, literally, every time he speaks. 

The next question asked is:

"But if we don't use timesheets, how do we 'measure' productivity?"   

People argue: "I cannot manage my people if they don't fill out timesheets--I won't know what they are doing."

There are several issues at hand in answering these questions. First, let's admit that there is a successful business or two out there that, without timesheets, seems to inspire and intellectually stimulate their human capital to be highly effective. That's the bottom line firms want, too, right? Effectiveness.

Then there's the question I have: if using timesheets to manage people helps us to be better managers, why are there so many partners and managers with very poor people management skills? (Could it be they are letting timesheets be the 'managers' in lieu of them?)

And, last time I checked, timesheets tell someone what somebody else did yesterday (lagging indicator). Not what they should be doing tomorrow (leading indicator). Shouldn't management focus on directing future results more than reading about past inputs?

Further, in a value pricing environment (one in which we aren't considering hours as a factor in price) we need to assure we are delivering value to our customers in accordance with the expectations we set and the prices we ask. To accomplish this, we need a means of assuring we do the 'right things' (usually client-oriented things as opposed to our own 'realization') to meet those expectations.

So how do we make sure we and the people we manage are doing the "right things tomorrow"?

We must align individual efforts with the goals of the firm which, for optimal firm success, should be aligned with the objectives of the client and establish Key Predictive Indicators for the firm's success through meeting customer expectations and needs.

Ron's newest book entitled Measuring What Matters to Customers: Using Key Predictive Indicators covers this in excellent detail, yet it's an easy read at only 200 pages. You can buy it from Wiley at VeraSage Institute's preferred pricing. (If you don't see -15% applied at checkout, enter code aff15 in the Promotion Code field and click the Apply Discount button.)

Ron's other books including three FREE PDF books can be found at VeraSage's website. The PDF books are: Trashing Timesheets, Burying the Billable Hour (on the move to Value Pricing) and You Are Your Customer List (on customer selection and DEselection).

Full disclosure: I am a Senior Fellow of VeraSage Institute but I do not benefit financially from the organization or any book sales.

Bosses Worthy of Raving About

An uplifting post on Lisa Hanneberg's Management Craft blog just in time for Bosses Day. It's very refreshing to hear people who adore their bosses!

Generation Gap--Less Chasm, More Fissure

I just read with great interest Allison Shields' post "What's Wrong With the New Generation of Lawyers?" referring back to a post Larry Bodine penned back in August called "Generation Gap Hurts Law Firm Marketing."

I really like Allison's take and find myself in strong agreement with her (which happens a lot, actually). What she writes above parallels (though much more eloquently) what ran through my mind when I first read Larry's post.

I don't contest the American Lawyer survey findings that 69% of associates don't expect or desire partnership. I, too, hear this in both law and accounting firms. I agree with her (a former practicing lawyer) that one cannot draw the conclusion (as did Larry) that associates not aspiring to become partner directly correlates with a lack of desire to market.

Allison nicely explains why lack of a clear desire to be partner doesn't necessarily equate to lack of willingness to market.

Just because a lawyer may not want to make partner or have a life-long legal career doesn't necessarily mean that young lawyers aren't interested in their firms, or in marketing. Most young lawyers realize that marketing and bringing in business will increase their professional reputation as well as their own personal bottom line, whether they ultimately stay with their firm or not.

From what I witness, more often than not, associates are more interested in, and willing to participate in, "organized" and "preplanned" marketing activities than are partners.

In the rare instances they don't participate, it is largely because partners don't practice what they preach (i.e. do the marketing planning and activities themselves). Other times it's because associates aren't taught the benefits or techniques of business development. Not taught the benefits to them, they might conclude their marketing efforts are just to drive more profits to partners' pockets.

Stereotypes

In Bodine's post, I really find Cam Marston's narrowly painted stereotypes of Gen X &Y to be heavily (negatively) biased. And Larry's generalization is just as bad: "They don't want to be like the people who are in charge of the firm, the Baby Boomers who have a strong work ethic, are competitive, optimistic and show success visibly with trophies and plaques."

Judging from the people in firms that I meet, this is largely untrue on both sides of the equation. Not all Gen X/Y'ers lack work ethic, competitive spirit, and optimism. Not all "Boomers" have work ethic, are competitive, or care to show success visibly. And certainly, many Boomers have lost their professional optimism.

First of all, I don't think the generations are so far apart, really.

Why do people try to create a chasm, where one needn't exist! Though there are, of course, some differences between people in their 20s/30s and their 50s/60s, it occurs to me that the problems we see in firms aren't so much due to a "Generation Gap." It's a lack of conversation.

Whether in the boardroom, or in the media, sitting around making sweeping generalizations about our differences only makes us less connected, less comfortable with each other, and not more.

Could we possibly approach this in a more UNhealthy manner?

What say we compare what we DO agree on and see how we can build from there?

Where to Start...

Allison writes:

For many lawyers, 'work ethic' has become synonomous with giving over your entire life to your firm and putting the firm ahead of everything else - family, friends, outside interests, and even health. That's not a work ethic - that's slavery. It may bring financial rewards and prestige in some circles, but it also often brings depression, alcoholism, anxiety, stress and a whole host of other problems.

I would say this applies to ALL ages/generations of professionals. Shouldn't we strive to free practioners of ALL ages from this paradigm of unhealthy work attitude?

It's time to have conversations about a better way for the professions to do business. And that includes making it better for all the generations in a firm.

Can Consultants Have More Impact?

To my recent post entitled "The People Problem is Firms' Fault," David Maister commented that he agreed with the points but he posed to consultants the questions:

I agree these are important points and right on target. But I don't think I really understand why those of us who share your point of view, Michelle, seem to be fighting a LOSING battle. What you advocate is becoming less common, not more.

What are we doing wrong in our attempts to have a beneficial impact on the world? If what we suggest would truly help everyone, why isn't it happening? What do WE have to do differently to help make it happen other than just keep on insisting that we're right?

I answered with a comment but wanted to elaborate in this post.

As the last consultant on earth who wants a firm to invest in me for research and development of solutions and then, for whatever reason, fail to implement the solutions they participated in creating—and it breaks my heart when this happens—isn't it the responsibility of the firms, who've looked to us for guidance, to ensure implementation?

So, assuming that the scope of our engagement does not specify implementation (leaving it the firm's responsibility, overall) some of us are still very invested in the outcome. Given this level of care, how can consulting experts be more influential in inspiring firms to desire and achieve results?

These are the largest barriers I see when it comes to implementation:

1) Problems and Solutions are NOT Simple
2) Democratic Leadership
3) Complacency
4) Defensiveness
5) Infrastructure

Perhaps if consultants work with fewer firms but in more depth, the results can be far stronger than when working with more firms, but more superficially.

Problems and Solutions are NOT Simple
They are complex and entirely interrelated. Consultants and media feed "easy" solutions to one small piece of a problem at a time. This doesn't seem problematic at first, and even seems a palatable way to make incremental change.

But what this approach fails to illustrate is exactly how interrelated most problems in firms are (e.g. low interest in personal marketing is perpetuated by the belief that no one is available to "do the work" if/when the marketing succeeds—though this appears at first like a capacity problem—often the capacity DOES exist to do the work, but leveraging is the issue). While it may seem trivial to fix a leverage problem, if we can show the impact of leverage on profitability (for example), it is easier to accept this as a beneficial change. Without a clear picture of exactly why a change is needed, buy-in tends to be half-hearted at best.

Unless the leader/s of a firm are true visionaries and connect these dots themselves, or can see the forest despite the trees, then we consultants may need to do more in this area in order to have deeper impact.

Democratic Leadership
When firms are governed by democracy, multiple leaders seldom agree about making a change at all, much less about taking that commitment personally and supporting it all the way through implementation. To succeed, leaders must agree that a problem IS a problem therefore believe in a solution's need and then must trust in the appropriateness of the recommended approach to resolving it.

The firms that experience greatest success have at least one of the following:

1. one key leader that others respect and follow;
2. multiple leaders, but infrastructure for accountability (including mutual respect in order to adhere to commitments made);
3. an emotional or psychological investment in the success of implementation.

Consultants can spend more time illustrating the interrelationship of problems for clearer understanding, and then facilitating solutions that are "right" for that unique firm. And consultants could probably work more closely with the firm to create custom solutions even if it means directing them to others to solve the problems.

Complacency
Today, many of those in charge are making "enough" money and are close enough to retirement that "sticking it out" a little longer in the status quo is still an option for them. And it's an option that can be more appealing than making the sorts of significant changes we suggest.

Is the firm going to increase it's internal and external value proposition? Or not? That is the question.

Bringing in the consultant doesn't mean the desire to move forward is a given. We consultants could do a better job to always raise the question — it is an important part of the commitment to implement. Getting a solid answer is a must because choosing not to decide is always an option. As the song lyric goes, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." (Freewill, Permanent Waves, Rush, 1980). Any choice, or lack of choice, will have its consequences. Until or unless the consequences of not changing are actually painful to the current leaders, many firms simply won't.

What consultants could do more of here is to be more compelling about the benefits of improving the firm's value proposition for its people and/or its customers. When enough work is piled on their desks, partners don't care to worry much about tomorrow's dollar. When there are warm bodies populating the cubicles, they don't care to question if those are the right bodies or if those bodies will be there tomorrow.

Much like an attorney or accountant trying to convey the benefits in proactive tax or estate planning, we consultants are presently trying to communicate the price of NOT changing. And much like many people will never buy the tax or estate planning, many firms will never accept our advice to change. We consultants must accept this and focus our energies on the firms that WILL move ahead of the pack.

Defensiveness
Leaders often think when someone says things need to change that we are saying THEY broke them or that THEY somehow failed. More often than not, all we are saying is that times they are a-changin' and firms need to change, too. Consultants could be more careful to avoid putting firms on the defensive which creates a barrier that doesn't need to exist.

Infrastructure
The systems, processes, and expertise needed to apply our recommendations is not usually in place within the firm. If we don't help them to create that infrastructure, then we could be more proactive in helping the firm find the resources to build it and follow up routinely to counsel through the implementation.

Again, though it isn't always our "job" to ensure our advice is heeded, if we care to, those of us who consult can do more aid in implementation. If our personal satisfaction is in seeing firms advance, then perhaps we need to be better at our own client selection--choosing to work with firms with higher likelihood of applying our advice. Sounds a lot like our advice to the firms we serve...