High Impact Rapid Cycle Consulting Engagements with Premium Management Consulting Firms

My interventions are based on helping professional service firms and solo practitioners to deliver higher client value for higher fees with less time and effort. In my work we achieve this alignment by addressing five key ingredients of designing, building and running a premium professional service business. They are...

1. Firm Leadership and Management - This area covers a broad range of both strategic (leadership) and tactical (management) issues. This is the people's angle of running a professional service firm. If your people are not fully involved in your operation, but merely show up physically as warm meat with pulse beat, then it doesn't make a demented badger's spit of a difference how good your services are.

2. Raising Client Satisfaction - The better service and more value you can offer to your clients, the more ready and willing they will be to furnish you with referrals, so you can reduce your marketing time, the less pressure prospects put on you for your fees, and the less they will hesitate when it comes to starting the next project.

3. Enhancing Skill Building and Integration - Professional service businesses have one single distinctive asset: Their people with their skills and character traits. Yet, look at most service firms. People are so darned busy doing the work that they have no time left to improve themselves to stay on the top of their industries and professions or develop personally.

4. Improving Internal Performance - While professional service businesses are busy improving their clients' performance, many of them are pathetically poor when it comes to improving their own internal performance. According to surveys, the professional service firm is the least profitable business model, lagging behind junk food joints and industrial businesses.

5. Acquiring Better Business - Unlike industrial businesses, professional service businesses should focus on acquiring better clients, not merely more clients. Most service businesses spread themselves too thin because they mistakenly believe that the more clients they have the more profitable their businesses will be. And the result is that they end up with clients most of whom they barely tolerate or downright hate and resent. But how can you do kick-arse wow work with clients whom you feel like drowning in a spoonful of water? Hm?

The engagements are of high intensity and high impact. They are usually three months long, during which time you have unlimited access to my help and support without concerning yourself about how much of my time you require. I don't watch the clock, so you have open access.

Instead of changing everything at once, as most traditional consultants prefer to do, we work only on one specific issue and measure the impact of change all along the way. This is the only way of knowing that we're doing the right things and the results we see is not impacted by other initiatives. This is similar to writing an advertisement. You change only one thing and test the ad. Then change one thing and test again. The better ad wins and you actually know why. You know the winning factor.

One More Important Thing

Some people separate consulting and coaching. I don't. Why?

Here is my own differentiation. Consulting is about replacing less effective processes and systems with more effective ones, so your overall operation becomes smooth as a baby's arse.

And after sorting out the system stuff, we have to work on the people who are expected to use the system stuff on a daily basis. That's the coaching bit. Without fine-tuning behaviours, fine-tuning systems would be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of the guillotine.

As a result of repeating certain behaviours, we become more and more proficient at specific behaviours which eventually lead to a certain level of success. But we also operate within certain boundaries, and blissfully ignore other even more effective approaches. And when once in a blue moon we try something new, and it either flops on the drawing board or goes apeshit upon implementation, we say it doesn't work.

Hell's bells! It does. But... Can I call a plane impossible to fly just because I can't fly it? No. It's flyable, but I'm no more competent to fly a one than a goat is. So, thee problem is with me... and with the goat, and definitely not with the plane.

While consulting works on how you do what you do and how you do it, coaching works more on the Who? (you are) and then integrates it into the What? (you do) and How? (you do it). It makes certain that your processes and systems are reflections of personal and firm-wide values and beliefs, and people's personal goals and the firm's vision are aligned and they support each other.

Without coaching, the results delivered through consulting are often something like doing plastic surgery without after-surgery counselling, during which the counsellor helps the patient to come to terms with the changes.

While consulting creates measurable improvements and tangible results, coaching is about changing people's habits, beliefs and behaviours to assist them to accept, adopt and adapt the newly developed strategies, tactics, systems and methodologies. It is about invoking people's true abilities, and pulling them beyond their self-imposed "I do my best" limitations.

To avoid this self-limiting situation, I coach people to fully integrate new bottom-line improvements into their lives. For example, as a result of charging higher fees, you can spend more quality time with your loved ones, and still earning significantly more than you did last year. This may sound a bit too "spiritual", but the way I see it, you can have the best firm but if your people have to work 70 hours a week, sooner or later you start losing the best ones. People, regardless how much they love their work, want to have a life.

Ideally, business is about joy, freedom and expression. To change your results, you have to change your behaviour; to change your behaviour, you have to change your thinking; to change your thinking you have to examine your motives. What are yours? What is the legacy you are building?

Depending on your unique situation, both consulting and coaching can be either 1-to-1 or a group gig. Either way, you and your designated people have unlimited access to me for a pre-set flat fee.

Let me know if I can help...