Techniques to Become More Valuable to Clients... And Raising Your Fees Commensurably

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

You can call me obsessed, but what I am noticing in my own life is that I work on figuring out new ways of creating distinctive value for clients using less and less of my time and effort.

Why am I doing this?

Sadly, so many service professionals are still living in the old paradigm of doing something for their clients, instead of helping (enabling) their clients to do things for themselves. That is, they are building clients dependency. Personally I disagree with the "client for life" concept. I find it unethical to cut my claws into a client and then hang in there for the rest of my life on the erroneous pretext that I don't have to market myself ever again.

I have always believed that short high-impact, high-value projects are more valuable for clients and are more time and profit-effective for professionals.

A few months ago we discussed what we can do to increase perceived value and what we can do to reduce the time and effort of rendering it. I don't want to use "delivering" because it is out of our control.

However, there is one more consideration here.

As a professional, you can only render value but your clients must interpret, integrate and internalise the rendered value in order to realise the desired improvements they hired you for in the first place. And while you and your client are mutually accountable to each other to put your best foot forward, your client is single-handedly responsible for the realised outcomes.

This is why during your client acquisition process you must focus on only accepting clients who are ready, willing and able to do their sides of the equation, that is, to interpret, integrate and internalise the rendered value to improve their condition.

In the cartoon strip Family Circus by Bill Kaine: A little boy is holding his homework out to his mother. She looks at him and says, "You misunderstand. I'm a homework consultant, not a homework subcontractor."  That is, she can work WITH him to get the homework done, but she won't do it FOR him.

All we can do is to bring our past experience to bear to improve the client's your possibilities, and increase the velocity and certainty of achieving certain outcomes. The client must take responsibility for getting the greatest possible result from your advice.

So, remember your project's success is: Rendering value (this is your job) + interpreting, integrating and internalising value (this is your client's job).

So, here let's discuss some techniques you can do both to render more value with less hard work and make sure that your clients have the capacity to interpret, integrate and internalise the rendered value and improve their conditions.

Developing Innovative Recruiting Techniques

Isn't it amazing that firm owners and partners love being involved in trivial activities like personally selecting and purchasing the fridge and the rubbish bin for the kitchen in the office, but when it comes to acquiring new associates, they just hire a headhunter firm, give the firm some anal specification, like we require 1.5 MBA and 3.5 years of experience in doing tax returns for left-handed midgets in North East Ivory Coast.

It is just surprising how many professional firms look at talent acquisition as hiring manual labourers to a construction site. While I believe in the importance of developing automated systems and processes, on the final analysis performing professional services boils down to one-to-one interactions between clients and associates. And for this reason professional firms constantly compete for the best talent available in that specific industry. However, I am not saying the best talent means the highest number of diplomas and certificates.

While industrial companies hire brute muscle power and raw technical skills, professional firms must put more emphasis on recruiting soft attributes (they are not really skills), such as passion, ambition and enthusiasm.

Improving Internal Skill-Building

The sad fact is that many service professionals get so bogged down taking care of existing projects and servicing existing clients, that trivial issues like skill building goes down the toilet.

A few years ago I attended a workshop on tax issues. I am not an accountant, but certainly want to know my rights and how I can reduce my taxes legitimately. It was a rewarding and eye-opening experience.

Firstly, I was surprised to find out how many entrepreneurs were there, wanting to learn about taxes.

Secondly I was amazed how few accountants turned up.

Thirdly, I was shocked beyond imagination when I realised how breathtakingly obsolete many of these - both certified and chartered - accountants were.

They are so busy doing client work, basically doling out obsolete advice, that they have no time to participate in ongoing education.

Yes, they all have a certain number of hours of mandatory education programmes, but they alone are just as effective as pinching an elephant's arse.

So, there was that guy, one of the chief advisors to Revenue Canada teaching how to reduce taxes legally, but accountants were too busy to come and learn.

But what I don't understand is that if they are obsolete in their own trade, why do they try to pose as business advisors? Just to add another craft to their repertoires they don't know much about?

You must make sure that regardless of how busy you could be with clients work, you have to participate in some serious skill-building. You have to be willing to cancel client appointments and go to that workshop.

Understand that it is not your busy-ness your clients pay for, but your knowledge. And they expect you to be up to scratch in your trade. If your knowledge is obsolete, then there is a bit of a problem. Nothing major, but it certainly means that you have nothing left to pay for. But if you don't get paid, it is very hard to put food on the table and sooner or later you starve to death, which is a rather miserable way of ending the day.

Remember the priority: First you have to acquire knowledge and only then you can dole it out and get paid for it. In the best interest of your prosperity, your family's happiness and your clients' success, keep this order.

Improving The Management Of Projects

Every project must be sufficiently supervised and managed. However, in most professional firms both partners and managers are evaluated on their personal billable hours (yes, far too many firms are still wage slaves, peddling time chunks), and not on what their team achieves. So, what is the outcome? They get busy boosting their personal utilisation, and managing projects and coaching their people go down the drain. And while this behaviour should be unacceptable, it is tolerated because of these people's positions in the firm as partners and managers.

Managers are not supposed to be managers for the sake of rank. It is a job description. The job of partners and managers is to bring out the best in their people. Period. They have to keep their people's feet in the fire, while protecting them from burning out. They have to stretch them, while protecting them from getting sprained. All in all, they have to be great coaches to inspire, enthuse and excite their people.

They also have to provide high quality project management. Yes, one of your people (re-read: NOT an army of juniors) is working with the client's tactical team to implement the project, and one manager from your firm, who is not involved in that project, must supervise the project. You need objective supervision, and that is why someone who is not involved must supervise it.

In order to make both implementation and supervision consistent, you need some systems and processes in place. For instance you can request clients to journal their experiences in a document called the "client impact report". In that they can document what they learn, what they like or dislike about the collaboration with you.

Enhancing Associate's Counselling And Coaching Skills

You can have the best lawyers, doctors or information technology professionals on board, but at the end of the day it is a people's game. That is your firm's future depends on your own and your people's counselling and coaching skills. They need excellent intra- and interpersonal skills. There are differences in these people skills in that some people are very soft, tender and pampering with clients, and some – me included – are rather tough and demanding. My justification is that the tougher I am with my clients and the more I expect of them, the easier they can live up to what the marketplace expects of them.

On this I totally agree with General Patton: "When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."

You simply can't sweet-talk and pamper your way to the top of your industry. And this is why your people must be good at counselling and coaching. They must know how to administer, what Patton called, "double dirty" stuff in such a way that the client doesn't get offended but rather inspired. You can read the full Patton speech here.

So, what can you do here? Make sure your people have access to great resources to learn coaching skills. While you can learn a lot from these institutions, you must also be careful. In recent years coaching has become a bit of a fad, has been blown out of proportion and has been commercialised quite a bit. Look at the web and you find that everyone and his kitchen sink offers coaching certification courses for some good money.

However, coaching is a pretty innate and pragmatic skill (parents practise it mostly successfully without certificates), and while I believe we can always polish our skills, we don't necessarily need a certificate essentially saying, "Fred Tigernuts successfully regurgitated XYZ Coaching Institute's point of view and is hereby allowed to spread it further". That is bullshit.

Improving The Firm's Information Dissection Ability

Information dissemination includes three stages. In these stages you can turn information into structured knowledge which can then be put into systems and processes for easy repetition and duplication.

Analysis is about dissecting information into easy-to-chew bits, so you don't choke or get constipated on extra-large info chunks. Sadly most firms place 100% emphasis on analysis by filling up their positions with people who can look at issues only from one perspective. So, as a result, they end up tearing everything apart, and spend the rest of their lives standing over the torn pieces.

Diagnosis is about inspecting the individual pieces. This is the microscopic view. You look at each piece one at a time, and assess its merits in relationship with the whole you are working on.

Synthesis is about putting the pieces together in new ways. And this is where the problem lies. Most professional firms are pretty homogenous. People have the same schooling, same education, think alike and dress alike, so in the synthesis stage they keep coming up with the same old tired ideas, ending up running around in circles and working damned hard to end up in the same place.

Every piece of information can be synthesised into different "wholes", just as the filing cabinet, phone and the fax was synthesised a few years ago into a rather interesting "whole", called the Internet. What is email really? Paperless fax. What is the web? A paperless filing cabinet. These are simple explanations, but simplicity is not a bad idea.

It is the synthesis that helps us to create new templates, systems, processes, statistics, market survey or other market research material in the industry, which you can then turn into new value for clients.

Remember, with the web anyone has access to any information. There is enough information on the web to make nuclear warheads in your kitchen, but information is not knowledge, and especially not easy-to-follow step-by-step process.

Your clients are time-strapped. They don't have time to collect and digest tons of information, so if you do that once and then customise it into a short report or checklist for many clients, they will appreciate it.

Improving The Process Of Becoming An Industry Master

You have to always thrive to achieve mastery in your industry. Think about how you can do valuable industry research, which then you can also package and sell to the same industry. This is proprietary research, and you can sell it as such. Show me a company in any industry which is not interested in learning something about the industry it is in. Every industry is flooded with conventional wisdom. If you show something different, then there is a good chance they buy into it. Hey, this is how we gradually gave up on MS-DOS and migrated to Windows-based systems.

Designing And Implementing Systems

While I buy the concept that professional firms' work – depending on their positioning - is very diverse, borderline haphazard, there are many aspects of a firm's operation that can be turned into systems and processes.

According to W. Edwards Deming, also called The Prophet of Quality, who basically single-handedly created the Japanese industry and put it on the map to keep the western world in fear, some 94% of business problems, including failures and lacklustre performance could be eliminated by implementing effective systems. Far too many professional firms chronically underperform because they rely on superstar people ("rainmakers") but when they leave for various reasons, they leave a hell of a storm behind. And as we know, superstars don't leave alone. They always take some other associates or clients with them.

Expressed in simple language, a system is to automatically, affordably, practically, measurably, repetitively and predictably execute a specific sequence of actions, in order to achieve specific outcomes, like to attract a preponderance of quality prospects to your business without lifting a finger. No, contrary to conventional wisdom, this first stage of lead generation should be automated in every firm, so everyone could increase billable work, skill-building, or other productive activities, while the system generates new business.

So, as you are developing your systems, remember Deming's words again: "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

Also, using FedEx's co-founder and innovator, Michael Basch's words, "You systemise the routine and personalise the exception."

Professional firms all over the world would be financially better off by turning their mundane activities into automated processes, so they could give more attention to their clients.

But if you consider that a typical professional firm spends over 140 person hours to craft a proposal for - often - tyre-kickers, then you can see where the time is lost. These proposals are very often initiated by a casual chat in the local cafeteria over a cup of coffee. And what is the result? Often nothing.

Also systems can...

• Save
• You
• Significant
• Time
• Effort
• Money

Listening To The Market

Paying more attention to what the market is saying, so instead of doing market research (which gives you lots of false information) you can listen for and observe real unadulterated information.

In spite of being schooled in engineering, I dare to say that research has its limits. This is doubly so when observing humans. People don't operate in their default ways under observation.

Researchers always find what they are looking for. Avant-garde physicist, cosmologist and philosopher John Archibald Wheeler named this phenomenon the Participative Universe principle.

Just think of it. Nor even eyewitnesses can agree that a certain car accident took place the same way. One would witness some trivial bumps and bruises, while others may witness a massive bloodbath.

The sad truth is that research supports mediocre ideas and kills great ones. In 1943, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM spent a small fortune on hiring a prestigious consulting team to research the computer market. The team concluded that the world market for was "maybe only for a few computers."

With that IBM lost its foothold in the PC business once and for all.

Remember, research doesn't expose the truth to you. It blinds us to the truth.

Market research is a hypothetical situation. People give you answers which make them look good and smart. Accept it at your own peril.

The other problem is that the more cutting-edge and innovative your ides is, the more likely you have to jam it down your clients' throats.

You are much better off collecting soft evidence through observing and listening and than wasting huge sums of money on hard evidence.

Remember the tale called "The emperor's new clothes". Based on "researching" his "trusted wise" advisors the emperor was nicely dressed in the most stupendous fabric in the known universe. The advisors wanted to please the emperor, so even by leading him to village-wide ridicule, they told him he looked amazing in his new clothes. Only the ignorant boy who didn't know what the emperor wanted to hear, had the courage to say what the emperor needed to hear: "Cover up your arse you idiot."

So, make sure you too cover your up arse, and don't leave it exposed just because the crowd you survey "admires your new clothes".

Research less and listen more.