Bobby Greco redesigned his firm’s go-to-market strategy by separating delivery from selling without losing growth momentum. In this episode, he shares how CSI Group replaced their broken “doer-seller” model with a structured, scalable approach that empowers tax advisors to identify opportunities without becoming salespeople. Through team-wide training, branded assessments, and a shared comp structure, Bobby turned his delivery team into trusted growth catalysts.
What you’ll get from this session:
• How to stop role corruption from stalling growth
• A scalable way to turn delivery staff into opportunity spotters
• The structure and branding behind the “CSI360” checkup tool
• How to design compensation that rewards both finders and closers
• Lessons from Schwab and IBM on expert handoffs and trust leverage
Why it matters:
• Founders can’t scale if growth depends on a few rainmakers
• Cross-functional selling without quotas preserves team culture
• Business development capacity can scale without headcount growth
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander, you’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. This podcast is for owners of boutique professional services firms, so if you’re in the expertise business, if you market, sell, and deliver expertise for a living, this is for you. If you listen to this show, we aim to deliver three things. We want to help you make more money, we want to help you make scaling easier, and we want to help you make an exit achievable. And on today’s show, we’re gonna talk about a mistake that a lot of professional services firms make, and that is they ask their delivery team, the people that do the work, to sell the work, and that is called role corruption, and it usually doesn’t work very well. So we’ve got a member with us, Bobby Greco, and Bobby has figured out a solution to this dilemma, and he’s gonna share that with you today. So, Bobby, for those that don’t know you, would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Bob Greco: Sure, nice seeing you, Greg. Bobby Greco, co-CEO of CSI Group. We are a financial services firm that provides investment advisory, tax preparation, and estate planning to middle-class individuals and families.
Greg Alexander: Okay, sounds good. So why don’t we start with this? We’re gonna talk about role corruption as opposed to role clarity. So my first question to you is: How did you spot this problem in your firm? Like, what were the symptoms that you saw that made you think you had an issue?
Bob Greco: It was very clear. Our firm was started by my dad, and the only rainmakers were my dad, my brother, and I. To start, you know, those are the real rainmakers, and then over the course of 20 years, we were only able to get two tax advisors to be able to cross-sell to the additional services that we offered. So it was very clear.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Did you see any burnout or missed expectations or opportunities, like lack of consistency in the pipeline, anything like that?
Bob Greco: We did, we definitely saw that, and our tax advisors, traditionally accountants, just were not built for what we were trying to do.
Greg Alexander: Okay. And as I understand it, what’s been explained to me is you’re not just splitting roles, you’re equipping the team. So tell me a little bit about what you’ve done to address this issue.
Bob Greco: Yep, so the original model was for our tax advisors to also be financial advisors, and we found that it was too difficult to train that, too difficult to recruit for that, and it just took way too long. It involved shadowing, and it just took way too long, as evidenced by the few people that were doing it. So, we did a lot of things, and the first thing we decided to do was to split up the roles and hire experts—mainly financial advisors and attorneys that are experts in their respective fields—and left the tax advisor as the expert on the tax side of it.
Greg Alexander: Okay, and I understand you created some tools, and instead of asking the delivery people—probably not the right term—but instead of asking them to take a deal from cradle to grave, all you’re really doing is asking them to smell a deal. And then it kind of gets thrown over the fence and somebody else closes it. That’s probably not the way to describe it, but tell me a little bit more about that.
Bob Greco: Sure, and I’ll go through the steps that we took. The issue was that the trust—even though we brought in other financial advisors—the trust was still with the tax advisor. So the question that we had to answer is: how do we best leverage that trust without trying to turn our tax advisors into salespeople and experts in different fields? The first thing that we did is, when hiring or promoting existing employees to the tax advisor position, we hired people who truly believe in our value prop of providing those additional services that we provide to the client. So we got buy-in first. That was our first thing: getting buy-in at the recruiting level.
Bob Greco: The biggest thing we did, number two, is we productized and we branded our offering. What we do is we start with tax, and then we cross-sell to financial services and estate planning. We created something called CSI360 Checkup, which has its own logo, its own definition, and we branded that. That encompasses all of our services in one offering. So that was number two. We then marketed the CSI360 to our customer base to raise awareness, so they knew about it already prior to coming into our offices. And then we trained. We trained all of our tax advisors on the 360 specifically—not only on how to do tax or how to do financial investments or estate planning—but on how to have our clients take advantage of the 360. We made a checklist that each tax advisor could use at the 360 appointment. After a while, they don’t need the checklist anymore, but we created that checklist for them. So they weren’t cross-selling, they were providing a 360, which encompasses cross-selling. Then we created metrics and a comp plan around that to drive the behavior that we were looking for. We put in sales incentives, we implemented a tracking system, so everybody got a little piece of the pie.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, so that’s where I was going next. I love the 360—branding it, marketing to the client base, making them aware of it. It’s sales, but not really. It’s sales through a delivery mechanism, in this case an assessment tool. And you trained them on it, which allowed them to not sell, but smell an opportunity. When the baton needs to be handed off from one expert to the next, I’ve seen that be problematic in situations like this. Did you run into any issues there, and how did you solve them?
Bob Greco: We did run into issues, especially in the beginning, of well—who owns what in the sales process? Our tax advisors are also getting compensated on a potential sale that the next expert makes. So there wasn’t clarity, and it took us a while. That was really what took us the longest time: getting clarity around who should own what. Different teams—our clients are divided up into teams—and different teams were doing different roles. Some of our tax advisors are more advanced than others, so trying to figure out a standardized system in order for scale was probably our biggest pain point, as well as the compensation. But figuring out that standardized system was our biggest pain point.
Greg Alexander: You know, you mentioned that you looked at other firms that have done this well. I think a couple that came to mind were Charles Schwab and IBM, if I recall. I’m a Charles Schwab customer, and I’ve had a fantastic experience, and my financial consultant—I know he’s not an expert in everything—but he has a way of engaging with me, and then matching me up with experts at exactly the right time. I end up buying way more from them, but it never feels like he’s selling me anything. Is that the type of approach that you’re using?
Bob Greco: It is. It’s the type of approach. Part of our 360 and the way we train our team—and it’s not just our tax advisors, we train all members of the team on the 360—is that we want to be the first call from our clients. We want our clients to call us for everything, and we will find a solution for that, even though it might be a service that we don’t offer and we have to refer it out. We’ll find a solution for them, and more often than not, that leads to revenue.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Here’s a little story. I was just in the Caribbean, my wife and I are shopping for a beach home. And James, my Charles Schwab guy, is not a real estate agent, but I called him. He trained me on being the first call. And I said, hey, what do you think? Am I crazy? Next thing you know, I was on the phone with a reinsurer on hurricanes. I was on the phone with their asset-based lending group to figure out whether I should borrow off my account or get a traditional mortgage, etc. So he found all those opportunities just because he was my first call. Not because I thought he was an expert in Caribbean real estate. I just trust the guy, and I ecoknow he’s going to direct me in the right spot. So that’s a good story.
Greg Alexander: You talked about credit. The other area that I see going wrong is that I’ve now got to share success. So I put somebody through this 360, I smell an opportunity, I hand it off to somebody else, that person closes a piece of business, and I want my piece. How do you handle assigning credit internally?
Bob Greco: So what we’ve done—that was a challenge. Where we’re at now is we created a comp plan where we standardized the percentage that the tax advisor and the financial advisor get. As far as credit, we utilize HubSpot as our CRM to show who the dealmaker was, and from there it just flows down to once the deal closes, assigning credit. And there’s a certain percentage that goes to the referrer, and a certain percentage that goes to the person who took it home.
Greg Alexander: So, in your model, does this mean that you do not have any rainmakers? That your entire team of experts, your delivery people, are doing the business development, or do you still have rainmakers in your firm?
Bob Greco: I would say it’s a mix. The rainmakers that we have are really high producers, the tax advisors who can almost do the entire process themselves. But want to focus on going on to the next client, and bringing the next client into a 360. So they really help the next professional in making the sale. They don’t just hand over a sheet and say, here, call this client. They’re really integral in the sale. So those are our biggest rainmakers, and those are the ones who are making the most compensation at the company.
Greg Alexander: Yep. So the lessons for members that are listening to this—some of our members are struggling under the burden of a big business development expense that’s non-billable. If you think about Bobby’s example, he has scaled the business development function by artfully designing the job that they do, equipping them with tools like the 360. So it’s weird, because the role is corrupted, but it isn’t. They’re generating business development, but in a very smooth, non-salesy way. That’s really slick how you did that. And the lesson for members that are listening to this: could you do the same? Do you have people that deliver work for your clients that, if you did something similar, you could add another 10, 20, 30 salespeople without adding 10, 20, 30 new people to the payroll? Like, that’s the scale element of this.
Greg Alexander: Alright, Bobby, let me shift to the culture. Sometimes when people try to do this, the delivery team says, hey, I don’t want a sales job. I didn’t come to work for you to carry a quota, leave me alone. How did you get around that?
Bob Greco: The great thing is that when we decided to scale, we were a lot smaller, and we had only convinced a few people, and the few people that we had were already on board. The two other rainmakers, as well as my brother and I, were already on board. But we did use what made the four of us, and the five of us including my dad, successful in the past. We took that and really set out our mission, vision, and values around that, and we built around that. A few years ago, we had about 20 employees; we’re approaching 100 now. And when we hire employees, the 360 is right in the job description. Our values, our mission is right in the job description. We did struggle with people saying, a lower-down customer service rep saying, well, I didn’t sign up for this, I just want to be customer service, I don’t want to do what they considered sales. But we shifted to including the 360 in the job description, in the interview process, and in the onboarding.
Greg Alexander: Yep. Let me talk to you personally. Just communicating with you here, I can tell you’re a natural rainmaker. In fact, you probably love that part of your job. So when you went to this new scale model and went from 20 people to 100, you probably had to let go of a bunch of stuff. So how did your personal day—how did your job itself change?
Bob Greco: Completely different. My brother and I are no longer client-facing, so we had to transition our clients to other tax advisors. And my day consists of building culture and meetings—meetings with our internal team, scaling, and growing the business.
Greg Alexander: Do you miss the thrill of the hunt?
Bob Greco: I do, but this is a new thrill that I enjoy, and I enjoy the scaling.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, and I would tell you, since you focus on scaling your firm, you’re still hunting, but you’re hunting for bigger game. No question about it. Alright, my last question for you, Bobby—and this has been great, thank you very much—is: if you’re a founder listening to this who has not gone on this journey yet but wants to, what’s the first two or three things you advise them to do?
Bob Greco: Well, first of all is seeing that it’s possible. I know some founders who say, no, it can’t be done in our field, and that’s not true, because a lot of people said that in my field, and we were able to do it to an extent. But I would say: get buy-in from your existing key stakeholders, your existing rainmakers. Spend the time getting the buy-in and showing the value proposition—how this will help the customers, and also help them progress in their career.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, very good. Well, listen, Bobby, it was a pleasure to talk to you today. You’re a great member, you’re always contributing to the collective, so let me speak on behalf of the members: thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Bob Greco: Thank you, Greg. Appreciate it.
Greg Alexander: Alright. A couple calls to action. If you’re a member, and you think you want your delivery team to be good at generating business or smelling an opportunity, look for the private member Q&A we’re gonna do with Bobby in one of these upcoming Friday Role Model Sessions and attend that. You can ask your questions to him directly. If you’re not a member, and you’re listening to this, and after listening to Bobby you think you might want to be a member, go to collective54.com, fill out an application, and someone will get in contact with you. But I appreciate you working me into your busy day, and I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and sell your firm.