Selling and delivering insight is at the heart of what professional service firms do. Some pro serv firms have packaged their expertise into research and sell it as a “product” via subscription. Attend this session and hear how member Mike Ellison has done this and built a 95-person firm in the process.
Mike Braun started Pivotal Advisors with his brother to get off an airplane and make a living with less stress. One day he realized he wanted more than a lifestyle business. This required the recruitment of the next generation of leaders who wanted a piece of the pie. Mike masterfully created a plan to allow for equity to be shared with the new team. And in the process, he built a legacy, a firm that would last long after he and his brother were gone.
Power members Eric Weisgarber and Adam Diesselhorst have implemented succession planning at their marketing agency, inspired in part by the Collective 54 book The Founder Bottleneck. As a result, they have identified their high-potential employees and are preparing them to take over the firm upon exit. This has allowed them to scale smoothly without the employee headaches and drama found in many firms.
Jeff Pedowitz, CEO of The Pedowitz Group, was one of the pioneers of the SaaS era by driving adoption of marketing automation technology from Eloqua, Marketo and others. This allowed his firm, The Pedowitz Group, to dominate his niche for almost two decades. Now, Jeff sees the next big wave, AI, and he shares with Collective 54 how to ride it all the way to the bank.
Win/Loss reviews are a powerful way to improve your sales results. Yet, most members are not doing them because they incorrectly think they are hard to do and require lots of time.
On this episode, Brady Jensen, Chief Executive Officer at Aggregate Insights, an expert in win/loss reviews will give members the method, tools, and templates to allow them to do this correctly, quickly, and cheaply.
The average boutique pro-serv firm is using 10-15 SaaS applications yet none of them talk to each other. This makes it hard to get a true 360-degree view of your firm.
On this episode, data warehousing expert and member Aron Clymer, Founder & CEO at Data Clymer, will show members how to solve this problem easily, and cost effectively.
Building a sales team inside of a consulting firm is hard. However, it is a requirement if a firm is going to scale beyond a Founder-led lifestyle business. Adding to the difficulty, is the need to go through an expensive and time-consuming trial and error period. It takes patience and many experiments before a firm figures out what works for them.
Running a lifestyle business can lull a Founder to sleep. The days, weeks, months, and years pass by as you are “doing just fine”. Then, one day, you are in your mid-50s, and realize you cannot retire, and after all these years, you don’t have much to show for your life’s work. What then? On this episode, Tad McIntosh, President at HumCap, shares how after 20+ years he is trying to convert a lifestyle business into something he can scale, and sell, someday.
Previous sessions often revolve on how to exit a professional service firm. What if we flip the script and discuss how to scale by purchasing professional service firms? On this episode, Colton Hathaway, VP of Technology at Northern Commerce, shares how their firm was created through a merger, and how they have grown by acquiring other firms.
Productizing a service seems scary and many Founders of service firms do not know where to start. As soon as you have decided to capitalize on it, productizing your service can lead to fast growth and large scale. On this episode, Nish Parikh, CEO at Rangam Consultants, funneled cash from his staffing firm into the development of a product called Talent Arbor. As a result of this innovation, Nish is helping those on the Autism spectrum build rewarding careers. Join Nish and hear how leading with empathy drives innovation and impact.
The yield of a boutique is the ultimate measure of productivity. Yield is simply the average fee per hour times the average utilization rate. For example, $400/hour x 75% utilization rate = a yield of $300/hour. Increase yield and make more money. But, how? One effective technique is to tech automate service delivery. On this episode, Ehsan Mirdamadi, Partner & CEO at NuBinary, explains that small service firms can now afford to tech automate service delivery by leveraging a fractional CTO (Chief Technology Officer).
Listen to this episode and learn how the fractional executive model has entered the technology office. Many Collective 54 members use fractional finance, HR, IT, and Legal executives. Now, they have the opportunity to leverage fraction technology executives. And those that do will see an increase in yield.
In a post-Covid world, does geography still matter? Should you pursue clients, and employees, based on where they reside? It used to signal to clients that you were legit when your name was on a building downtown. Is this still true? On this episode, Ashok Sivanand, CEO at Integral, shares how he thinks geography is still a mission critical element of strategy, but not for the reasons you might think. He moved to Detroit and is building a firm based on mid-western values. And it is these values, concentrated in this geography, which is contributing to his success. Hear from Ashok his remarkable story which started with him driving a forklift in a factory during the graveyard shift.
Key employee risk is a very real threat to founders of boutique professional services firms. Small, people driven businesses are overly dependent on key employees. If a key employee resigns, the pain inflicted on the owner is intense, and the financial impact on the income statement is large. On this episode, Kimberly Kraemer, CEO at Waterhouse Brands, shares how she suffered the loss of a key employee and how she survived it. In addition, hear how Kim re-engineered her firm to prevent this from ever happening again.
Boutique professional service firms need to listen to their clients intentionally. One effective way to do that is a client advisory board. On this episode, Luke Johnson, CEO & Co-owner at Katalyst shares how he launched a client advisory board recently. Luke shares the early benefits, some mistakes to avoid, and how, exactly, he runs his.
Generating revenue from sources other than the billable hour is a key part of scaling a consulting firm. On this episode, Robin Way, Founder & CEO at Corios, shares how he is generating revenue from training products, licensing tools, and generating reports. He will talk about how he went from a single source of revenue- the billable hour- to four sources of revenue.
