How a Regional IT Services Firm is Leveraging a Client Advisory Board with Luke Johnson | Episode 113

Greg Alexander [00:00:15] Welcome to the Pro Serv podcast with Collective 54, a podcast for leaders of thriving boutique professional services firms. For those that are not familiar with us, Collective 54 is the first mastermind community dedicated entirely to the needs of leaders of thriving boutique serve firms. My name’s Greg Alexander. I’m the founder and I’ll be your host today. On on this episode, we’re going to talk about the Client Advisory Board and why it’s an important tool for all of the professional services firms. And we’ve got a great role model with us today, someone who’s recently implemented this. He’s a collective 54 member. His name is Luke Johnson. Luke, great to see you. Please introduce yourself to the audience. 

Luke Johnson [00:01:00] Hey, Greg, great to see you as well. As you said, I’ve been a member for I think almost a year and a half, and we put a client advisory board in place at the beginning of 2022. It’s been great. I am the CEO and one of the owners of Catalyst out of North Carolina. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:24] And what does Catalyst do? 

Luke Johnson [00:01:27] We are a boutique services firm, Greg, focusing in the technology space and we enable our clients to go faster, further and safer. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:38] Okay. And I tell you, like a MSP, it’s outsourcer type firm. I get that. Okay. You are. 

Luke Johnson [00:01:45] Exactly correct. All right. A lot of cybersecurity work for us as well in that space. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:49] Okay, Awesome. Okay. Well, let’s start with the basics. So would you provide a definition of what a client advisory board is? 

Luke Johnson [00:01:59] Sure. To us. It is a board that we lean on. It is currently comprised of all active clients, although I don’t think it would have to be ours today. It’s someone that we lean on to get advice around what we’re doing as a business and figuring out if that’s relevant to them as well as a board that we lean on to better understand the real everyday challenges in our clients. So I think the distinction I would draw very clearly is this is a board that serves us far more than it does the clients directly. 

Greg Alexander [00:02:37] Yeah, fantastic. You know, we advise our members to stand up a client advisory board for a very basic reason, which is we want to be outward in in everything we do. We want to be listening to our clients as much as possible. And the knowledge we can gain from our clients is extensive. Affects everything from how you market and sell to the types of services that you bring out to the problems you go after is just a really great tool. Look, what I’d love to hear from you is that there was a time in your company’s history where you did not have a client advisory board and you recently installed one in 2022 at the time of this recording. It’s January of 23, so that’s a really fresh use case. So what what prompted the need? 

Luke Johnson [00:03:18] I think it was a few things, Greg. We always struggle with enough very direct feedback from our clients. A lot of times we get a lot of indirect feedback and we’re doing our best to guess what is needed and we put it in place. So we were looking for a mechanism to get more direct feedback. I think also it was a way to draw closer to a specific group of clients, and most of the clients on this board are some of our largest and most meaningful. Not all, but but good, good mix up there. So it’s a way to get really close with those folks and improve the relationships. 

Greg Alexander [00:03:58] Okay, so let’s talk about those folks. One of the challenges of standing up a client advisory board is to figure out who to invite to participate on the board. So how many clients do you have on it and what was your selection criteria? 

Luke Johnson [00:04:14] So we we have seven active members today because we started. Yeah, thank you. We started a little smaller. I think I reached out to maybe nine or ten in the beginning and we started with six. I’ve asked the board if they felt like the number was right. If we could grow it a little bit, we decided we could grow it a little bit. So we added somebody else. And I’m not sure there was a great science around the criteria, but what I did is spend some time looking at years worth of business with a variety of clients, and I tried to make sure that I picked certainly some from the Top End. So folks that have done the most business with us. But I also wanted to accurately represent our client base as a whole. So I sort of looked to that bottom side as well, and maybe not somebody who’d only transacted business with us once, but smaller clients as well. So it’s it’s a real representative group of the clients we are dealing with every day. I also did interject a little bit of personality in there in the sense of some some clients I know really well, some I don’t know really well, But I tried to pick people that I thought would be great, interact with us and share really, really candid feedback. 

Greg Alexander [00:05:31] Awesome. So obviously you had a good pitch because just about everybody you invited said yes, which is an indication you have great relationships with your clients, which is fantastic. But what was the pitch? I mean, why did they agree to be on your client advisory board? 

Luke Johnson [00:05:45] I was really candid, Greg, with them and basically said, I feel a little selfish in asking, but this is for our benefit. I believe that that indirectly benefits you because if we tune our services to be in line with what you need, it should benefit you as well. But we want to pick your brain about what we’re doing. Is it the right thing? Is it in alignment with what you need? We want you to be candid with how we’re doing. If there’s things that we’re not doing well, we want you to call it out and we want to talk about it very directly. And another piece of it is we really pick their brain about competitors as well. And we like to know what are they doing that you like? And. And that may help us as well. So we kept it. We kept it pretty simple. And and that seemed to work well with everybody.