6 Step Transformation Programme

Consulting businesses typically grow based on the expertise of a few key people. These organisations are often profitable in the early years; the owners are involved in selling and delivering work, overheads are minimal and revenue grows thanks to personal referrals.

Due to the innate talent of these individuals and their ability to turn their hand to a broad set of challenges, the scope of work broadens and contractors are engaged to support increasingly diverse projects. This diversity offers significant intellectual stimulation – no one project is the same and motivation and job fulfilment are high. The value of projects progressively increases and the business now has real potential.

However, as time passes and the business grows, a few things start to happen:

• A project doesn’t go so well because a contractor hasn’t delivered to standard
• Staff members start to ask about your vision for the business
• Consultants sell different solutions and deliver them with personal and inconsistent styles
• New staff find it hard to deliver ‘your way’ without lots of hand holding
• Clients offer you work on the proviso that you deliver it yourself
• You have less and less time and work life feels increasingly stressful
• You find yourself competing for work that you are not expert at

Sound familiar?

The overall aim of this first day is to get over this ‘bump in the road’ and set the direction for your next phase of growth. At this point in your business, you need to :

• Clarify where you are going and why
• Understand the different types of business you could create
• Appreciate what is involved in building a scalable business that has equity value
• Explore different futures and alternative exit strategies
• Articulate your personal aspirations and motivations and those of your fellow shareholders
• Define success based on the type of business you want to create
• Set your strategic objectives for the next 3 years – financial, proposition, customer, people
• Decide what your investment priorities will be – product, capability, channels, partners
• Assess you and your senior team against the capabilities you will need to sustain growth
• Anticipate how your role and the organisational structure will change as your business grows
• Prepare a plan to engage your team in your chosen direction

Ultimately, this will set you up to achieve a position where you have shareholder alignment, clarity of vision, a clear strategy and purpose and a robust exit plan.

Consulting involves giving expert advice in challenging contexts, and it is far from black and white. Two equally qualified consultants may well disagree about how to approach the same issue. If you have five or 50 consultants, all with their own opinions, it can be challenging to ensure clients get a consistent experience that is representative of your brand and reflective of ‘the promise’ you sold them.

In a nutshell – a consulting business is extremely difficult to scale.

Familiar challenges include:

• Overdependence on individual consultants
• Difficulty recruiting people with the right experience
• Finding and training new staff is expensive, time consuming and fraught with risk
• Facing differing points of view with regards to the focus of the organisation
• Having difficulty articulating your points of difference versus the competition
• Employing inconsistent, continually changing methodologies

Once you’ve completed this module, you will be able to:

• Significantly enhance the way you express what you do and how you do it
• Understand the value of narrowing your focus
• Decide on your primary niche proposition, sector focus and target client profile
• Get really clear about why your business is special and how to articulate it in a compelling way
• Create a pitch deck with supporting stories and evidence that your team can deliver
• Understand the different types of intellectual property that create equity value
• Build a plan to enhance existing IP or create new IP that will increase competitive advantage
• Understand the value of productising your services
• Evaluate your core offering using our ‘Service Productisation Tool’
• Design a plan to increase scalability, differentiation and profitability through productisation
• Align your product architecture to your target client journey
• Design a rate card that makes your services easy to buy, easy to sell, saves time in negotiation and delivers your target gross margin

The overall aim is to move towards standardisation, consistency and clarity without detracting from the quality of the client experience.

No matter how clever your proposition, if you can’t get in front of prospective new clients, you won’t be able to showcase your work. Too many small businesses rely on word of mouth to generate leads; as a result they find it difficult to predict future revenue growth. This creates uncertainty and detracts from equity value.

Having the confidence that if you spend more on marketing, you will get more opportunities to pitch your business is close to the holy grail.

This workshop focuses on what you need to know as a business owner to develop your marketing strategy and build a lead generating machine. This day is not about brand.

You will learn how to:

• Build an integrated, sales-driven marketing strategy using our framework
• Get inside the head of your ideal customer and link their concerns to your value proposition
• Ensure your marketing communicates clear competitor differentiation
• Turn your customers into an extension of your marketing team, maximising referrals
• Create core messages to market that will form the basis of your campaigns
• Create a campaign-led marketing plan linked to your sales strategy
• Implement an effective campaign planning and evaluation tool
• Prioritise different channels and potential marketing activities
• Choose the most cost effective social media channels
• Allocate budget by channel, proposition and campaign
• Decide what to outsource versus where to develop internal capability
• Set specific, measurable targets by campaign and build a marketing KPI reporting mechanism

Ultimately, this day will set you up to build a lead generation machine which will accelerate your growth path and ensure that a bigger and bigger portion of your work is within your sweet spot.

For many consultants who pride themselves on their technical expertise, sales remains a dirty word. But if you are serious about growing your business, you will need to build a depth of expertise in sales.

The ‘buyer landscape’ has changed enormously. Prospective clients today are well informed and have high expectations. Despite this, with the right strategy, you should be winning the majority of pitches.

The aim of the Sales Mastery day is to inspire and equip owners to lead, challenge and support their sales function to create an outstanding sales experience with exceptional results, including market leading conversion rates and long term high value relationships.

You will learn how to:

• Work with the ‘right’ customers
• Employ an ‘advocacy mind-set’ to maximise long term growth
• Recognise when a profitable deal isn’t necessarily the right deal
• Decide when to take on clients that don’t meet your qualifying criteria
• Identify whether and how the client has categorised your business and how to influence this
• Get more insight into your prospect’s budget than your competitors
• Apply the do’s and don’ts of proposal writing
• Stand out before you even meet the decision makers
• Reduce the timespan for price negotiation or avoid it entirely
• Price to win whilst ensuring your targeted profit gets delivered
• Maximise the chances of your pitch hitting the spot
• Implement the five components of an effective sales strategy
• Unpick the sales process end-to-end and maximise the impact of every stage
• Build your sales management process
• Structure your sales function as your business grows
• Target your team to drive the right behaviour
• Bring non-responsive prospects out into the open
• Focus on ‘must-win deals’
• Employ ‘give to get’ negotiation

In summary, this sales tool-kit will increase your confidence to go for bigger deals, maximize your conversion rate and inspire you to engage with the craft of selling.

Having a great idea for a business and convincing clients to trust you is one thing. Growing your business into something of real value requires rare and exceptional capabilities.

Conscious Leadership is a critical lever you can pull to accelerate the growth of your business. It consists of carefully selected and highly relevant tools and insights that will help you become the very best leader you can be, so that you can maximise the potential within your organisation.

You will learn how to:

• Enhance and leverage your personal leadership brand
• Focus your time and energy to have maximum impact on achieving your ambitions
• Make every conversation count
• Build a culture that helps you attract high performing, like-minded people
• Increase the discretionary effort, retention and performance of your team
• Adapt your leadership style to get the most out of your people and develop followership
• Immediately implement tools that will increase efficiency and speed up decision making
• Assess when to inspire, when to coach and when to direct
• Make a small change and achieve a big difference
• Take advantage of herd mentality
• Create an environment where people take accountability
• Balance short and long term goals
• Deliver the level of leadership required at each stage of business growth

This day is about you. It’s about investing in your ability and developing your mindset such that you can lead a rapidly growing consulting business. Ultimately the success of your business is down to how you spend your time.

So… you’ve got a compelling proposition, more leads than you can handle, and your revenue and team are growing. You now need to manage your clients and make sure that all of your hard work translates into a healthy profit, which of course, you may choose to reinvest.

This is when operational challenges typically kick in:

• Your remote workforce starts to feel disconnected and starts thinking ‘why don’t I do this for myself?’
• Clients take advantage of your consultants who are keen to please and shy away from difficult conversations
• Consultants work late into the night to meet poorly managed client demands which sets an unhelpful cultural tone
• Non-consulting staff feel undervalued because their meetings keep getting bumped because of client demands
• Consultants that own the strong client relationships are reluctant to upsell or ask for referrals
• Management meetings and ‘one to ones’ get postponed leading to poor communication and disengagement
• New staff struggle to figure out what good looks like because ‘the standard’ varies depending on who they observe
• Key processes start to break down, invoices go out late, expenses are disputed or projects are kicked off without a signed order in place
• Sold margin does not translate into delivered margin
• Product penetration is poor – clients only know you for the one service they have bought

To overcome these challenges you will learn how to:

• Inspire and manage clients so they refer you and spend more money with you
• Avoid unbillable scope creep and unwanted shrinkage
• Maximise utilisation whilst maintaining morale
• Maintain an operating rhythm that values internal needs as well as client needs
• Increase consistency and quality by defining your key operating processes and inducting staff professionally
• Prepare your business for external scrutiny should you decide to exit
• Introduce discipline that improves cash flow and minimises lost consultant time on non-value adding activities
• Leverage the financial impact you make for your clients
• Lock down sold profit margins
• Maximise the use of non-negotiable standards
• Strike the right balance with associate resource ensuring they represent your brand
• Define the roles you need to support ongoing expansion

This day is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle and completes your transformation journey. You will have built a fantastic peer group along the journey and it is likely that everyone will stay in touch to support each other and hold each other to account. By now your run rate should be tracking at least 50% higher than it was at the start of the programme!