Do you have a well-integrated firm?

It is no longer enough for your firm to be good only at what it offers as a professional service.

Success depends on being excellent, not just at the core professional offering but across an integrated set of capabilities. In particular, the people running those capabilities need to be as good in their domain as your experts are in theirs. In other words, you need ‘support’ functions run by peers of the partnership, with equal earning power in the market, and you need their systems and professional standards to match yours. These firms strive for ‘excellence’ but become ‘world-class’.

In many firms this is an inconceivable concept. ‘We’ (the expert partners) are more important than ‘them’ (the mere supporting cast). ‘Our’ professional domain (law, accounting, engineering, HR, project management, PR, technology) is more important than ‘their’ domain (PR, technology, accounting, HR, finance, engineering, law, project management).

Competitive advantage may once have derived from being like a guild, with a quasi-monopoly on a difficult domain of knowledge. Today, acquiring access to knowledge is easier. For those paying for your service, several factors are at least as important as your professional knowledge.

Relevance – the ‘so what?’ test applied to their specific circumstances.

Ease of engagement – frictionless systems that work well with their systems.

Simplicity – all your complexity delivered to a comprehensible point.

Currency – compatible with current technology, especially their latest tools.

Alignment – demonstrably enacting similar values, particularly integrity.

Your current and potential clients run these tests across your whole firm, not just your core activity. In working with boards and heads of professional firms, I’ve found that four areas matter when it comes to their firm’s ability to develop a reputation for excellence. They seek good responses to the criteria for excellence for each domain, some of which I’ve set out below.

Use these to reflect on your firm’s approach to its business. One may become a source of new competitive advantage. Each line here represents a project or process that one of my clients has used as the basis for firmwide improvement.

Your core:

• You have clearly defined internal criteria for ‘professional excellence’, including both quantitative and qualitative performance measures.
• You have both financial and non-financial standards for how your professional engagements are managed and everyone refers to them.
• You gauge the relevance of your work to the actual issue the client needs addressed and how they measure value.
• You have well defined systems for recruiting and developing professionals with a career path that has aspirational milestones from induction to retirement and beyond.
• You have clear processes for supporting professionals in attaining your standards and correcting where necessary.

Your operations:

• You have an investment strategy, with clear budgets and measurement of both tangible and intangible returns. (There’s an accounting code for ‘investment’).
• Your operations are assessed by how well they enable high quality professional work.
• You have stable, timely, trusted financial and non-financial information on which to base decisions about the firm’s future.
• You have strong processes to support each area of activity of the firm, such as marketing, training & development, project execution and the Board/Council.
• Innovation is a process, not a concept.

Your Marketing/sales/client development

• You are collaborative on IP with your tier 1 clients. (You have clear tiers defining client importance).
• Your message to the market, both existing and potential clients, is crystal clear and compatible with internal messaging on matters such as the firm’s vision, professional expectations and execution quality.
• Your entire firm knows where your marketing is focussed, and why.
• All market statements relating to trust are mirrored by events, processes and documentation within the firm that deliver on that trust.

Your Technology

• Your technology strategy is as sophisticated as your core professional strategy – using relevant data, expert advice, researched relevance to the firm’s objectives and measured by impact.
• Your partners are adept at using the latest technology you have provided them.
• Your technology strategy enables development of your professional IP and offerings to clients.
• Your technology delivers frictionless, easy-to-use internal systems.

And a final point: - Commitment

• Each area, the Core, Operations, Marketing and Technology, has at least one partner at equity level who is an acknowledged authority on it, both within the firm and outside it. There is personal, passionate commitment to multi-faceted excellence amongst the ownership group.

My clients often debate with me the difference between ‘world-class’ and ‘excellent’. This is often quite straightforward when it comes to their profession.

The challenge I put to them and to you is:

• Can you strive for world-class, if you ignore the significance of these four, professionally equal, aspects of running a firm?
• Can you even be competitive?
• Will you survive for long in the future environment for professional services?