Solving the Professional Services Dilemma

1© 2013 TOCICO. All rights reserved.

TOCICO 2013 Conference

Solving the professional services dilemma

how to “productize” services and build a practice that will scale

Presented By: Justin Roff-Marsh

Date: June 2013

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© 2013 TOCICO. All rights reserved.


The Entrepreneurial Expert’s conflict

1. Build a consulting business (sell personal exertion)

2. Build a traditional business (sell products or packaged services)

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The chasm

• Consulting is profitable

• But it consumes the time you need to build a traditional (scalable) business

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This presentation

1. How we crossed the chasm

2. How you can learn from our (often painful) experiences

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Then and now

• High-cost projects

• Difficult client relations

• Implementations that didn’t stick (post project)

• Stressful work environment

• Burned-out team members

• Like a drug-addict, looking for the next fix!

• Low-cost engagements

• Appreciative long-term clients

• Stable operations on three continents

• $1.5m in annual sales (and steady growth)

• Throughput: 73%

• Happy team members

Then Now

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Three critical realizations

1. Unless you’re working with Fortune 500 companies, selling change-management projects is not a business model

2. There’s an inverse relationship between high fees and client sustainability

3. To earn sustainable profits, you must providing an enduring (packaged) service

4. To scale, you must sell religion (an ideology, not a methodology)

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How we transitioned

1. We dreamed about selling engagements

2. We convinced ourselves we weren’t ready (we needed better software, etc)

3. We eventually made a decision and wrote a document describing our service offering

4. To our surprise, companies started saying yes

5. Old project clients started returning and signing engagement agreements

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The new model

Outsourced Sales OperationsWe’ll design, build and

supervise your sales environment

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The new model

• 25% of one of our consultant’s capacity

• Unlimited access to creative team

• All sales-related technology (including special projects)

• Recruiting services

• Strategic input

• Cost

• $7,700 a month

• Immediate savings

• Smaller field force

• Eliminate field offices

• Fewer managers

• Save money on creative and tech

Client benefit Client value proposition

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The new model

• Recruit young smart people with management (not consulting) experience

• Pay them $100,000

• Sell their capacity for $370,000 (4 engagements each)

• Maintain consultants as the system constraint

• Maintain protective capacity in small creative and technology teams (and sales and admin)

• Give away packaged information to build a house list

• Promote webinars to the house list to generate sales opportunities

• Sell two-day Solution Design Workshops via web conference (never face-to-face)

• Deliver SDW face-to-face: sell up to ongoing engagements

• Founder sells (all 3 continents)

Our operations Our sales

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12 steps: follow in our footsteps

1. Identify the day-to-day services you could deliver to clients on an ongoing basis

2. Design a value-proposition that ensures clients have no net monthly outlay (from day one)

3. Convert one or two existing clients to new service offering

4. Employ a smart, young person and teach them how to deliver

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5. Centralize as much work as possible so your consultant becomes more of a facilitator

6. Adopt TOC as your religion (and use existing materials to spread the word)

7. Get yourself an EA and take personal responsibility for sales

8. Use pay-per-click advertising to give away (sample) content and build your house list

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9. Use webinars to generate sales opportunities

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10.Sell Solution Design Workshops and encourage your future clients to redesign their own environments

11.Use the initial change-management initiatives as hooks to secure ongoing relationships

12.Re-calibrate your definition of your market: geography need not be the barrier you think it is

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The new model

Questions?

Business

Solving the Professional Services Dilemma