Professional Services Strategic Planning for Today Jun2011

8/6/2019 Professional Services Strategic Planning for Today Jun2011

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Professional ServicesStrategic Planning For

Today

By CEI ComplianceFor Professional Services Firms the rules of strategy

setting are different. Without knowing the differences

instantly sets your firm into a dilemma and causes

untold damage to turnover and growth as well as

individual partner/director career development.

Lee WerrellCEI Compliance Limited


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Strategic Planning For today Page 1

Strategic PlanningFor TodayByLeeWerrellFInstSMMCharteredMCSICertPFS

Typically, many professional services firms are often so preoccupied with assisting their clients

with regulatory issues, business demands and time pressure issues that they lose sight of their

ultimate business objectives. With major landscape shifts on the horizon with the RDR, move of the

FSA to the FCA as well as the backdraft of the banks financial crisis and governments austerity

combating measures, is precisely where a facilitated business review for the preparation of a strategic

plan is more than a virtual necessity; it is a criticalnecessity. Corporate Strategy may not be a recipe

book for any professional services company and their success, but without clear direction, planning,

awareness of external impacts as well as internal issues, partner/director career paths, fiscal and

resource crises, as well as staff and HR challenges a business is much more likely to fail.

The main problem with most professional services and their strategy setting is that if you took their

strategy statements along with about 50 others, they will almost all be interchangeable and will, other

than branding and stylizing provide a bland to target this type of client in this industry/sector and

provide them with this level of service. Not that there is anything wrong with the intention and there

is nothing wrong with the goals being written clearly. The problem will arise where they all have the

same client list to target, all have the same service offering in that industry/sector and all aspire to

provide an exemplary level of service.

Often failing in what our American brethren would say is Strategy Setting Course 101 whereby the

goal is to provide a set of actions consistently to make the firms service or support more valuable to

clients than that of the competition; you can see that they have barely turned the front cover.

The support you receive from CEI Compliance Consultancy is targeted at corporate development,corporate strategy planning, strategic management

and strategy consulting and will involve the following.

Planning: strategic thinking and strategic business

planning identify where the new opportunities lie.

Positioning:Strategy consulting gives your

company the insight to be perfectly placed to

exploit each opportunity to the full.

Process:putting in place a strategic management

process ensures that your company is constantly

primed to use events to its best advantage.

As the cat in Alice in Wonderland states; If you dont

know where you are going, it doesnt matter which road

you take.

A sound plan should be simply that once a desirablemarket, level of engagement and market size isestablished and defined, the firms must then turn to the not so straightforward task of decidingspecifically how it will compete.

This would mean, to the more astute of you that the time has come to move away from the marketingtactics, intelligence, research or other evidential gathering mechanisms and move to a more creative


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and innovative methodology. It is time to concentrate on the internal, operational, administrative anddelivery systems so that clients can derive additional and thus pertinent and relevant benefits over andabove the competitors offering.

Below we will provide potential areas that may provide more value to clients but not to create aperfect answer for all the areas, but pick on two to five areas that they understand they are lackingdynamism in and brainstorm the ways to perfect these areas to provide a perceived extra value to theirclients.

Your strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. The former is likely to be a short

document whereas a business plan is usually a much more substantial and detailed document. A

strategic plan can provide the foundation and frame work for a business plan, providing vision and

identify the gaps and obstacles that the business plan needs to address.

A strategic plan is different from an operational plan. The strategic plan should be

visionary, conceptual and directional in contrast to an operational plan which is likelyto be shorter term, tactical, perimeter focused, implementable and easily measurable. As an

example, compare the strategic process of planning a holiday (where, when, duration, budget, who

goes, how travel are all strategic issues) with the final operational preparations (tasks, deadlines,

funding, weather, packing, transport and so on).

A clear, carefully stepped corporate strategy invigorates your business, energizes your team and

puts your long-term goals within you and your teams reach

Basic Approach to Strategic Planning

I challenge you to disagree, but there is a tendency in professional

firms to augment their strategy development by inputting the desire

to focus on new things. These range from new markets to new

clients; new services and products and even opening new premises

(the panacea of expansion at all costs). Most of these activities are

designed to, but usually fail in, providing additional revenue,

substantial additional profitability or increased market share due to

some convoluted formula that dilutes existing markets and

redistributes the share to the new venture.

Most fail to realize that without specific expertise in those areas, a strong support to the newproducts or services plus the periphery requirements of resource, licenses, IT etc then for most it

means redeployment, reallocation and reduced work on their core business.

The key element that most firms overlook is that the attitude and focus as well as behavior of the

partners/directors will also need to change significantly to make radical changes which are at best

disruptive and uncomfortable for most people and at worst politically charged and disruptive to

existing teams and career plans of senior management. All the sound and considered reasoning

coupled with strategic diversity and suggested actions are usually merely pebbles thrown in a pond,

and like the ripples made, soon forgotten.


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So what should we target?

This is a suggested list that can be adapted. It is not intended to be exhaustive and can be extended

according to your needs.

Table 1-1

How can we develop an innovative approach to attract the best hires so we are seen as

employers of choice and providing higher caliber solutions over our competition?

How can we develop distinct and innovative ways to manage our assignments/

contracts/projects so we are more thorough in delivery yet maintain accuracy?

How can we best train our staff to understand client perspectives and maintain meaningful

dialogue with our clients, effectively providing a counseling advice service?

How can we lead with skilled and specialised people that are perceived as extremely valuablesubject matter experts to the market and our peer group?

Can we become more valuable to our clients in the marketplace by listening to what they say

and what they dont say: understanding their business as well as they do?

How can we ensure that our professional technical advisers and consultants become more

valuable to our client by increasing their breadth and depth of knowledge?

The Biggest Myth

Sorry to report this, but the strategy in a professional services firm is not best set by the seniormanagement in a top down exercise. That may well be the best way for industry and production

divisions, but where each partner/director is in control of their subdivision or team and they may

not necessarily buy into a strategic plan set by their peers and fellow professionals. The variance

between subgroups and their specialties will be such that there will be a level of interest initially,

then as soon as an element does not apply or is difficult to adapt, the whole plan is dropped and

they all return to business as usual.

Additionally different disciplines will also clash, such as a litigation department of a law firm will

want different things to the family law or conveyancing division. You would find it extremely difficult

to find any professional services firm that was considered by their clients to be vastly superior in all

aspects of their service compared to other firms. Dictating strategy from the top down and

expecting whole firms and their sub-practices or disciplines to all develop the same way, will be

doomed to failure before the ink is dry.

Additionally the move would be foolhardy as the different practice groups have already

differentiated themselves to a degree, by working in their recognized fields in such a way that

exploits or leverages on their different offering. To force them to all toe the line and operate as a

single front with new and changed business practices, would quickly result in an exodus of the

practice heads and their teams.

Simply put, in these businesses, where a professional service is being offered, the best strategic

plans are those formulated by the professionals that are carving out the practice and their careers


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within that work. These should not be given free rein to come up with their strategic plan, but

rather facilitated with probing and thought provoking questions to help them understand what their

unique points may be.

Table 2

Again this is not an exhaustive list but the stance of Devils Advocate helps test and challenge the

robustness of the plans. Questions along the lines of;

What special or unique capabilities do you have or plan to obtain that your closest

competitors will be unable to match?

What makes them so unique?

What do you have to do to put these capabilities in place?

What do you think the clients will like about your changes?

What field testing or evidence do you base it on?

Who is responsible for implementing each component/stage of your plans?

Who was involved in this development? Who was consulted/not consulted?

What three main criteria are needed for this to work?

What are the closest competitors likely to be developing and how do you propose to counter

this?

If they come up with a really clever angle, how will you leverage that idea? How quickly?

In what way do you see that you need assistance from across the firm?

How will you contribute to other parts of the firm with the lessons learned?

What are the staffing implications of your approach?

How will you know the plan is working? What evidence will be produced and when?

What could go wrong and how will you tell at an early stage?

These questions need to be asked after the first pass of the teams strategy planning and then they

should be sent away to prepare their responses for use at a second meeting. When all of these

points have been challenged, answered and accepted for each team, the management is now in a

position to offer selective investment/funding to help the best of the opportunities and to confirm a

high level plan for the company.

The whole process of strategy setting in this way provides a level of responsiveness for the

organization that is rarely equaled by any other company in the same marketplace. Most companies

are staffed by people that have come from large companies and will always revert to their comfort

zone of installing a strategy on everyone.

Returns are Many Fold

Not only will have you have an edge over the competitors that are funding new offices, expensive


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recruitment campaigns and posturing in the market purporting themselves as experts in their new

fields, but a second, more fundamental and better benefit is obtained, whilst at the same time

bringing better commitment and buy in from the practice heads.

Each practice head is always planning their career, building it to provide a better future forthemselves and their clients. By utilizing this methodology, each practice head is more focused on

their teams development, achievements for themselves, and healthy competition within the firm as

each head tries to better his peers.

There is no point in diversifying and spreading yourself too thinly as a company unless you have the

resource and skills to capitalize on a niche area. By re-engineering what you already have to provide

a better level of service, support or advice to clients will also lock them into your new caring,

streamlined and efficient systems that they would never even think of leaving you.

Companies wehavebeen involvedwith in the last10 years;

CEI Compliance can help provide a full compliance support service, reducing

required management time, ensuring all areas are up to date and working for your

firms long term benefit. Call 0800 689 9 689 today or go online atwww.ceicompliance.co.uk

This whitepaper was written

by Lee Werrell FInstSMM Chartered MCSI

Cert PFS, founder of CEI Compliance Limited.

Avoid S166 Skilled Persons Reports download our free guide here
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Professional Services Strategic Planning for Today Jun2011