Tracking the turnover of the firms professional staff is another important part of quality control. If a firm has high turnover, it is clearly not meeting the needs of its professionals. Unhappy professionals can, unfortunately, often be translated into unhappy clients. The firm needs to understand how internal staff issues affect its client relationships. Consistently successful professional services firms do not have high turnover of professional staff. Professional staff retention is discussed in Chapter 9.

Summary

In a professional services firm that understands the needs of its clients, business development strategies are really just techniques for broadening the scope of the firms market base. In other words, business development is a natural by-product of understanding the needs of the firms clients. If the professionals in the firm understand how they are or are not satisfying the needs and expectations of their clients, then as the firm adjusts its service delivery model, it also affects its ability to compete and differentiate itself in the marketplace. The more proficient the firm is at meeting the specific needs of the markets it serves, the greater its ability to expand its business base.

That is what is so revolutionary about the process of strategic firm management. A firm that understands how to manage itself first, and do so strategically, gives every professional in the organization a strategic mind-set. When they are making contact with the firms constituencies, they are automatically asking the right questions, inquiring about the strategic needs of their clients or prospects, and developing new business naturally. Its typically the same people developing new business who are delivering services because the two processes are integrated.

When professionals and administrative staff are managed in this way, the strategic perspective on professional services becomes a natural part of the way they think. When they are at lunch with a potential referral source or prospective client or they are speaking at a conference or seminar, they will adopt the strategic perspective: How do I attack that problem with that client? How do I attack that need of the marketplace? How do I think about that issue? How should they think about it? Staff who understand how to convey the message of the strategic approach of the firm ensure that the professional services delivered will be of consistently higher quality than those provided by competitors.

A firm, however, needs traditional marketing support to help grow its client base and sustain the clients it currently serves, but the firm must act strategically in the way it markets. It should also take some risks-redesign professional services and reach out to the marketplace that the firm currently does not serve.

NOTES

1. Anthony Greenback, The Book of Survival: Everymans Guide to Staying Alive and Handling Emergencies in the City, the Suburbs, and the Wild Lands Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. xi.

2. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Gower, 1993), p. 337.

3. Edi Osborne, CEO, Mentor Plus, phone interview by the author, Pasadena, California (March 15, 2004).

4. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap-And Others Dont (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), p 44.

5. Dale Cordial, CEO, PT Group, phone interview by the author, Greensburg, Pennsylvania (March 20, 2004).

6. See note 3.

7. See note 3.

Resource Management

Joe Santana

Nothing is denied to well-directed labor, and nothing is ever to be attained without it.

-Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)1

In this chapter, we focus on the key ingredient behind the success of any professional services firm: the effective and appropriate utilization of its people. According to analyst firm Aberdeen Group, service-centric organizations make up approximately 75 percent of the economy in developed nations. In their report, Aberdeen states that these organizations are now realizing that success hinges upon their ability to efficiently leverage their intellectual cap-ital. 2 Clearly, nowhere is Joshua Reynoldss statement about well-directed labor truer than it is in the professional services industry.

Why This Topic Is Important

Professional services firms are classic knowledge-based service-industry enterprises that have few physical assets and are built on a widely distributed intellectual capital base. As noted by many in these consulting businesses, all you really have as the engine behind your offerings in a professional services business are people and their experience. If these people are utilized improperly, profitability will suffer, or at best it will be substantially lower than it could be for a similar organization that is more mature in its people practices. To build their profitability and competitive advantage, professional services firms, therefore, must (1) hire the best talent on the market in their space, and (2) make the best use of the talent they have in-house. This chapter focuses on the latter: how we make optimal use of the people already inside the organization.