This week saw the inaugural Legal Advisers & Suppliers +1 Conference in Australia, hosted by Macquarie Bank in their Barangaroo, Sydney office. The event was emceed by Alistair Marshall, Director of Professional Services Business Development along with David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions in the UK where the event has been run successfully for a number of years. Innovation in industry events is rare and this drove the idea for a conference where advisers and suppliers dedicated to providing value to the legal industry, all bring along guests from a client law firm. The result was a day at ..read more

Explaining your value to prospects and referrers is a massively underrated skill. How many times have you been impressed by a lawyer, accountant, banker or engineer? No one taught you how to do this in this at law school/accounting school/engineering school did they? You can't just give a history lesson as no-one really cares how long you have been practising, but need to know more about what results you have achieved for clients. If you get this right I will guarantee you will be in an elite group of maybe 5% of practitioners who get it ..read more

It is just about a year to the week since Chat GPT was unleashed on the world. It has changed a lot of things. However, I continue to be surprised and disappointed in equal measure when I ask Professional Services Firms how they are using it and in 90% of cases get a blank face staring back at me and a shrug of the shoulders. I implore you to get onboard as every day you wait, you fall further behind the early adopters. In 1997 I bought a PC which frankly was rubbish, but at least it forced me to learn the new skills, I knew I needed to acquire to remain competitive. It wasn’t cheap. Chat GTP ..read more

We’ve all experienced it. The prospect is a perfect fit for your firm. You understand their situation perfectly and can demonstrate a track record with their current issues. The presentation or engagement meeting went great. They said they would get back to you soon. And then silence, glorious silence. Total radio silence. So , what can you do without sounding needy or desperate to find out what is going on? Well your first option is old school and pick up the telephone. A long lost art form often dreaded in this situation and certainly unlikely to be top of the list for the younger generatio ..read more

As we come out from the malaise of the pandemic, there has been a noticeable uplift in the number of events that professional services firms have chosen to attend, perhaps hungry/desperate to re-engage their markets. My personal experience has been that whilst the halls have been full of willing exhibitors, the footfall of attendees has been somewhat disappointing. So, should you invest and how do you know if it was worth it? What might your ROI look like? Well to be fair, this will depend on what your definition of success is. Have you attended before? Do you have any accurate data around bu ..read more

Similar firms deliver similar services using similar people with similar qualifications to similar looking clients at similar prices. Some firms receive ten times the number of applications than competing firms for similar roles. So why might this happen? It is difficult to stand out versus the competition. But in this current war for human talent, you must try.   In exit interviews 48% of people cite unfulfilling work as their reason for leaving a position whilst another 41% quote that often overused, yet misunderstood phrase, culture. So, tell me, why should I choose to work at your fi ..read more

Business development is client service and relationship building. Let’s not over complicate it. A few years back, I was involved in Market Research with 150 professional services firms here in Australia and New Zealand who claimed they did 5 hours of BD/Marketing each week. Not sure I believed them, but on close inspection, 70% of this time was undertaken at their desk. Only 30% was done out of the office in a face to face environment. When pushed, they admitted that when they successfully landed new clients, it was indeed as a result of one of those in person meetings. My conclusion therefore ..read more

July is the traditional time to raise prices as we enter the new financial year Down Under. This year it has never been so important, as costs go spiralling upwards for salaries, mortgage payments, insurance, energy etc That’s why I raised an eyebrow at recent research suggesting that 40% of Professional Services firms have NOT raised prices since the outbreak of Covid more than two years ago! Remember, raising your prices is the fastest and cheapest way to raise profits. Based on average margins in firms, a 10% price uplift can enable you to lose up to a quarter of your turnover yet return ..read more

Finding/Recruiting/Maintaining staff is the number one challenge facing law firms. Attracting and retaining new profitable client work is the second largest challenge. How are the two related? How can addressing one problem help solve the other? How can firms motivate, educate and inspire people to grow their practice? Find out as I chat with Simon Tupman on 16 June. This webcast will be recorded for later viewing in case you are unable to tune in live. Register here: https://bit.ly/3t7rfgp ..read more

If you are not already doing so, 2022 might just be the year to concentrate on winning more work from existing clients, rather than spending huge time and resources trying to win new ones.  So how do the most successful Professional Services firms around the world go about it? Key Account Management Well first things first. Diagnosis comes before strategy and strategy comes before tactics.  You are going to need a plan and remember what got you to this point, will not necessarily be sufficient to get you to where you want to go to now. Consider also, that there are essentially thre ..read more