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News
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CPAs
Suzanne
advises PSF marketers how to lead important new
initiatives in her new article, How
to Take Control of Your Career in Tumultuous Times
CPATrendlines, November 2010
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Recent Issues
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The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
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About
this month's issue
In January, we debuted our 2011 Learning to Fly newsletter series, based on our latest research, "Research on the State of Grow-the-Business Skills Growth in U.S.-based Professional Service Firms." Each month, we will explore how professional service firms (PSFs) are helping their people grow skills to grow the business. When I say grow the business, I mean competencies and/or credentials to market and sell the firm and its services, but also to lead, manage and govern the enterprise so that it competes as effectively as it can.
This month, we'll summarize the skills-growth environment for these grow the business competencies.
Suzanne
Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional
Service Firms Compete to Win
Author, The Integration Imperative: Erasing
Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and
for All - in Professional Service Firms
The Skills-Growth Environment for Growing a Professional Business Looks Like a Patchwork Quilt
In the latter part of 2010, we conducted lengthy interviews with more than 30 people in management consulting, architecture / engineering, accounting, executive search, and law firms. Everyone expressed interest in gaining skills to help their firms compete and grow, and to help themselves lead more effectively to achieve those objectives. But their opportunity to gain skills is impacted by a dizzying patchwork quilt of variables.
The PSF skills growth landscape is highly fragmented. The educational programs – whether undergraduate or graduate – for most professions do not teach students how to grow or manage their knowledge-based enterprises once they go out into the marketplace as business people. And so, especially in the last few decades, other educational offerings filled in this surprising deficiency. Today, there are many varied options for patching together at least a perspective on effectively running a professional enterprise. Some firms bring in consultants or training companies whose focus is on a specific grow-the-enterprise area, e.g., managing people, diversity, solution sales, or any of a spectrum of leadership programs. Still other PSFs support their people's attendance at executive education programs at universities or their associations' annual conferences. And there are some PSFs that create their own skill-building and professional-development curricula.
A person's career or leadership stage. There is wide variation in what an individual is willing to learn about growing a professional firm, as well as what competencies the enterprise itself wants the person to gain. Let's first look at the early stages of a person's career. Most firms ask their early-career learners to grow skills in the day-to-day operational workings of the practice itself ("This is how we manage client projects"). Some firms ask their early-career people to start learning immediately about how to increase the firm's marketplace effectiveness, e.g., "how to differentiate our firm from competitors;" or "how to listen for a client's unmet needs." But the majority of early-career learners are not asked to grow these critically important skills. For established or near-retirement firm leaders, most PSFs shift from encouraging learning to a more perquisite- or networking-orientation, e.g., "go to a conference where other PSF leaders will attend." On top of this, most of the established PSF leaders we interviewed feel they've learned all they need to know about leading their enterprise toward marketplace effectiveness. This attitude persists even though they have never been educated on managing a firm, e.g., "this is how to redistribute a professional firm's resources in a recession."
A firm's cultural approach to skills-growth. Some firms have strong "grow the people, grow the business" cultures. They put real time and real money toward incremental skills-growth. Other firms have a "you're on your own" mindset about how their people learn to lead or manage any part of the enterprise. Interestingly, we did find some sector specificity: management consulting, a profession that is unlicensed and "unregulated," appears to have a strong grow-the-business mindset. But accounting, engineering / architecture and law have continuing technical education requirements in order to maintain licensure. Their people have to learn, to stay in business, but their learning is about keeping up with their craft, not about growing or managing their enterprises.
A person's function within the firm. Knowledge-based enterprises skew their internal skills-growth offerings – or if they don't have any in-house offerings, supporting people to build skills outside - toward client-facing practitioners. In those firms we interviewed, people in administrative functions (marketing, sales, IT, HR, etc.) are generally left to fend for themselves when it comes to learning how to manage or grow the enterprise. Not surprisingly, this silo'ed approach to educating people to grow the business has contributed to further internal fragmentation of the enterprise's ability to compete effectively as an organization.
Whether the firm is very large or smaller. More of the large firms we interviewed appear to have developed their own branded curricula. They also have more well-developed formal mentoring or apprenticeship and/or tuition reimbursement programs. Generally, smaller firms have no branded internal training programs. They also have no formal reimbursement policies for helping people increase their grow-the-business skills. Apprenticeship and mentoring aren't formal. Numerous interviewees told us they asked their firms for help in gaining a master's degree credential. Many of their firms said "yes," once asked. But this kind of individual initiative is only "allowed," not actually expected or encouraged.
Peer pressure. A person's pursuit of an advanced degree or formal program is viewed as a favorably distinguishing career move, even for administrative functions like marketing, business development, and talent management or human resources. Peer pressure to gain credentials is increasing, in both positive and negative ways. First, there is peer pressure stemming from people we'll call "advanced-degree enthusiasts." Here's an example from a newer career law firm marketer: "I need to understand the entire professional services realm, and be able to make myself more marketable. Not to leave, but to bring in new ideas." But peer pressure is also increasing from "advanced-degree skeptics." Here's a quote from a different newer career law firm marketer: "I would pursue this if I saw anecdotal evidence that credentials are increasingly desired. I would pay attention to what my leaders are focusing on [in our department's hiring], as well as candidates in other positions in other departments." A minute later, she said: "A master's degree with a focus on marketing or some kind of relevant focus . . . could only be an asset on someone's resume." So even the skeptics are under pressure to grow their skills.
The Best Practices to Grow a Professional Enterprise
Does a slate of grow-the-business best practices even exist in professional services? I think not. Certainly, numerous cross-sector consultants and some academics – myself included – are addressing this gap, with research, case studies and books that have begun to examine how PSF managers can most effectively grow market share and compete advantageously, in variable economic conditions. Arguably, even our efforts could be considered yet one more piece of the grow-the-business patchwork quilt.
Clearly, more exploration will be needed before we truly Learn to Fly. In the next decade, the educational arena for cross-sector learning about how to lead, manage and grow a knowledge-based enterprise will itself begin to grow up.
Write
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