Advisory Services for Top Management of Professional firms

All professionals have a certain self-image of themselves. This advisory service will help your team assess your professionals from various aspects — many assessments you’ve already conducted yourselves — and put it all together to make quality hiring, training, promotion, and outplacement decisions.

We will go through personality profiles and self-assessment tools such as DiSC, CliftonStrengths, MBTI, etc., and map the data onto one of our proprietary maps. This will make it easier for HR professionals to evaluate staff composition, roles scarcity, and fine-tune performance appraisal systems for different types of professionals.

Primary goals: to manage employee turnover and retention.

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Your firm’s profitability depends on the effectiveness of your project managers (partners, team leads, coordinators). Apart from staffing projects optimally, there are ten managerial roles PMs should be aware of, and capable of. However, no one is terrific at wearing all managerial hats.

In order to avoid micro-management, there are also profesionals’ motivations to keep tabs on. In addition, there is a set of criteria that makes projects successful despite being (e.g.) less profitable.

In this advisory service, we will attend to your project management challenges to apply the best practices taking your specific requirements, projects’ nature, and goals into account.

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There are eight types of teams. Each type is better-fit for certain team tasks. In addition, the team composition plays a huge role in team’s success. Certain team roles cooperate better with other roles, while others have constant issues. Each professional has a unique composition of such proclivities.

Apart from all that, there is a preferable sequence to how team tasks should unfold, when intervention will likely to be effective, and a desirable set of conditions to meet in order to increase the probability of superb team performance.

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This advisory service will assess your professionals’ and marketing specialists’ preferences toward specific marketing channels. We will review all possible options, and establish which ones will actually work for your firm.

Because budgets are always tight, and commitment isn’t always impeccable, we will develop an actionable list of marketing activities your firm will be able to do, will be willing to do, and will actually commit to doing. No sticks, and few extrinsic carrots.

We will match professionals with best-fit marketing activities. We will also tie your firm’s marketing efforts to client types, buyer decision journey, and service lines. One of the primary goals: to make yours a learning organization; at the very least, the most essential parts of it.

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In this advisory suite we will establish buyer (client) types your firm is currently dealing with most, the kind of service provider you are, and based on your best-fit client criteria create a scorecard system.

Thoroughly designing your service offerings, we’ll work on value capture and creation activities, explore client motivations and value elements. Additionally, we will inspect sales negotiation tactics and pricing, look into sales pitches and proposals (RFPs, RFQs).

We will also determine who among your team is better equipped for different client-facing roles, and what skills are ripe for improvement. Primary goals: assertive stance, fast quality response, preparedness, adaptiveness.

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There are eight generic service provider types to choose for your firm and individual practice areas (divisions, groups). There are also unique combinations that reveal existing, and perhaps yet unoccupied, market positions.

Having identified your firm’s current position, we will look into positioning opportunities. Several techniques will aid in positioning your firm in a way that makes it scarce — in demand yet less fungible.

Apart from today’s market, we will also explore your firm’s general direction, and map out potential lucrative future market positions.

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Organizational cultures are never homogenous. The larger the firm, the more likely each large faction (group) posseses its own subculture. There are four subculture pairs that are always at odds with one another.

We will discuss all subculture types, their strengths, and potential benefits and drawbacks. Assessing subcultures within your firm, we’ll establish how to avoid conflict, how to foster synergies, and improve collaboration.

In addition, we will create a thorough actionable plan to drive your organization toward a set of preferable subcultures. This will include managerial placements in certain positions, and creation of routines, processes, cultivation of favorable values, and tinkering with your performance appraisal system and rewards.

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During this advisory service we will go through your organizational structure to find ways how to improve it given your current business objectives. Not all structures are supportive of every aspirational goal.

Structures may also change over time. Sometimes, a ten-year-old organizational chart is a far cry from today’s actual configuration; while top management still runs the firm as if it was. This creates additional (and unnecessary) organizational entropy.

There are several basic types of structural configurations. However, a rare firm maintains initial and pre-defined one type throughout its existance. Given your current state of affairs, and overall strategy, we’ll explore how to rearrange things to avoid future loss of useful work and improve performance.

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Growth is often more about politics within the firm than rational economic choices. The larger the firm, the more likely two (or more) political camps will vie for their own preferable growth route.

There are eight basic routes, as well as numerous viable combinations. Some growth paths are opposites, some — complimentary. We will probe your current political milieu, and suggest how to reconcile any potential tensions that could result in direct confrontation, covert resistance, or sabotage.

This advisory service is largely about one-on-one interviews and conversations rather than firmwide surveys and workshops.

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