Professional services strategic_planning_for_today_jun2011

Professional Services
Strategic Planning For
Today
By CEI Compliance
For 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 Werrell
CEI Compliance Limited

Strategic Planning For Today
By Lee Werrell FInstSMM Chartered MCSI CertPFS

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 critical necessity. 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 firm’s 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 don’t
know where you are going, it doesn’t matter which road
you take.”

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

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

Strategic Planning For today Page 1

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

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

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 likely
to 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 team’s 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 new
products 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.


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 valuable
subject 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 don’t 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 senior
management 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


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 Devil’s 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 team’s 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


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 for
themselves and their clients. By utilizing this methodology, each practice head is more focused on
their team’s 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 we have been involved with in the last 10 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
firm’s long term benefit. Call 0800 689 9 689 today or go online at
www.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


Professional services strategic_planning_for_today_jun2011

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