How do you move the profit dial upward?

Have you ever actually had a lesson in how to win good quality, profitable business?

Most professionals haven't.

We spend years learning how to become good lawyers, accountants, wealth managers, bankers or other professional advisers.

But when it comes to winning business, what do we do?

We tend to do what everyone else does.

We network. We attend conferences. We arrange one-to-one meetings. We post on social media. We write articles. We keep in touch with contacts. We ask for introductions.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these things.

But if you are doing broadly what everyone else is doing, is it really surprising if you end up with broadly similar results — and similar profit margins?

I had to find another way

When I took over the Private Client Group at Simmons & Simmons, I was given a very simple message.

If I didn't produce City rates of profit, I wouldn't receive City rates of pay.

At the time, I had two infant children. I couldn't simply work longer hours, attend every event or fill my diary with more meetings in the hope that some of them might eventually produce work.

I had to be more strategic.

I had to think carefully about the clients we wanted, the work we wanted to do for them and why those clients should choose us rather than another perfectly competent firm.

I also had to think differently about relationships.

Who did we already know? Who did our clients know? Which other professionals were advising the sorts of clients we wanted to work with? What problems were those clients actually trying to solve? And how could we bring the right expertise together around those problems?

It wasn't about doing more business development.

It was about being much more intentional about the business development we did.

Within two years, I was earning City rates of pay.

More importantly, I had learned something that has influenced the way I have approached winning business ever since.

Good quality work doesn't have to arrive by accident.

Moving the profit dial upwards

I have now turned much of what I learned into a programme for other professionals and professional firms.

We don't start by telling you to network more, post more frequently on LinkedIn or attend another conference.

We start with a deep dive.

What are you actually trying to achieve?

Which clients do you most want to work with?

What work do you most want to do for them?

Which work is genuinely profitable?

What are you currently doing to win it?

What is working?

What isn't?

And where are potentially profitable opportunities being missed?

Only when we understand the answers to those questions do we start developing a plan.

That plan will be different for every firm because every firm starts from a different place.

You may already have an extraordinary network of contacts but not be converting those relationships into profitable work.

You may have highly valuable expertise but find that too few of the right people know about it.

Or you may be spending considerable amounts of professional time on business development without really knowing which activities are producing a commercial return.

The objective isn't simply to win more work.

It is to become much more strategic about winning the right work.

Because ultimately this is about one thing:

Moving the profit dial upwards.

If you are curious about whether this approach could help you and your firm, let me know and we can book half an hour for a preliminary conversation.

It won't be right for everyone.

But if it isn't right for you, what have you lost?

Half an hour of your time.