WHAT WE DO

GROW SERVICE FIRMS BY COACHING BEST PRACTICES IN LEADERSHIP, STRATEGY, SALES AND MARKETING

At The Shattuck Group, we empower mid-size professional service firms to grow. Over the last 20 years we’ve served more than 70 mid-sized service firms, those with those with 25-100 staff and 10-50 million in revenue. Because we focus exclusively on this specific market niche, we’ve gotten plenty of opportunities to learn what works, and what doesn’t work. Here is what we know actually does work to grow mid-sized service firms. Fundamentally, this is about getting the obvious obstacles out of your growth path so you can keep growing.

First, leaders need to be clear about the mission and aligned with each other. This is much harder to achieve than it sounds. In our experience, the number one reason service firms hit growth plateaus is because leaders cannot agree on where they’re going or how to get there. Growing a service firm requires a lot of decisions to be made and when leaders cannot agree on the direction, inertia becomes the default. Stall-outs follow.

Second, a service firm needs to be organizationally, not just financially, healthy. Plenty of mid-sized service firms are profitable. But are they healthy? In our experience, it’s relatively easy to maintain organizational health until somewhere around the hiring of the 35^th to 50^th employee. The practices that have worked up until that point usually don’t work for larger firms. Organizational health requires the adoption of practices that most leaders were never taught.

Third, you need great strategy. Growing a service firm is about delivering value and impact to ideal clients. There are all sorts of creative ways to do this, including the adoption of managed services, geographic expansion, acquiring other businesses, rolling out new services and even entering new markets. These big decisions can be very daunting to make and require an aligned group of leaders who are willing to take risk.

Fourth, you need best-practices in sales. In professional services, “sales” is sometimes a dirty word. The growth-oriented firms we’ve served have a healthy perspective on sales and usually practice consultative selling. They also adopt best practices in social selling and optimize the use of CRM tools, like Salesforce.

Fifth, you need a great approach to marketing. This includes positioning for ideal clients, developing messages that resonate with them, using content marketing effectively and deploying best practices in digital strategy & social media. It also requires efficient and consistent use of email marketing and your website. Top it off with storytelling by your executives and a strong brand identity and you have a winning formula.

If your organization has stalled out, is not as healthy as you once were or is looking to reignite that spark you seem to have lost, we should talk. Just fill out the form below to get started.