Trusted Advisors and New Business Idea Generation

Trusted Advisors and New Business Idea Generation

“All I did was add overhead without any change in the top line. I think I need to go back to the way things were because your idea to add high-powered administrative staff isn’t working.”

Hold on!

In the last article we went through some simple math to open more time for the best and brightest in our firm to focus on clients. When this concept is introduced there is little resistance. The challenge lies in what we want partners to do with the extra hours. Two things happen when you give your people more time: first, they find more administrative tasks to fill the void. The work expands into the time allotted. The second scenario is that our smartest assets use a high powered administrative staff to improve their quality of life by working fewer hours.

Neither option is particularly bad, but when you bring on the extra cost of an administrative staff and the increase in production barely covers the expense of new staff, you’re not exactly transforming your firm.

Let’s talk about how to get the most from the extra time you’re finding for your partners. In this article, I’ll cover 3 techniques that your best assets can use begin to get more from their extra hours.

1. Patience – measure
2. Case studies – research
3. Find opportunities to Productize one off requests

Patience

This is a process, not an event and you need to work with your partners accordingly. If they’ve had to get used to doing administrative work, they won’t instantly fill their time with new high value activities. As a matter of fact, when the time comes to let go of activities, the first thing your administrative superstars will have to work on is bulldogging through the partner objections when they take those client administrative tasks off their desks. That’s why we start with Patience. Productivity jumps are not going to happen overnight, however within 6 months you should see the administrative team getting busy. By 12 months they should be nearing capacity.

That brings up the discussion on how we know that time is being freed up. The assumption is that you are successfully tracking time and activity. Your tech team needs to build a report that tells you who is inputting the tracked activity. Split those hours into the activities controlled by the partner and the activities controlled by the administrative team. We want 30 minutes a day per partner transferred to the administrative team in 6 months and 1 hour a day transferred by 12 months.

Case Studies

Once that measurement is in place, we need to take that time and build your team’s idea muscles. Yep, just like you build physical muscle strength through repetitive exercise, your partners will build their idea muscles through a similar workout.

In introducing this concept, your partners will tell you that their idea muscles are in good shape. They never stop dreaming up new ways to help clients. The idea muscle has 2 parts to it, the reactive idea muscle and the proactive. The reactive is used to taking cues from clients to uncover new projects. “I have been talking to client XYZ about our services at each review, but they haven’t needed our help yet,” is the sound of an underdeveloped proactive idea muscle.

Your job is to build that muscle up.

Start your partners on a 30 minute diet of cross discipline case studies in their preferred vertical markets. Not industry specific information, but case studies from other solution providers into the same space. An easy place to start is with the information technology solution providers. They may be working in the same vertical, but guaranteed they have their own language and worldview that will require your partner’s brains to adjust.

The goal of the steady diet of cross discipline case studies is to get brains out of the day to day minutiae to consider the client’s entire business. This forces the proactive idea muscle to get stronger and you’ll hear more “I mentioned that I was reading about alternate technology solutions for fulfillment centers and it reminded me of a funding solution we set up for another client. They set up a meeting for us to come in and give a presentation.”

What new ideas look like

This is a good time to bring up what new ideas look like. Just the term “new idea” can conjure up some Steve-Jobs-like vision of an earth shattering insight. The reality is most ideas look like a mash-up of existing ideas and practices put to a new use. A slight improvement here and a connection there is all your firm needs to start seeing an increase in business development activity.

Productize

I know. I doubt “productize” is a real word due to the red squiggle under it. . . Regardless, looking for opportunities to create new products is the next step in getting the most from utilizing a high-powered administrative staff for your partners. Teach your team to spend 30 minutes a day looking through client logs for small items that can be productized for other clients. The following story is grossly oversimplified, but it works to get everyone on the same page.

The scenario is this: I want a new car for business and personal use. Before I make that purchase/lease decision, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything that I should consider as a small business owner. I put in a quick call to my accountant and she does some quick head calculations and says “well, since you’re set up like X and you’ll be using the vehicle for Y, you have these options – YY or ZZ.”

Since the call is so short, my accountant thinks twice about the billing of that call, but logs it anyway. By the time my invoice shows up, the value of the advice is lost on me.

When your partners look through their client logs, an exchange like that will eventually jump out as something that can be productized. If the call went something like “well Greg, based on the answers to a few questions, you may be looking at tax time savings of anywhere from 12-24% of the price of your vehicle. How much is the care you’re looking at?”

“$40K”

“Well, with a $40K car, that’s somewhere between $5-11K – maybe a little higher or lower. I have a spreadsheet kit that I can have John send over to you that lets you answer questions, work with the figures and come up with an answer. It’s $495 that we’ll charge to your card on file or we have an option where John asks all the questions, routes the work to me and I can make a recommendation. Would one of those options work for you?”

Uh, yes. $500 for a $6K tool that I can use for a while? Done. All day long.

Like most examples, that’s an oversimplification but the general idea is that when solutions are presented in a way that builds value, some of your current bill by hour conversations can be turned into a product that your clients will benefit from. And you’ll get paid for the real value you are giving them.

Conclusion

That’s what you’re looking for when you bring in a top notch administrative staff to free up your partner’s and junior partner’s time. If you are patient with getting the most from those found hours, if you give them some self-paced training ideas that build up their proactive idea muscle and if you show them how to find extra value from their past interactions with clients, you’ll be on your way toward getting more from your new staff than simply adding cost and HR issues.

Good stuff.