Solving the Professional Services Dilemma

1© 2013 TOCICO. All rights reserved.
TOCICO 2013 Conference
Solving the professional
services dilemma
how to “productize” services and build a practice that will scale
Presented By: Justin Roff-Marsh
Date: June 2013

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© 2013 TOCICO. All rights reserved.
The Entrepreneurial Expert’s conflict
1. Build a consulting business
(sell personal exertion)
2. Build a traditional business
(sell products or packaged services)

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The chasm
• Consulting is profitable
• But it consumes the time you need to
build a traditional (scalable) business

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This presentation
1. How we crossed the chasm
2. How you can learn from our
(often painful) experiences

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Then and now
• High-cost projects
• Difficult client relations
• Implementations that didn’t
stick (post project)
• Stressful work
environment
• Burned-out team members
• Like a drug-addict, looking
for the next fix!
• Low-cost engagements
• Appreciative long-term
clients
• Stable operations on three
continents
• $1.5m in annual sales
(and steady growth)
• Throughput: 73%
• Happy team members
Then Now

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Three critical realizations
1. Unless you’re working with Fortune 500
companies, selling change-management
projects is not a business model
2. There’s an inverse relationship between
high fees and client sustainability
3. To earn sustainable profits, you must
providing an enduring (packaged) service
4. To scale, you must sell religion
(an ideology, not a methodology)

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How we transitioned
1. We dreamed about selling engagements
2. We convinced ourselves we weren’t ready
(we needed better software, etc)
3. We eventually made a decision and wrote a
document describing our service offering
4. To our surprise, companies started saying yes
5. Old project clients started returning and signing
engagement agreements

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The new model
Outsourced Sales Operations
We’ll design, build and
supervise your sales environment

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The new model
• 25% of one of our
consultant’s capacity
• Unlimited access to
creative team
• All sales-related
technology (including
special projects)
• Recruiting services
• Strategic input
• Cost
• $7,700 a month
• Immediate savings
• Smaller field force
• Eliminate field offices
• Fewer managers
• Save money on
creative and tech
Client benefit Client value proposition

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The new model
• Recruit young smart people with
management (not consulting)
experience
• Pay them $100,000
• Sell their capacity for $370,000
(4 engagements each)
• Maintain consultants as the
system constraint
• Maintain protective capacity in
small creative and technology
teams (and sales and admin)
• Give away packaged
information to build a house list
• Promote webinars to the house
list to generate sales
opportunities
• Sell two-day Solution Design
Workshops via web conference
(never face-to-face)
• Deliver SDW face-to-face: sell
up to ongoing engagements
• Founder sells (all 3 continents)
Our operations Our sales

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12 steps: follow in our footsteps
1. Identify the day-to-day services you could
deliver to clients on an ongoing basis
2. Design a value-proposition that ensures clients
have no net monthly outlay (from day one)
3. Convert one or two existing clients to new
service offering
4. Employ a smart, young person and teach them
how to deliver

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5. Centralize as much work as possible so your
consultant becomes more of a facilitator
6. Adopt TOC as your religion (and use existing
materials to spread the word)
7. Get yourself an EA and take personal
responsibility for sales
8. Use pay-per-click advertising to give away
(sample) content and build your house list

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9. Use webinars to generate sales opportunities

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10.Sell Solution Design Workshops and encourage
your future clients to redesign their own
environments
11.Use the initial change-management initiatives
as hooks to secure ongoing relationships
12.Re-calibrate your definition of your market:
geography need not be the barrier you think it is

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The new model
Questions?

Solving the Professional Services Dilemma

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