Creating Competitive Advantage for Professional Service Firms

Leadership happens in a context. The context of the organisation, its environment, its values, its life, its people.

Our team at the Møller Institute works closely with clients to ensure the nuances and subtleties of their organisational reality are reflected in the solutions we co-create together.

Our expertise in leadership is witnessed by our work with most of the UK’s top 10 law firms, some of the largest and most successful law firms in the world, accountancy, consultancy and other professional service firms and the largest banks in China.

Our team has years of experience in the field of leadership and has worked with thousands of leaders internationally. Those leaders, and our clients, value our solutions that are grounded in real world experience and delivered by seasoned executive education practitioners. Practitioners who have had to deal with the real world practical implications of their leadership actions and decisions.

The markets that professional service firms work within are unsettled. Historically, firms have achieved high levels of profitability simply by doing good work and being highly responsive to client needs. Although these fundamental requirements have not changed, professional firms are facing four additional and significant challenges.

1. Increased volatility and flat demand for core services
2. Structural disruption from automation of services and increased us of artificial intelligence capabilities
3. Increasingly professionalised procurement and buying of services
4. Increasing competition for both talented people and valuable clients

In our market analytics and working with the partnerships of over 400 professional service firms, we’ve reached two simple conclusions.

• The first is that a firm’s success is dependent on a clear vision and a clear strategy that are fully aligned and differentiated in the market. Crucially its leaders need to act to align their firm’s direction, strategy, commitment and ability to execute. This is a substantial challenge for many leaders, but not an insurmountable one.
• Secondly, that every partner and leader should have a good practical understanding of how their firm makes money. The costs of service delivery, the different business models employed, how to manage and manipulate margin return on work done and critically, how to adapt to a changing market.

We organise workshops and seminars to help firms and their leaders to better understand their markets, create and adapt their strategies and manage the commercial development of their businesses, addressing issues such as like:

• What do clients want?  Trends and preferences in the buying of professional services
• What is strategy in a professional service firm? How do you build one? How do you execute one?
• Future firms; current and future trends in the growth and development of professional firms – what will the firm of the future look like?
• Practice and line-of-business profitability
• Strategic alignment and strategic execution
• Leading change and performance improvement
• The strategic leadership of talented people and teams

Our programmes run between a few hours to multi-day events and use a variety of formats, including discussion based learning, case studies, presentations and the use of “Practice Clients” – people who occupy the buying position in real life, who can share their experiences and insights of how the firm can improve.

All programmes include the opportunity for after care – supporting leaders in putting their ideas into practice through coaching, mentoring and group sessions to share their learning and experiences.

Professional service firms face a very unsettled marketplace. Many surveys predict flat demand at a time when overheads, particularly salaries, are rising. This means that firms face challenges in:

• Growing income, which means taking work off competitors (at a time when their competitors are trying to do the same thing)
• Holding onto their key clients
• Improving margins
• Finding new markets and new clients
• We see this as a leadership issue. What is needed is for a transformation in key client relationships, away from supplier and buyer, past client relationship management and into client leadership.

This involves a meeting of client and their professionals as equals. It is the most effective defence against aggressive buying behaviours and procurement, and takes the relationship to a new level. One where the client sees that they have as much to gain from this new relationship as the professional service firm, and where the client becomes invested in the success of the relationship. It means jointly creating a future vision of the relationship and then working together on a road map to deliver it.

We organise workshops for many of the world’s largest law and accounting firms, addressing issues like:

• The psychology of services buying – how do clients choose?
• Growth without selling – how the best professionals build bigger client relationships
• Business development for introverts
• Understanding the process – what are the steps in creating growth from a client
• Segmenting clients – identifying the best opportunities for you
• Networking for growth, both online and real world

Programmes run between half a day, and two days, and use a variety of formats, including the use of “Practice Clients” – people who occupy the buying position in real life, who can share their experiences and can coach partners through the process.

All programmes include the opportunity for after care – supporting partners in putting their ideas into practice through coaching, mentoring and group sessions to share their learning and experiences.

We live in times of unprecedented change – at the very least rapid advances in technology plus the growing evidence of a different outlook on what matters at work mean that the way talent is nurtured and performance accelerated has never been more important than today. For this reason, it is crucial that professional service firms begin to pay serious attention to the following factors:

• How do purpose, meaning and values become part of our everyday working?
• How do the behaviours of those in leadership roles encourage and listen to different ideas from a different generation who think differently?
• How does the rise of technology and automation mean that essential skills such as creativity, judgement, negotiation and strategic thinking are focused on in order to retain the importance of the human at work?
• How do our organisations ensure that the environment they create provides a psychologically safe culture of respect and trust, where genuine innovation and collaboration is the norm?

In our programmes at the Møller Institute we have many years of experience in designing and delivering learning which aims to assist professional service firms to grow their talent by including the following key principles:

• The importance of self-awareness – an understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to maximise our talents and move quickly to the role in which we can be most effective
• To work on teaching the skill and care needed in our interactions with other people; how to maximise and grow teams so that everyone for whom they are responsible becomes fully operational and individually motivated as soon as possible
• The importance of understanding our organisational and market context; developing a radar to understand our competition, our opportunities and our risks and therefore which strategy is the best suited to context in which we find ourselves

We believe that learning is an individual experience and therefore design programmes to include both large group classroom activities and smaller more intimate working groups, as well as many opportunities to coach and be coached both by fellow participants and by our professional team of executive coaches. This range of approaches means that our participants leave our programmes feeling fully catered for, having taken a pause in their otherwise busy lives to examine their own individual potential, and therefore be in a better position to make choices to go on and realise their own particular ambitions.

In an environment characterised by downward client cost pressure, the real threat of technological and marketplace disruption, and increased competition for high value services, professional service firms must continuously find new ways to create competitive advantage.

• The most successful firms will be those that can effectively identify emerging client needs before their competitors
• Rapidly develop and launch new solutions that clients and their people really value
• Challenge the status quo and experiment with new business models, policies and approaches both internally and with clients
• Tap into the collective creativity and insight of their people

One approach that some of the world’s most forward-looking firms are adopting to drive continuous innovation is design thinking. It is a “human-centred” approach that starts with understanding people, and applies creative tools such as visualisation, storytelling, rapid prototyping and experimentation to arrive at more innovative solutions to challenges facing clients, the firm and its people.

Our team is unique in that we possess deep professional service firm experience as well as having worked with many of the world’s most innovative corporates. This allows us to bring a fresh perspective to the world of professional service firms while also understanding the unique delivery-driven cultures that exist within them.

In our innovation-focused work across sectors, we have helped our clients to:

• Create new revenue streams
• Achieve cost savings through internal process innovation
• Develop and test prototype solutions jointly with clients and partners
• Increase agility and innovative capacity
• Improve employee engagement and ability to contribute to bottom line results

We apply this approach in workshops (1-3 days) , multi-month innovation projects, as well as short accelerated design sprints to help firms tackle some of their most critical strategic challenges.

We also help firms develop this capability within their own people and teams through a range of tailored training and leadership development programmes.