The Two Main Reasons Your Firm May Not Be As Profitable As You'd Like
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- Money in the bank doesn't mean you're tapping all the opportunity in front of you. There could be more.
- Some of that money in the bank should be in your personal pocket, instead, if you are underpaying yourself, and so the presence of that money might lull you into a false sense of accomplishment.
#1: Subsidizing Client Relationships
This is nearly always the primary cause. In other words, you're busy, but clients aren't paying you for whatever time it requires to get the work done. But if we dig a little deeper into this, there are many sub-reasons:- Maybe you have no pricing power or you don't know how to negotiate.
- Maybe your standards are impossibly high. So high that the client doesn't even notice the difference between "good enough" and "let me impress my peers."
- Maybe you find it challenging to call out scope creep.
- View timekeeping as a necessary (albeit temporary) tool to improve the next estimate. And then once you close the gap, drop timekeeping, too, which is otherwise unnecessary. The only value enduring value in timekeeping is to improve your estimating, and once that gets to where it needs to be, free people from a practice that people (rightly) hate with a passion.
- Ensure that one of the healthy tensions you hold at the firm is the one between account managers, who want to please clients, and project managers, who want to make realistic promises. (We take a very scientific approach to this in our TBR.)
- Establish a positioning that makes it difficult for clients to find cheaper substitutes for your firm, and spin up sufficient opportunity so that you can say "no" to underpriced opportunity and still have enough to stay (profitably) busy.
#2 Unrealistic Comp Structure
This one is tougher to fix and in fact has no quick fixes. It's not usually right to assume that your people are overpaid (though that might be true), but rather that your firm isn't making enough to justify what you are paying them. In other words, this is a reflection on you and not them. I've never measured it scientifically, but it seems like one-fourth of you just throw up your arms and declare surrender. "You have no idea how expensive great people are. Our firm is in XYZ, and things are just different here. Even our cheapest people are demanding XYZ, right out of school." It's all a bit vapid, because most firms manage this swimmingly. These are the ones who:- Don't overpay to cover up lousy culture so people will stay.
- Don't view a marketing plan for people as important as a marketing plan for clients, and frankly, great people are harder to find than great clients.
- Hold on to this strange idea that staff turnover should be avoided at all costs by continuing to increase someone's pay without passing those costs along to clients, meaning that you're going to keep paying people more and more and not get a matching ROI out of it.