Your Firm Needs More (Healthy) Tension

There are two kinds of tension: the kind that has you sleeping on the couch, and the kind that holds up bridges. The latter is healthy, and you need more of that kind of tension in your firm.

I’m going to illustrate that with a simple example that will apply to every single reader, but first a brief detour.

How Those Dang People Make Money

You hear about a firm that makes a lot of money and you scratch your head and wonder why. We’ve seen deeply inside 1,300+ firms, and here are the reasons we’ve catalogued:

• Mommy and Daddy believed you could do anything, and they hung your embarrassing drawings on the fridge and said you were little Picasso. You borrowed enormous confidence from that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
• You worked at a serious firm that made serious money before you started your own firm, and so you just knew it was possible and held your ground as yet another serious firm.
• The business world “endorsed” you with big, lucrative projects and that “marketplace acceptance” replaced what Mommy and Daddy may not have provided. This could be because you’re just really good at sales or really good at building a referral base.
• You have some of that healthy tension I’m talking about.

When I say “make money”, I mean at least $200k fee billings per full-time equivalent instead of the typical $160k. The kind where there’s enough money to pay the principal(s) appropriately to earn their genuine interest even when work isn’t always fun.

That Healthy Tension

That fourth reason is the one I want to talk about. It’s the one that takes you from an average utilization rate of 42% to 60% and beyond.

That healthy tension is how the outward client facing people work with the inward project management people, and how together they balance two things:

• How the outward facing people want to please the client and
• How the inward facing people want to protect two things: profitability and work-life balance.

Neither side can win. If the client facing people win too many of the battles, the client starts to run things at your firm, profit slips away, and the people are run ragged. If the inward people win too many battles, the clients are repelled by the rigidity and inflexibility and they find another firm.

What Creates This Imbalance

There are several reasons why firms neglect themselves and allow clients to lead them around by the nose, but it always comes down to this, really: they don’t have options. They don’t have options because they don’t have a marketing plan. They don’t have a marketing plan because their positioning leaves them interchangeable with too many other firms.

The Simple Test

I’m going to save you a lot of time, here, by giving you one simple question to help unearth the truth at your firm. As you know, the client facing people sit between the client and your internal control tower. Is that client facing person more afraid of the client…or the control tower?

Because when the client is asking for something big, your client-facing person better pause for a deep minute and ask this question: “are the people back at the shop going to kick my ass if I say yes to this request?” If that doesn’t give them serious pause, to the point where they say, “hey, I need to check first to see if that’s possible and how much more it might cost,” then you, my friend, are in the clutches of a client-driven firm where profitability sits in the back seat.*

*This work is one of the modules we include in the Total Business Reset, or it can be applied on its own. We help build this through understanding personality profiles, the “work to be done” for each person, how much of each role you need, and reporting relationships.