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Feature Story . . . |
Build a Strong Professional Services Brand
Performance, profits and personal wealth await
by Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group
I stepped off the elevator into the fourth floor lobby, an attractive environment with plush leather chairs, an oak reception desk and a large logo on the wall. I walked into the conference room, where a long wooden table with high-back chairs stretched out before me, and I waited for the CEO. When he entered the room, he got right to the point.
"Randy" he said, "I want you to help us grow our numbers by 30 percent this year. Can you do it?"
Like many other professional services (PS) firms, his business had grown rapidly through referrals and hard work by a focused team. But now it had reached a plateau and struggled to move beyond it. I asked him one simple question, "How strong is your brand?"
"My brand? Why it's great," he said. "We love our logo. Just look at it."
In that moment, I knew three things about his business:
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He had grown it through hard work, professionalism and a commitment to service.
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He was unclear about why it had stalled and what to do to get beyond the plateau.
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He had a weak sense of what his brand really was and how it would get him beyond his current stall-out to make his firm the de facto standard in his market — a position that would consistently deliver high annual returns and tremendous wealth in a future liquidity event.
This meeting was not unlike dozens of meetings I've had with senior executives at PS firms. PS people tend to excel at sales, delivering services, leveraging referrals and growing their businesses to a certain size.
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But then they top out. Usually, it's because they really don't understand how their brand is the key to making it to the next level. Unless they have formal training or significant experience in brand building, their future will probably look a lot like their present.
To address this and other issues, I'm writing a series of articles about the role of brand building in growing a consistently profitable PS firm that is well positioned for a liquidity event.
Over the last 17 years or so, as a senior marketing executive focused almost exclusively in PS, I have witnessed many successes and failures. I have helped grow numerous firms to more than 1000 percent of their original size in sales, customer acquisition and geographic expansion. I have led or participated in brand building efforts at firms that have realized increasing profits quarter over quarter.
I have also witnessed the stakeholders at these firms walk away with enough wealth to last several lifetimes. If you are uncertain about the link between your brand and your firm's financial performance and a future liquidity event, you owe it to yourself to continue reading.
What is a PS brand?
The aforementioned CEO had a direct link in his mind between "brand" and "brand identity." To him, they were essentially the same. To us, identity is merely a sub-element, albeit important, of a brand. A PS brand, boiled down to its core, is "reputation."
To illustrate this point, let's take any given classroom in an elementary school, which acts as a microcosm of any given market. Each classroom takes on its own dynamics, just as markets and industries take on their own dynamics.
In a classroom, students begin to take on roles. There is the teacher's pet, the class clown, the "brain," the jock and even the bully. Students become known and gain a reputation by their words, actions and attitudes.
Eventually, it can become very difficult for a student to transition out of his or her reputation. Students become penned in by the expectations of others, by names they are called and by learned behaviors they find easy to repeat. Their reputations equal their identities.
This provides a great lesson for those of us building and shaping PS brands. Take a moment and think about your brand. How would you characterize it? How do your competitors characterize it? What about your clients? Can you state with certainty what the market thinks of your brand? If not, this is the place to start building a strong brand.
What are the elements of a PS brand?
PS firms gain a reputation by their words, actions and attitudes. Changing this reputation can be very difficult and very expensive. Usually, this requires fresh ideas and new perspectives. "Reputation" alone, however, doesn't quite capture all of the dynamics of a brand.
At The Shattuck Group, we think there are six unique elements to PS brands:
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Service offerings.
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Positioning.
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Value proposition.
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Brand strength.
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Brand awareness.
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Brand identity.
Service offerings: The stuff of a brand, service offerings are what a firm actually does. So it only makes sense to get these messages right. So often, this isn't the case. In our experience, companies typically make three mistakes when branding their services:
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They don't provide benefits-driven messages.
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They poorly articulate what they actually do.
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They don't give enough information to make it comfortable for a buyer to take the next step.
Positioning: A PS firm's position is the point of convergence where three dynamics intersect:
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The needs of the market, where companies are willing to pay for services.
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Your service offerings, delivered profitably.
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Your competitors' offerings, and how you differentiate from them.
Value proposition: Your value proposition is, simply put, the reason the market does business with you. Why do your customers give you money? What value do they derive from associating with your firm? This is your current, although maybe not future, value proposition.
Brand strength: Your company's brand strength is the sum total of opinions that the market holds of your business. If you were to poll your top 20 clients, what would they say about you? What about 100 companies that fit your target profile and know about you but don't do business with you? How about your top five competitors? These polls can be eye-opening.
Brand strength is the difference between a highly regarded, trusted and respected company and a company that does not hold these traits and therefore struggles.
A key component of brand strength is perceived financial strength. Clients want to know they've chosen a stable, financially solvent firm that won't go out of business during an engagement.
Projecting an air of financial strength actually benefits a PS firm because it says you are good at what you do and are highly paid by others, which makes you valuable and potentially scarcely available — which always drives up profits.
PS firms demonstrate financial strength, in part, through their brand identity. A shoddy brand identity suggests your company cannot afford a professional look.
Awareness: This is the number of decision-makers who fit your target profile who know about your business. PS executives often over-estimate this. We create surveys that poll a few thousand decision-makers within a given market to discover how many of them can, without prompting, identify a firm as a service provider in their market.
The results can be astounding. When only two out of 10 decision-makers can accurately identify a service provider, 80 percent of the market will never consider that service provider at the beginning of the buying cycle.
Brand identity: You'll notice that I list this element of a brand last in this list of six. I do this because identity is so often what springs to mind first when people think of brands — logo, taglines, color palettes and the like. To my way of thinking, identity should actually come last.
Too often, we see PS firms hoping to change their reputation by changing identity. This is a mistake. PS firms that do not address the other key elements of their brand before they address identity will ultimately slip back into old habits, old ways of describing what they do and who they are, and end up with the same results.
Applying the theory
So this definition of a brand is all well and good, you might say, but how will this benefit your business? Your brand is all you have. If you are not building a strong brand, you are not building a strong PS firm. Here is what I mean:
PS people sell the intangible — a concept, an idea, a promise of results. There is no Web site that allows consumers to compare features and benefits of this firm's PS offerings versus another firm, unlike virtually every product available today.
Your ability to acquire customers, increase profits and expand your business geographically or through additional services all comes down to the strength of your brand, as I've defined it here.
Don't believe me? I encourage you to continue reading this series of articles in which I will unequivocally demonstrate that brand building is synonymous with firm building.
The PS brand power
A strong PS brand is worth far more than its weight in gold. Firms that patiently, deliberately create such a brand will reap tremendous rewards and potentially garner enough wealth to last several lifetimes from a liquidity event.
I have personally witnessed stakeholders at such firms retiring in their 30s, 40s and 50s, traveling the world, investing in charities and other worthwhile causes, and living lifestyles that most can only dream of.
Are you ready to build a strong PS brand?
About the author:
Randy Shattuck is a senior marketing executive and founder of The Shattuck Group, a full-service marketing firm that specializes in professional services firms www.theshattuckgroup.com. You can reach him at randy@theshattuckgroup.com.
