Starting a Professional Services Firm: Small as an Advantage
A Catch-22 is a problem for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. A startup professional services firm can often find itself in a Catch-22 when it comes to acquiring its first clients. How can we convince them to take a chance on us when we are so small and how can we ever grow if they won’t hire us?
Individuals put their careers on the line when they choose to engage a professional services firm. Rarely does the client want to hire us. They come to us in times of need, pain, and crisis. There is a tendency to play it safe. The old line that “nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” still gets thrown around (although I assume there are other names that get inserted these days.)
Although it can certainly feel like this situation is hard to overcome, there are big advantages to being small.
Fight Above Your Weight
The first solution to the problem is to position the firm to “fight above its weight class” by projecting a substantial, professional image onto the marketplace. As a startup, there’s a unique advantage to come out of the gate strong with smart investments in brand identity, website development, content marketing, and social media engagement.
These investments are how a small, agile firm becomes a category killer while the big competitors struggle with focused messaging.
Even as a startup, there is no reason to handicap yourself with a poor, unprofessional online presence. You know clients are going to be looking; don’t give them an easy excuse to say no. Even if the buyer is your best friend, you don’t want to put them in a bad spot by causing them to have to answer unnecessary questions from their colleagues.
Invest in creating a multi-pronged marketing strategy by hiring people that know what they are doing when it comes to positioning and selling professional services. These are unique skills, and you can waste precious time and energy working with the wrong people. The right team can create an online presence that lends credibility to the firm as an extension of your personal brand. It will help you sell.
Use Your Competitors’ Size Against Them
The other strategy is to use your competitors’ size against them. Ultimately, professional services are delivered by professionals, and the quality of the individuals assigned to a project greatly affects the quality of the result.
As a small firm, you can offer a client more partner time and can guarantee the commitment of specific high-quality, experienced resources to an engagement.
Force the larger firms to make similar commitments of specific senior resources. This is very difficult for them to do on a cost-effective basis. Ask a prospective client, “Would you rather be my most important client, or be relegated to a junior consultant from a larger firm?” This is a powerful pitch. Follow that up with, “Here is my cell phone number. You can call me day or night. Weekday or weekend. I am here to help you succeed.” And mean it.
Of course, you must be able to deliver. Avoid overcommitting and underdelivering. In my experience, clients are often willing to wait for just the right team. Also, be honest about what you are going to need from the client organization. The larger firms are likely to be willing, if not anxious, to provide all of the horsepower required to complete a project – with the commensurate fees. You can win by providing high-leverage expertise and partnering with the client team to do some of the heavy lifting.
The goal, of course, is to grow, and to grow to the point where size is no longer an obstacle to be overcome. Use these strategies to navigate the growth Catch-22 at startup and rapidly achieve escape velocity.
