Is a fear of failure holding your firm back?

I don’t need to convince most consultants and advisors about the benefits of continuous-engagement. Advisors of all kinds are thinking about productising their services, having a constant presence with their clients, and how these different revenue streams can supplement or even replace their lumpy project-based fees. We love that continuous-engagement models offer more predictable revenue, create deeper integration with clients, and ultimately should help you better support your clients.

I’ve spoken to advisors across industries and while they know moving to continuous-engagement is what they should be doing, many aren’t actively trying to transform their business models. A key reason? Fear. Fear of the unknown, and fear of failure.

Moving toward continuous-engagement and creating services and products that stick with clients in the long-term requires holistic change. This is daunting. Especially if you’ve tried and failed before. But there is the key - failure is to be expected, and experimenting with the unknown is essential.

Creating a model for continuous-engagement almost always involves developing a new piece of technology.? And I’ve never seen a piece of tech hit the market without some kind of issue.?

Moving to continuous-engagement is entirely doable but it requires a mindset shift. A shift to an experimental mindset, and embracing a process of trial and error. And it might require an uncomfortable level of transparency, both internally and externally, particularly when it comes to launching before ‘perfection’ is achieved.

Those who do make the shift successfully are systematic and pragmatic. Afterall, even if you create a successful digital product that enables a long-term engagement with a client, you’re still going to have to improve that product. The process is…continuous.?

Prepare for a long-term investment?

In my experience, it’s best to consider initiatives around continuous-engagement as long-term investments. Stakeholders need patience. You might see returns in years, not months.?

You also need to adopt a mindset of constant improvement. Think of consulting in general. You don’t learn something once and that’s it. You have to keep learning, improving and updating your knowledge for yourself, and your clients.?

Creating a framework for continuous-engagement?

If you want to lay the framework for continuous-engagement, start with a small achievable project that has a clear end-to-end process. Use this project as an opportunity to get your internal process sorted. Who needs to approve this project? Where is the budget coming from? What does every step of the journey look like? How does a firm ‘get out of its own way’ (as I’ve heard our own clients describe it)?

One way to think about this is: you are an artisan looking to become a manufacturer. A manufacturer with a unique edge, of course. In order to build and develop more quickly, you need to understand every step of the process, and how you can manage it best in your circumstance.?

This is the real key to success. Counterintuitively, it is not what you’re building but how you build it and plan to improve it.?

Ideas to get started?

It’s the beginning of the year and ideas are fresh and flowing. I’ve been talking to consultants across industries about how they might establish on-going services with clients.?

A popular concept right now are digital strategy tools - not just canvases, pumped-up spreadsheets, or digital whiteboards, but dynamic tools to help executives assess, decide, and track.?

The best way to approach these tools is to base them on your own ‘secret sauce’ and understanding of your target clients. Done right, your digital strategy tool can help client leadership teams model and choose between strategic options, and automatically generate the forecasts and business cases for those selected strategies. You can achieve continuous-engagement by having the same tool collect data that monitors and provides insight into performance against that business case over time. This works as a very effective ‘leave behind’ tool for clients, delivering real client value.

Strategy planning linked to execution management can apply across an array of industry sectors.?

HR and leadership advisor? Embed your own unique approach into a goals and culture product to support your coaching and facilitation, and then tap into real-time understanding of how your clients are progressing against those goals to help them accelerate or course-correct as required.

Industrial consultant? Make energy transition tangible for the exec and board by using field data as a baseline to evaluate different strategic options, and then provide year-on-year performance as an interactive dashboard.

Financial planning specialist? Scenario planning is great, but leaving a client with a static forecast of the future doesn’t make you ‘sticky’. Instead, capture on-going market and internal data programmatically, and compare performance to forecast, and give your client the tools to call you in to help manage the inevitable variances!

I could go on (I often do!) as the opportunities are endless (and exciting).?

In short, my advice is this. To get some early wins for your ‘productisation factory’, look at how you currently work with clients and identify an area that’s easiest to improve that will generate the most impact (hello, 2x2 matrix), and refine from there.

Good luck, and remember, learning is part of the process!