How Many Flearoys Are On You?

I am currently helping a client to recruit a senior BD person and, during the course of interviewing a candidate yesterday, we got onto the subject of Flearoy the cat!

For those of you who are unaware of Flearoy, he appears in a current TV advert for Clearscore (which is a consumer credit referencing agency…bear with me!).

In the advert Flearoy (the cat) insists that everything in his owner’s house is his (“mine…. everything mine”; “phone mine” …. etc…. etc…. you get the drift).

Anyway – the reason that we got onto the subject of Flearoy during yesterday’s interview was because we were discussing the challenge of dealing with certain partners in professional services firms who take (demand) a similar approach to clients.

“This client is mine….my client…. mine”

The problem is clear. In some firms there are partners (and others) who see clients with whom they have the principal relationship as being “owned” by that partner, rather than being a client of the firm. The motive isn’t hard to discern – the individual partner wants to try to retain that client as a portable part of their own business case for future lateral hire (very generous and collegiate!)

This suggests that such partners shouldn’t have been hired in the first place, because if the sum total of their talent amounts to the perceived ownership of a high value client then pity the firm that hires on that basis. But that’s a whole other thing for another day.

What we are focussed on here is how to deal with the problem of partners and or other senior individuals who won’t include themselves or their clients in key account management, client development, and other initiatives that benefit both client and firm.

There are a number of potential approaches:

·      Don’t hire them in the first place (the best approach);

 Â·      Ignore them and exclude them (and rely on the fact that there is a decent margin on their billing to let them get away with it and do their own thing) – OK if you aren’t big into developing an attractive cross-firm culture;

 Â·      Deal with and manage them – probably the best or only approach if you are contractually committed and/or don’t want a big bust up (although don’t discount the big bust up from your options list).

 The best way to begin to deal with the situation is to try to engage directly with the client(s) in question in order to build additional relationships beyond the partner in question. This can be tricky to commence but is very do-able. 

Key is to take an assumptive approach – definitely don’t ask permission – the client(s) are clients of the firm and not of any one individual (who negotiates and pays the PI and all the other commonality?). That said, buy in is best and so if you can persuade the partner to ‘release’ her/his client then you may be able to do this by, for example, using evidence of previous client engagement programmes and how these have resulted in increased income and tremendous kudos for individual partners concerned.

Failing that, and in no particular order:

·      Extend (or introduce) a programme that sees (for example) your managing partner; divisional head (or whatever) have an ambassadorial role that includes independent meetings with all key clients of the firm (as a matter of policy – exceptions by exception, which have to be compelling);

 Â·      Invite the relevant client(s) to firm wide events – social and training – by all means give the relationship partner the first bite of the cherry when doing this – but do it anyway if she/he hasn’t done it within a week (and when the clients attend ensure that they are ‘targeted’ with introductions to other key people in your firm);

 Â·      Where you have a client/key client benefits or added value package that includes independent client listening then include these clients in the programme – again better with the buy-in of the partner concerned – but don’t wait for it.

There are others, so give me a shout if you would like to discuss in more detail.

It’s sometimes easy and less bother to tolerate individuals who won’t open up ‘their’ clients to the rest of the firm. But it’s not fair. It’s not fair on your firm and it’s not fair on the (usually) majority of colleagues who work hard and proactively to develop key client relationships and to make these more profitable and more valuable.

Taking the right approach to this will also support your client retention activity – client attrition rates plummet at the point where you can engage three (and more) of your people and services with a client (as opposed to one).

So it’s worth the effort – let us know if you would like some help to kick-start the process.

How many Flearoys do you have in your firm?