A sit down with Bant Breen on the growth and development of HOLDEN ADVISORS.

I recently sat down with Bant Breen on The UNCAGED Show to talk about my career as the President of Holden Advisors. Holden Advisors is a team of seasoned practitioners who have walked in your shoes and have solved the most challenging profit problems. This is an edited excerpt from our discussion:

Bant Breen:

Brian is the President of Holden Advisors, a management consulting company focused on increasing the company's profit by transforming its pricing, negotiation, and sales approach to deliver improved customer experiences with higher profits. Let's focus on what you're doing now at Holden advisors, it seems interesting. I would love to hear how you guys approach this space.

Brian Doyle:

We have three main areas where we help clients, and that's assessing what's going on for them in the context of their business. It's helping them price with confidence. Then it's also helping them with what we call “Selling with Backbone.” What makes me excited about what we're doing today is that in all three areas, our clients are seeing significant positive results. The first is in assessing that client's current situation, whether it be where, how, or when to change their pricing strategy. To give you an example, we just finished a project that led our client to see a 55% increase in top-line revenue. That equated to $86 million. These are big dollar amounts we're working on. The second area that's going so well is enabling our clients to price with confidence. Anytime you raise prices, the first concern that comes to mind is “Yeah, but am I going to lose all my customers.” The key here is understanding your value and then having the confidence to communicate that value to your customers, along with the price increase. We had a client last year whom we ended up doubling their price. That's to the tune of $100 million of extra revenue. Again, a big number. When it was all said and done, they didn't lose a single customer. That's the sort of balance we're striving to strike. Lastly, it's about selling with Backbone, with confidence. Because we know that the best pricing strategy in the world is meaningless if your sales team can't defend it in negotiations with their customers.

Bant Breen:

I’m curious to see how you and Holden Advisors have approached the pandemic and what insights have come from that period.

Brian Doyle:

One of the things that were at a major point in time for us was how we do a lot of workshops for commercial teams, to help them negotiate to sell with Backbone. Two half years ago, they were all in person. We had to make a decision, “Is this pandemic or the flu?” or is it something that's going to stick around, and we put our heads together and said, “We think this is going to be a long-term event.” We went from that, which was the end of February 2020. We said, “We have to make our workshops, virtual.” and on May 4, we had our first virtual workshop. I was proud of the team's ability to pivot so quickly because it's not just the same material. You can't sit on a zoom call for eight hours in one day and hope to retain things. How do we break it apart? How do we make it more engaging? How do we do all these things that we didn't have to worry about??

Bant Breen:

Tell me a little bit about your thoughts for 2022? How does this change the landscape in the short term?

Brian Doyle:

In terms of big challenges, there are certain parts of the market that are exploding. Our industry is one where people are starting to say, “We could need some help, we can use some help navigating this new environment.” On the business development side, it's awesome for us. On the challenging side, it's hiring great people. Because Reid and Carolyn Holden built an amazing organization over the last 20 years. We have to make sure that we maintain the quality results that we were talking about before we provide to our clients and the wonderful team culture that we have. We've grown rapidly over the last couple of years. “How do I maintain that balance and our approach?” I think is different from some of the other consulting firms and we take extra time to make sure our candidates are a great fit for us. Equally as important, we're a great fit for them. I feel good about our new hires. They're gonna get the mentoring they need to have a real-world impact and still maintain some work-life balance. Are we doing the work they want to do? What happens is sometimes that extra rigor makes it so we don't move fast enough. We lose candidates to somebody else. The flip side is the people that we end up with, I'm proud of the team. Both the folks we've had for a while and the folks we've hired in the last year.

Bant Breen:

Brian, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.?

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To see the full interview on the Uncaged Youtube channel, go to:

https://youtu.be/HxZAMT8bVpI