Involving Your Team to Achieve Growth and Profitability
Growth and profitability are key elements for any professional service organization. You may be more focused on one than the other for a time, but they go together like hand in glove. Which you lean toward at any given time is unique to your business and its goals.
PS organizations have one thing in common, though – you can’t achieve growth or profitability without the people in your organization. It is your team that plans the engagements, talks to clients, and in the end, gets the work done that allows you to be profitable. It is their presence and skill that makes growth possible.
So, it makes sense that involving your team, watching out for them, and taking care of them is critical to the success of professional services. Investing in them, including them in the planning process, and maximizing their capabilities are crucial for both increasing profits and growing the business.
Maximize Your Team
Typically, when we talk about the people working for our professional services organizations, we’re talking about cost. Indeed, human resources are the most expensive part of running a PS business. However, they are also your greatest asset and the reason that you’re able to grow and turn a profit.
Because they are both a cost and a path to profit, PS leaders need to keep a close eye on their team’s billable and utilization rates. Obviously, you want utilization and billability to be high, but you also need to ensure it’s balanced across the teams and individuals. Too high of a billable rate can burn a team out, and if billing isn’t balanced across a team, you could be draining your best resources.
Maximizing your team isn’t about squeezing every hour out of them but taking care of them so that they give back high-quality work that impresses clients. Meet with planning and management teams regularly to evaluate utilization and verify that no one is overloaded or underutilized. For instance, at Top Step, we meet weekly and sometimes even daily to monitor resource usage for balance.
Invest in Your People
Investing in your resources is another strategy that promotes both growth and profitability. For instance, training has multiple benefits for your business.
First, training keeps you competitive. With new skills and by staying on top of the latest trends in technology, a professional service organization’s resources can handle a wider range of projects that customers need. Not only does this make you more valuable to existing clients, but it also supports the ability to expand into new areas.
Upskilling provides a path to professional development and promotion. It also keeps consultants happy. When your team is able to learn new skills or expand their current ones, they feel more confident in what they do and what they can deliver. Plus, investing in learning for consultants illustrates that you also care about their growth. In turn, that creates a stronger connection to the organization.
You may consider training a cost, and it is – but it’s one with a high ROI. Don’t take our word for it – Accenture did a study on the ROI of training and found that for every $1 a company invests in training their teams, there is a return of $4.53, or a 353% return on investment. More importantly, 40% of employees leave a job within the first year due to a lack of training. Given the current hiring environment, it’s much more advantageous to put money into training and keeping your employees than to try and find new ones. An example that is easy to implement is what we have done at Top Step by implementing a weekly “Lunch and Learn.” Each week, a different consultant presents a best practice, lesson learned, or tip and shares it with the team. This also promotes improved communication across the organization as well as team camaraderie.
Include Them in Planning
A third area in which your resources can contribute to growth and profitability is planning. Giving teams a voice in the company’s future and decision-making brings ideas to the table that the leadership team may never have thought of.
Knowing that they have a voice in the process empowers your resources. Even if you choose to go in a different direction, listening to your team’s ideas is a powerful way to build trust and create communication channels that can bring creative and new ideas to the surface.
It’s also crucial to remember that every consultant is already an integral part of your business’s growth and profitability because they are your “boots on the ground” with clients. They represent your company to your clients and can build or break your reputation. Including them in planning and decision-making lets them exude the trust and confidence you’ve placed in them with the clients.
They are also the ones who are closest to the client’s problems and trending needs. It’s likely they will see a growing opportunity long before others do. If they know that they can bring those thoughts and observations back and be heard, they are more likely to keep an eye out for expansion and upselling.
The Soul of Professional Services is the People
Your team is an essential part of your professional services organization’s success. An investment in trust and learning within your resources today will yield huge results in the future. To make the most of them, you’ll need tools that can help you keep track of their workloads and utilization and their skills so that you can create balance and support new opportunities.
If you’re looking for support and guidance on finding and adopting the right tools to support your growth and profitability, and help you manage your teams, Top Step can help. Contact us for more information.
