Navigating The Four Stages Of Growth For Consultancy Firms

Do you own a consultancy firm with five or more people and are finding that growing your business further is a bit of a struggle?

In this article, I'm going to show you the typical growth path for professional firms that grow from struggle and survival initially to becoming scalable and saleable, and why most struggle to get beyond survival level. You'll probably recognize yourself in one of the levels.

The real key to being able to grow your business sustainably is the focus of your activities, depending on the specific level you're at. Getting this wrong is what keeps most consultancy firms struggling to survive. If you want to see the 60 minute training I did for my premium clients, that goes more in depth and shows you exactly how to use three critical strategies to achieve successful growth, drop me a line in the comments below and I'll send you the link in the messenger.

Over the past 25 years, I've been able to start, grow, and sell three professional service firms in accounting and consultancy areas based on my ability to strategically build authority with my market and create a platform that sets my business up for scalability and saleability.  I'm going to reveal why most consultants struggle to grow a business successfully, but also how the most successful consultants use strategic, proactive intent to grow their businesses successfully, to the point where they can sell it at maximum value if that's what they want to do. When you actually get to the point where your business is saleable, many people don't actually want to sell it because running it is so enjoyable because you're actually running a business that works for you instead of you being the one that has to make it work.

So, let's take a look at the typical flight path or growth path for the professional service firm. Typically, when a professional starts their own business, they tend to start a business in the occupation they've done their training in and where their expertise lies. But typically, in a business, initially, there's a struggle to get clients to make a consistent income. Most of the revenue is generated by the owner, so, in that occupation level, the business is in struggle mode until there's an ability to find new clients regularly. Once they have that platform for growth, then the business can move to the next level where the business owner becomes the business operator, and the business is able to operate more consistently at a survival level.

Typically, here the challenge is having an inconsistent lead flow and many clients are of low value. The business still survives by the efforts of the owner at this stage. To get beyond survival, the business owner needs to focus on building the right structure so that the business can grow to the next level. The critical point here is really dependent on the mindset of the owner, because when the owners see themselves as the business operator, then they tend to operate fairly reactively in the way they grow the business. The business actually doesn't grow with intent, but it actually is reactive growth because the business services are well performed and offer value to the market. There's a demand for what the business provides and so that growth comes from external demand, which actually creates pressures on the business and often tends to create headaches that the business operator can't overcome.

Now, what needs to change is the mindset of the owner, and that mindset needs to flip from being a business operator to being a business orchestrator. By being a business orchestrator, they can have a deliberate intent then to run a business that works without them, and running a business without the owners having to be involved in the day-to-day operations is the biggest challenge and the biggest impediment to business growth for most professional service firms. But when that flip is made to the owner becoming the orchestrator of the business and building the systems in the business that enable the business to become scalable, anything is possible.

The next level of the business orchestrator is the business overseer where the business is achieving market supremacy and has the ability to be saleable if the owner wants to get it into that position. But often at this level, then there's no need to actually sell the business because the business is profitable and provides cash flow for the owner.

So where are you on that scale? Are you in an occupation or are you a business operator? Or have you made that transition to be the orchestrator or the overseer? If you'd like to learn more about the, process of business growth here, what I'd like to offer you is a 60 minute recording of a webinar that I've run with my premium level clients. I'd like to make that available to you so that you can learn the process that I've talked about, the three critical strategies to grow your business, to become the orchestrator and the overseer.

So just drop me a note in the comments below and I'll send you the link to that training in the messenger.