At Camford Management Consultants our consulting services are focused on helping mid to large B2B Professional Services Firms to improving their capabilities in what we call the 4 pillars of a successful professional service firm.
They are:
Marketing | Sales | Delivery | Operations
Our consulting services align to the 4 pillars as follows:
Marketing Mastery
Every professional services firm needs an effective marketing strategy. The challenge is that there are numerous ways in which to market your firm. And if we’re honest, they can all be successful. But realistically, if you try to do all of them, they’ll like all end up unsuccessful.
We help you to determine which methods of promotion are right for your firm, and how you can be the most effective and efficient in your chosen methods.
Successful Sales
A big problem with professional services sales is that firms typically get stuck doing what they’ve always done. It might be that you’re still trading time for money. Selling staff on day rates and billing time and materials. This is seldom a successful strategy.
We help you to determine how best to sell your services, including crafting commercial propositions that ensure you make a profit.
Previous project work includes helping a regional law firm with its response to a panel review from one of its top 5 clients. The project resulted in a successful outcome for our client, having been retained for a further 3 years.
Enhanced Delivery
Our delivery support is focused on two areas:
- Development of your Project Delivery Methodology
- Provision of Lessons Learned as a Service
Project Delivery Methodology
Most firms use an established project delivery methodology, such as Prince2. However, these methodologies are not built in a professional services context. When providing Project Management for a client, the consultant is often faced with two concurrent projects – the clients project, which sits within the consultancy’s project. That’s two sets of Time, Cost, Scope and Quality to manage!
At Camford we have successfully developed project delivery methodologies for professional services firms including an international engineering firm, and a global leading law firm.
Lessons Learned as s Service
Few professional services firms even undertake Lessons learned reviews of their projects, and even fewer still have an effective approach. At Camford we have developed a robust Lessons learned model that starts at the very beginning of a project with what we term a ‘Pre-Mortem’. This utilises our online database to review previous lessons learned that might affect the project at hand.
We’re not interested in completing lessons learned for political or process reasons. There needs to be a valuable business outcome. To this end, our process includes the creation of Working groups in your team to take forward initiatives that focus on recurring lessons learned, whether positive or negative.
Optimal Operations
There are many different areas of operations in a professional services firm. Our services focus on two aspects:
- Business Systems Strategy & Procurement
- Organisational Design
Business Systems Strategy & Procurement
We provide our clients assistance is in the procurement of business systems, such as ERP and CRM. We are renowned for the quality of our procurement documentation, and our ability to provide vendors with a very clear understanding of the clients business requirements. We provide our clients with robust complex decision support on systems that are often multi-million pound investments.
Organisational Design
Organisational design in professional services firms is too often based on what matters to the firm, and the Directors within. Team structures get influence by the career aspirations of individuals. Our approach to organisational design in professional services firms is to put your client first. What structure best supports how you deliver your services to your client. That is what matters most.
Our organisational design projects have included insourcing and outsourcing, local teams and global teams, and client-facing front-office teams as well as internal facing back-office teams.