Managing The Professional Service Firm

One of the most important features of partnership is the seeming absence of hierarchy among partners.

The job of management in a professional firm is not to develop a strategy for the partners, but to ensure that they develop one for themselves.

Young professionals view a short period of time at such firms as a form of “post-postgraduate” degree, and often leave for prime positions they could not have achieved as quickly by another route.

At such firms (in contrast to many competitors), high growth is not a declared goal. Rather, such firms aim for controlled growth. The approach is one of, “We’ll grow as fast as we can train our people.” As Ron Daniel of McKinsey phrases it: “We neither shun growth nor idolize it. We view it as a by-product of achieving our other goals.”

After the engagement partner has forewarned the client (in person) that it is coming, and explained why the firm is doing it, the questionnaire should be sent out over the firm name (with the firm or office managing partner’s name attached), not the name of the individual engagement partner.

Since strategy is not just about what the firm wants to achieve, but how the firm is to achieve it and who is going to do it, an action plan must be devised, and the best people to do that are those who are going to be responsible for implementing it. Therefore those people must be involved early.

Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for one part of the firm to create a strong “frontier expertise” reputation when the firm is already well known as a low-cost provider.

sell its services on the basis of the high professional craft of its staff. In essence, their appeal to their market is,…

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much larger client base exists for what I term Grey Hair approaches to practice. These types of client recognize that their problems have probably been faced and dealt with by other companies, require less complete customization, and are probably not crisis

This seemingly simpleminded calculation, relating the staffing mix requirements of the work to the staffing levels existing in the firm, is in fact of extreme importance.