Sublime

professional service firms do not serve a mass market. Each of their projects, engagements, or “matters” is customized to specific client needs. Accordingly, that form of market research which provides aggregated results of what large numbers of clients “think” about various issues tends not to be as directly helpful as it may be in other situation

Simple calculations such as these show that, with eight seniors, the firm would need sixteen managers and forty juniors. The proportions remain constant: one senior to every two managers, to every five juniors. Unless there is a change in either the project team structure (i.e., the types of projects the firm undertakes), or the target utilization

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.

Training approaches would become increasingly formal with greater use of out-of-hours classroom…

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It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

over time, the proportion of juniors to seniors required by the firm in a particular practice area will tend to increase.

Edward Jones also tailored its value chain to its chosen customer segment, conservative individual investors who wanted a trusted advisor to make financial decisions for them. Trust is built through personal, face-to-face relationships. To that end, Jones invests in conveniently located offices, and lots of them—in small towns, suburbs, and strip m

contributes to the unmanageability of professionals: their daily roles as “experts.”