This is the story of how O’Byrne and Kennedy changed their business model from an unremarkable suburban compliance practice with 500 clients to a remarkable niche business advisory firm with 50 clients and in the process dramatically increased profitability, client loyalty, and team member engagement while having a life-changing impact on the clients they work with. Read more…
“Explain how I can attract and retain better quality clients” was one of the responses from 92% of the people who attended a webinar I presented last year in which I asked the following question: what are the top 3 questions you’d like me to answer in the book I’m writing on practice development? Read more…
I’ve been reading a biography on the Wright Brothers that describes in minute detail the hugely difficult process they went through to create an airplane. One of the side notes that caught my attention was a reference Read more…
They–the nameless and faceless people who make predictions about everything from the weather to the stock market–say it costs 6 times more to acquire a customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Interestingly, the literature contains references to acquisition to retention cost ratios ranging from 3:1 to 30:1. Quite frankly, I don’t know if the 6:1 metric is an urban myth or a thoroughly researched observation but I do believe Read more…
Yesterday I had a conversation with one of our clients who asked: “how can I get better clients?” He believed the problem he had was a marketing challenge. Read more…
I recently finished reading Geoffrey Blainey’s A Very Short History of the World – all 450 pages of it! As interesting as it was, I’m so glad it was the short version. I came away from that book with a renewed appreciation of human accomplishment but that’s not want I want to talk about. Of the many things that resonated, one was Read more…
There are 3 basic types of people involved with business ownership. They are Investors, owner-managers who primarily work “IN” their business so we’ll call then IN-guys, and owner-managers who primarily work “ON” their business so we’ll call them ON-guys. If you want to grow the business advisory side of your firm you need Read more…
It was a dark and stormy night. The power was out and I heard the back door squeak. I was sure someone was in my kitchen. I called out but I couldn’t have expected what was about to happen … Read more…
The Gallup organization has been monitoring the level of employee engagement across national boundaries and industries for years. The numbers are not pretty. Gallup measures the degree of engagement based on employees’ ratings of key workplace elements such as having an opportunity to Read more…
At our Bootcamps and other events one of the biggest and most important recommendations we made for getting team engagement was to stop doing annual performance reviews with your team members. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a FB post from a good friend Michelle Golden in which she announced with deserved pride that the firm she is a Principal at, K-coe Isom, have abandoned doing annual reviews. Read more…
