Eight Things Your Firm Can Learn From Solo Practitioners

Source: RainToday

The following excerpts, from an article by Andrew Sobel, are reproduced with permission.

The best independent practitioners have a singular focus on helping their clients achieve their goals. They deliver value at every stage of their work, and they do so as quickly as possible and with ruthless efficiency. The most successful independent professionals:

• Create personal brands by building individual market renown. They create notoriety for themselves through publishing, speaking, and networking, and by focusing on a core specialty for which they become well known. All too often, professionals in large firms spend years sheltered under their firm's brand.
• Regularly develop and disseminate intellectual capital. Often, there are just a handful of partners in large professional firms who create all of the intellectual capital, and everyone else feeds off of it.
• Focus on conversations, not on PowerPoint. While it is always a good idea to outline your thoughts in writing, creating so many PowerPoint presentations takes a huge amount of time and energy. The best independents lower their threshold for a client meeting. They talk often to their clients, and they have learned how to hold an engaging conversation.
• Try to achieve success, not perfection. When you lack resources, you have to focus on delivering a solution that is good enough and works -- not on the one that is most comprehensive and elegant.
• Have learned to eliminate non-value-added activities. For a solo practitioner, every single activity has to contribute directly to the project's goals and deliver value to the client -- otherwise you work yourself to death and/or end up seriously diluting the time and effort.
• Take responsibility for their personal development. Without mandatory training seminars or meetings, independents must really think about the skills they want to develop.
• Organize around clients. Large firms must reconcile geography, practice groups, industry sectors, and functional expertise within the same organization structure. Independents are always organized around one simple and essential dimension: the client.
• Truly act like it's their money. For independents, every cent they spend on expenses is a cent that doesn't go into their pockets (after taxes, of course). It's a good mindset and a good discipline -- often neglected in large organizations.

In today's difficult economic environment, these are good principles to adopt and then keep for the coming good times.

For the complete article, click here.

Andrew Sobel is a leading authority on client relationships and the skills and strategies required to earn enduring client loyalty. He is the author of the business bestsellers All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships, Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty, and Clients for Life: Evolving from an Expert for Hire to an Extraordinary Advisor. You may contact Andrew via his Web site.

From RainToday, www.raintoday.com,  March 3, 2010, "Where Independent Professionals Succeed and Large Firms Fail."