Episode 167: Building Beyond the Founder - How Successful Firms Scale

Nick Synnott (0:04)

Today's episode is brought to you by the Consultancy Growth Network. As you'll know, I'm a big believer in learning from people who have achieved the things that you want to. It's why I run this podcast, to share the stories of consulting leaders and how they've got to where they are today. So when I started talking to Mark Jansson and the team at Consultancy Growth Network, it was clear there was an obvious fit between Climb In Consulting and their mission and what they are building with their network. But you're probably asking, what is the Consultancy Growth Network? The Consultancy Growth Network is the leading community of boutique consulting leaders. It brings together seasoned consulting growth experts who successfully scale their own boutiques, with rapidly growing consulting founders looking to emulate their success. Now, you might be thinking, who are these growth experts? What do they actually know about consulting? And this is one of the most exciting things that personally I find about the Consultancy Growth Network. The team at the Consultancy Growth Network have searched far and wide for some of the best boutique consulting leaders to help their members on their journeys, some of which I have previously interviewed for this podcast, such as Don Morehouse and Augusto Negrelo. But it's not just the insights from these people that you will benefit from. By joining, you get access to their jam-packed calendar of regular in-person and online events, their comprehensive growth hub of resources and their active Slack community. Through all of these channels, you can learn, solve challenges, and achieve the goals you want for your firm. And now if that wasn't enough reason to sign up, the Consultancy Growth Network is giving all listeners to this podcast a special sign up offer. If you join for 12 months, you join for that next year, you will get your 13th month for free, giving you that extra month to continue to build on everything you're learning and continue to benefit from the network. To sign up, just visit consultancygrowthnetwork.com or contact their Partnerships Director, Luke, at lukeatconsultancygrowthnetwork.com.

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Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. Really excited for this one, Sales and Marketing, and Moving Beyond the Founder are topics that I love to learn about myself. So I'm really keen to share that with all of you, and obviously get the insights from today's panelists. So what are we going to be covering? The subject matter is Building Beyond the Founder, how successful firms can scale. It's actually been a theme that we've been running here at CMAP for the summer, as we recognize there are moments in a firm's journey where the founder maybe becomes the bottleneck. But as you scale and grow, you don't want to lose that nucleus, that culture, that inspiration that got a firm from zero to beyond startup phase. So delighted that we're going to be joined by Tom Hill from Revenue Shift, a North American based consulting firm who have really implemented some of the best practice around that headline. We've also got Nick Synnott, MD of Create Engage, a marketing agency for professional services firms. We were going to be joined by Create Engage's Ellie Hunt, who actually I believe runs the account for Revenue Shift, but unavailable today, but she still deserves the spotlight as you can see on screen, because she was very much involved in some of the prep and the promo.

So the themes are outlined here on this holding screen, but what are the topics that we're going to be focusing on? Well, there's four main areas I wanted to explore. First off is moving from founder led growth to building more of a sustainable pipeline. This is a challenge I see time and time again, it's like how to turn that roller coaster of pipeline into more consistent and predictable demand gen.

For lots of firms, when you're starting out, you have to do a ton yourself. But the reason why we have Tom and Nick here is because there are things that potentially you can use expert partners for, you can outsource, so we'll be covering that as well. Lots of consulting firms have fantastic referral mechanisms and schemes that drive a lot of their new business, and that could be from networks, it could be from peer-to-peer relationships. What are some of the things outside of that in a more traditional marketing sense that consulting firms and professional services can leverage?

Then the fourth topic is driving that more sustainable growth over a more extended period of time, so it's less on and off, there's more repeatable and consistent lead gen and pipe generation.