What is the best way to grow and scale professional service firms? Today’s guest sold one company for $162 million. He has the experience and the answers.
Greg Alexander is the founder of Collective 54, the first mastermind community dedicated exclusively to thriving professional services firms with big aspirations. He authored the best-selling book “The Boutique: How to Start, Scale, and Sell a Professional Services Firm,” and founded the company Collective 54, an EO that is focused on a single industry.
If you’re thinking about pricing from a cost basis, you’re thinking about yourself like a commodity. With a shift in mindset, you can consider the value that you’re creating and the problem that you’re solving. Thinking about it from that standpoint can change everything.
Greg calls pricing an underleveraged lever, especially in professional services. Rather than throwing out a number and hoping that your client is willing to pay it, talk with them about the total value they will gain from your services and work out what percentage they are willing to share with you. If you can start top-down rather than bottom-up you will end up making a lot more money.
Sell painkillers and cures, not vitamins. When “nice to have” services become “must haves,” sales go up. And if you can solve someone’s pain point, they will be more inclined to pay for your maintenance plan later on. But it is essential to tackle the most pressing issues first, with the goal of developing long-term support over time.
Greg shares several examples of ways that he has found a focus area for a client and subsequently been able to fine-tune his services. Then the collective efforts of the entire company can support and scale up in ways that wouldn’t be possible without finding that niche.
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Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.
Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.
We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.
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