Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So Jeff the last time we spoke at the end, I sort of set the topic for today. And you had written a really thoughtful post around confident versus insecure firms. And we sort of left a cliffhanger out there saying, well, okay, that’s all well and good to determine where is your firm confident? Is it insecure or somewhere in the middle? But I think the central question is, is if you’re in an insecure firm, a firm that lacks confidence, how do you get the firm to become confident? And so that is the topic for today.

Jeff McKay:
It can’t be done.

Jason Mlicki:
It’s never been done in the history of time.

Jeff McKay:
Never been done, never been done. Nice talking to you buddy.

Jason Mlicki:
See you next week. That’s really funny. You kind of challenged me. I put it out there and then you said, well, okay, well you better think about that then. And I came up with a couple of different points and I’ll tell a few stories along the way. The first thought that came to mind for me was that, and I’ll tell a story as it relates to this, that someone has to decide that they’re frustrated with the status quo before anything can change. A leader of the firm has to say that they’re not happy with the firm’s current reality and wake up to that notion. And I’ll tell a quick story that I thought was just sort of timely and interesting. About a week ago, I got a phone call from an old friend of mine, a guy that I’ve known for probably 15 years or more.
I used to be in a association of professional design firms. And I got to know a lot of the leaders in those firms through that association. And he was a guy that ran a really successful wayfinding firm had done a lot of work in the healthcare industry on wayfinding. And I was kind of re catching up with them. I hadn’t talked to him in 15 years. And so we were chatting just last week and he had left the firm. He had been president and CEO very, very successful firm 20, 30 person firm, which in that space is pretty large, did good work really well respected. And he said, the reason he left was because essentially his partners were satisfied with the status quo. And the status quo was basically that they’re in a pretty competitive space for wayfinding.
And the reality was that for every opportunity that was out there, there was going to be a very competitive bid, multiple pitches, and they would win their fair share. And he wasn’t satisfied with that. He just got fed up with that. He got fed up with this kind of feeling that they were being commoditized and his partners didn’t seem to care if it was partners, they just thought, well, we’ll win our fair share. It’s sort of this idea of it’s a numbers game. And if we put enough proposals out there, we’ll win enough business and we’ll be fine.
So to me, I thought it was a really great story. He was sort of telling me that, and he’s kind of spun off on his own as I said, started a consulting firm and a leader saying he’s frustrated with the status quo. In this particular case, he couldn’t get his partners to share that same frustration and make it a shift in the firm. But either way, he was frustrated with the reality that he was in and he set out to create some change. And so that to me is the first step as a leader has to say, this reality, isn’t working for me and I want something different. So that was my first thought.

Jeff McKay:
I think that’s spot on. It really, really is. I put together an infographic I’ll link to it in the show notes. That is the 10 questions that prudent firms ask themselves. And it’s broken into five questions that firms ask themselves ask collectively. And then it’s five questions that leaders ask themselves. And the number one question that leaders have to ask themselves is, am I clear on who I’m being called to become? We all have in us some inner drive calling the person we were created to be. And once we have this self awareness of that, we have to ask the question, can I become that person in this firm? And you can say, yes, I’m a cactus planted firmly in the desert and I’m going to thrive here or I’m a cactus and I’m in a rainforest and I’m going to die if I stay here.
And you have to have that question and that clarity, if you’re going to one, become who you were meant to be, but two, lead others to a shared vision. And I don’t think a lot of firms or individual leaders think that way, and that leads to this discombobulated culture. And I would argue to a large degree, the lack of confidence because they aren’t aligned and they don’t have clarity. I really respect somebody like your friend that says your vision is not my vision. He tries to change that. But if you can’t, you have to move on, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to the people that you’re working work.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, no, it was a really interesting conversation. Like I said, I hadn’t talked to him in a long time and I thought it was just a really interesting thing that he had made this decision. And I think a lot of people would have been like his partner’s very satisfied. Life is good. We’re making a good living. Yeah, we win some business. We lose some business, but in the end it all nets out and everything works out great. And I think that’s a really interesting moment in time. So my second thought on this, and then I said, okay, so let’s say you wake up and you decide you’re not happy with the status quo and you want to make some change. And I thought a lot about this and really confidence derives from options. That’s a phrase that’s been thrown about a lot.
And if you think about fundamental best practices of negotiation, I remember in business school, we were always taught that the only way you can negotiate in any moment is to have an alternative option, right? So a BATNA best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So some other alternative you can take, which enables you to walk away. And so really for a firm that is insecure to get to a place of confidence to do that, they have to be able to change the market conditions, such that they have more options. And when I say options, I ultimately mean they have more revenue opportunities than they would have had otherwise. So they have the ability to do many of the things you describe in your posts, which is the ability to say no, the ability to walk away, the ability to charge more.
All those things derive from having options and having some saleability in the marketplace. So to me, options and confidence are intrinsically connected. If you don’t have any options, if you’ve got X amount of clients and you’re not getting any inquiries and you don’t have new sales conversations on a regular basis, then all of a sudden you don’t have confidence. So I think there’s a couple of different levers you can pull to create more options. And so that’s to me is the starting point, if you want to go from insecure to confident.

Jeff McKay:
I like the way you articulated that, what did you call that BATNA?

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, so I took a negotiations class. I got named [inaudible 00:07:19], who was actually one of the sort of leading scholars on negotiations. And he always called it a BATNA. You have to have a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And we’ve all had those moments, right? When you’re trying to negotiate a job offer, or you’re trying to negotiate with a client or negotiate a house you’re negotiating anything. And whenever you don’t have the willingness to walk away, or you don’t have any alternative at the table, your negotiating power is completely out the window and hence your confidence is pretty low. I’m just going to take this deal, whatever it is, you know?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. You said a key expression there it’s the ability to walk away. And I find in firms that aren’t confident that are insecure. You see that manifested in meetings oftenly and it’s like a human characteristic that you can just observe in these interactions. And when I sit down with people on my team or peers, and I see that they have this inability and they are insecure or fearful. The question I think they need to come to answer and need to come to grips with is no matter what, getting back to your do I have options, or do I not? You always have an option. You always have a choice. And most people do not think in those terms, but if you can get to a point where you know in your heart of hearts, that no matter what happens in this meeting, in this opportunity or proposal or client engagement, no matter what happens, no matter how big a failure or an embarrassment or whatever the case may be, think of your worst case scenario that you will still be okay when it’s done.
That’s when you’ve crossed over from fear and insecurity as an individual into one of confidence, because you now have what you just described, you have options. You can always walk away and our mind will tell us, no, I can’t get another job. This will really look bad on my resume. There’s all this negative justification that’s been pounded into us by society and conventional wisdom that you just can’t do that. And the fact of the matter is you can, and to me that is the soil that confidence begins to grow.

Jason Mlicki:
There’s real power in saying no, that’s for sure. It’s an important thing to recognize in life that the importance of saying no. So I came up with a couple of ways that you can create options for a firm. So I think to some extent we’ve talked a little bit about the individuals and the leaders involved, but I think if you’re the leader, then the first thing says, okay, if the culture of the firm is insecure, the culture of the firm is insecure because people aren’t entirely confident that their jobs are secure. And so there’s all these kind of different layers of that. But the first thing I thought of was obviously just kind of going back to the root positioning question and changing the positioning of the firm. So ultimately if you’re trying to create more options for the firm, then you have to change the dynamics of the marketplace to your advantage somehow, right?
And that’s the essence of positioning. It says, well, in the example I gave before the wayfinding firm, the generalist wayfinding firm needs to find a more narrow source of positioning, perhaps that enables it to have more options than maybe its followers had before. If that was really one of the levers, that was a problem in that case. So they’re taking on every work, they can get their hands on and if they can win because for whatever reason. So that’s the first thing. The first option you would have is to kind of adjust the positioning of the firm. Perhaps it’s get more narrow, perhaps it’s go upstream. It’s again, look at ways to change the dynamics. So instead of being one of a sea of many, you’re one of a couple of expert practitioners, that’s sort of the first place to start, I think, for a firm to create more options.

Jeff McKay:
I like the enthusiasm that you shared that. As I was thinking, and we just talked about this and the prudent pedal model, I agree with you that repositioning provides more options, but there is in my experience, a step that occurs earlier in terms of critical path of repositioning the firm. And this is where confidence again, rears its head or insecurity rears its head. And that’s in defining what is our core capability? What is our key strength? And most firms will define it in terms of their industry. Well, we’re accountants, we’re actuaries, or they’ll talk about our quality work or are integrity. And those are important things. Those are features that people buy, they’re a reflection of expertise in relationship and results, which are brand differentiators. But I don’t think that clearly defines who a firm is in terms of a broader capability, mindset, worldview, and skills that wrap around that.
So for example, if you were to take actuaries well we’re actuaries and we define benefits and pension risk assessments, well, that’s really not your core strength. Your core strength is mathematics. You may have some other methodology, but where do you apply mathematics? Accounting firm may define themselves as accounting or tax. Well, that’s important, that’s kind of regulatory understanding, but accountants are business people as well. And where are their applications for that business capability? And I mean, you can go to architectural firms and think in terms of pure design and things like that. But there are also skills in terms of we’re really good at talking to senior leaders, we’re very good with implementation with junior people.
There’s always some combination of capabilities that makes every firm unique. And it’s a combination of history of the clients they’ve worked with in the past, their HR and leadership development or lack of it that creates a unique combination that I think opens up all kinds of different market opportunities and opportunities to reposition the firm. But most firms don’t look at it that way. They too narrowly define core capabilities. Therefore, they too narrowly divine their positioning and they fall right back into not having options longer term. And they don’t think they’re special as a result.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
So they don’t have confidence. Right? Confidence comes from we’re special, we’re unique. We offer something of unique value, but if you group yourself with everybody else and the same core capabilities, your positioning will never change. It’ll always be like somebody else.

Jason Mlicki:
This is a comment of David Baker’s management consulting to agency industry. I think it’s a really good one. And the question he always asks is if your client decided not to work with you anymore, how long would it take them to replace you? So if they can replace you in a couple of weeks, then you’re not very special. If it’s going to take them six months, nine months, 12 months to find a partner like you, then you are really, really special. And I think that’s kind of the heart of the matter is have you really built something? Have you built capabilities that are salient and valuable to your clients, such that the thought of exiting the relationship becomes very difficult for them to replace?
And that’s probably not just a function of an industry served as you pointed out. I’ll just think about my own agency for a minute. We’ve built the agency over the last seven or eight years on a vertical disposition towards professional services. And we’ve been kind of bending that a little bit more horizontally towards SAS and other service companies. But the fascinating thing is like a lot of times I’ve had clients say to me, well that brought them to the door, right? The idea that you’ve got specific knowledge about my type of company that is going to be valuable, but then as they work with us, they’ve kind of pivoted into, well really the core capability is your ability to take all of our complex ideas, all of our noise, shape and argument and produce a high quality piece of thought leadership.
And that’s not really tied to our industry predisposition, right? It’s a capability, it’s a layer above or below, I guess, depending on how you look at it, where we’ve chosen to focus our marketing energy. And so I don’t know if that really helps or not, but I think it’s just this central idea of, if you’re going to focus on capabilities as a lead into your position, then you have to think about building capabilities that are difficult to replace whatever they are. It’s a mix of skills, a mix of technology, experience whatever those things are mixed up to be. They all come back to that they’re valuable and rare. Most likely when they’re put together in that combination.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent Thoughts on Growing Your Professional Services Firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki principal of Rattleback the marketing agency for professional services firms and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy, Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you, now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jeff McKay:
Exactly. And if you think about somebody like Jason Mlicki and Rattleback that firm has evolved over time when your dad started it, it had a very narrow and specific focus, and it’s been expanding and adapting over the years. And it’s the combination of a design sensibility. Your analytical math mind, I mean, that was your undergrad, was math. I mean, it wasn’t marketing, but your ability to tell a story and position a story within the context of communication, E marketing makes for a unique combination, right? Because what’s missing in most thought leadership is a complete lack of empathy and understanding and deep thinking reinforced with empirical evidence because most thought leadership or that is produced in professional services and even SAS is somewhat generic and self centered and not client focus. That combination that has evolved over time is a unique permutation based on experiences and capabilities and passions that you have that at this time in place makes it an apt positioning and market opportunity for you.
And you can do that as an individual, as a small firm or a large firm, because there is that collective experience and strength to be leveraged to give you options. And when you tap into that, insecurity begins to fall away if you step into it and take some risk and you have a success or two then you’re like, “Oh, there might be something here.” And it just keeps building on itself. But none of it happens until you recognize that you’re okay, you have options and you add value. You want me to help you with your marketing strategy? I couldn’t let that one pass.

Jason Mlicki:
So I think we’re coming up on time, but we sort of have one that you’re going to hate that I have sort of sitting in my back pocket that we haven’t talked about. So I don’t really-

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, we do. I want to hear it.

Jason Mlicki:
Want to take the time to hear it over for our listeners or not. But part of confidence is the collective culture that the people that work at the firm and their perception of the credibility of the organization in which they operate. And a lot of times I see firms through the years that kind of do things maybe a little bit on the cheap at times, and this all comes back to branding, this is why I said you’re going to hate it. And that the brand identity that they’ve put into the marketplace that represents the firm visually and maybe verbally as well, just looks dated and stale.
And maybe it doesn’t even look that professional it’s incoherent. It’s not cohesive. And we’ve actually seen multiple times through the years, firms making large brand investments where they invest in sort of like a complete rebrand, an entirely new visual identity system to represent the organization, have significant effects on confidence within the culture. And so what happens when we’ve been through these projects with clients on the backside, which you’ll see happen is all of a sudden the people that worked at the firm feel like they’re working at a real firm for the first time. And they’ll say those things to us and the leadership then we kind of say, thank you for doing this because we always kind of felt we were fly by night. And we looked incoherent. We didn’t look like we had it together.
And now I feel like I can walk into any company anywhere of any scale. And I can come in as professional and confident and put together. And it’s a really strange thing. It’s hard to put your finger on. It’s hard to measure. It’s hard to put an ROI on, but I can tell you having been through some large scale rebrands in my career on behalf of clients, I’ve seen that play out many times and then revenue growth follows so they go through this rebrand and the rebrand itself didn’t unlock the revenue, the rebrand unlocked sort of cultural confidence that then led to all kinds of new reverend opportunities because people felt better about walking into a prospect meeting than they ever had before.
So it’s a really strange kind of thing, but it’s like I said, one, I know you’re going to hate, but I can point to more than a few examples of that playing out for our clients who have made those types of big strategic investments that on the surface, I know you’ll say that’s a waste of time and money to be investing in visual identity systems or whatever it might be. Now, I think it’s supersedes everything else, meaning that if you don’t have clarity on positioning, you don’t have clarity on capabilities all the things you’ve talked about, no investment and that type of visual stuff is going to solve the problem, but it can raise that kind of, I would guess, call it cultural confidence. People feeling like they work at a top firm, maybe for the first ever.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. I’d be curious to know what the percent of refresh brands fall into that confidence revenue generating and which really didn’t move the ball because I think the distinction will be, and you correct me if I’m wrong. But-

Jason Mlicki:
You’re wrong.

Jeff McKay:
Those that do the heavy lifting around the positioning in conjunction with the brand identity, we’ll see the most lift because they take the step back and really strip away everything that’s been piled on to the original brand and positioning and culture and get back to its essence. And its essence, its confidence is unleashed again. And every firm I have to think starts with some form of confidence. Because firms either start out of confidence, I can do this better than my existing firm is and I have a different vision. Like your friend said, or desperation, I just got let go and I need to feed my family.
I got to do something. I’ll do anything. But out of that origin comes a confidence because if you’re not confident, you’re not going to succeed of those firms that succeed they’re built on some baseline confidence. And when you go through a rebranding exercise, you have an opportunity to rethink and strip away everything that gets piled on that. If you have a really good firm helping you and they’re not just having you fill out some templated, what are our values and stuff like that, but they really are coming in and it’s like psychology it’s business psychology.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, it is because-

Jeff McKay:
Therapy. Therapy.

Jason Mlicki:
My response is you’re correct. I don’t have any data of course. And that the challenges in my years doing brand work, that’s the only type of brand work we ever did. So my accuracy is way off meaning that the brand work we always did was okay let’s delve down to the core of what makes this company tick. Even if you look at the testimonials of our clients that speak to that, they’ll say that, they’ll say, well, Jason and his team stripped back our organization down to its bare bones and then build it back one piece at a time to really get at the essence of who we are, what we do and why we do it. And so our hit rate on that kind of confidence lift would have been quite high I imagine because that’s the only way we did it, but you’re right.
If you took the whole universe of just slap a new logo on it, that’s not going to work. And so we would see those effects because I think some of that is also just that their workforce respects when a leadership team does that, whether the decisions are right or wrong, it gives them confidence that the leaders have really stepped back and thought through a great depth, how the firm operates, why it does what it does, how it does, what it does, where it competes and then how it tells that story to the marketplace. And when you do that, you earn credibility and you earn confidence of your people, right? Like it’s just sort of logical. Right? So yeah, I agree with you kind of conceptually, but I can’t comment on that.
Because I’ve done very little in my life of just, Hey, stick a new logo on that because I know that doesn’t work. So we just don’t do it. So I’ve never been a party to that really much. But I agree with you that if you took the whole universe of that, that’s not going to be effective, well we have now overstayed our welcome. So I think I’m going to call it a day. Good discussion. I hope that our listeners came away with some ideas on how they can drive confidence into their leadership teams, into their firms. If they feel like they lack it. And I think we proved you wrong that confidence, absolutely can be built. Confident leaders can come from insecure firms.

Jeff McKay:
There you go. That was fun.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:53].

Jeff McKay:
Do it next week.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.