Jason Mlicki (00:02.242)
Jeff, sorry.

Have you ever heard the phrase, eat what you kill?

Jeff McKay (00:12.014)
Yeah, everybody in professional services has heard that expression.

Jason Mlicki (00:16.65)
I think I was thinking about this. We’re doing part two on our series on scaling here. And I was thinking about that notion because I was thinking about a story. was years ago, probably almost 20 years ago, I hired a guy. And at the time he was evaluating his options between working for me or working for this some research firm in town that had I don’t even remember the name of the firm at the time.

And he said, was interviewing with the research from the guy that’s kept saying, he’s like, you got to understand this is an eat what you kill business. You eat what you kill. And he’s like, okay, I understand that. He’s like, so basically you got to go out there and bring in the business and then you deliver on the business you bring in. And he’s like, we don’t basically they don’t, wouldn’t, they didn’t pay anything. They paid zero. just, they, they, know, when you, when you brought something in the door, you got to, you got paid for what you brought in the door. And they sort of took a cut. And he said, well,

He’s like, I understand. He’s like, I understand. I understand what you’re saying. He’s like, and I have no problem with that. He’s like, only problem I have is like, what value do you provide?

Jeff McKay (01:20.302)
Yeah, exactly.

Jason Mlicki (01:23.862)
like why do I need you? If it’s what I kill why would I just go eat and kill everything by myself? So anyway that story jumped into my mind only because it’s kind of the antithesis of scale right? Like that’s a business that I don’t see any real way for it to scale unless they were offering something.

there was something fundamentally underlying that they had, IP, if you will, that was so unique and valuable that made it easier for him to go out into the marketplace and kill things and eat them. Because now he’s got this magical, powerful black box underlying him that he can operate against. So anyway, that’s where that story came from in my head. It just struck me as like,

an analogy for this. And you see a lot of firms like this. I don’t know if you’ve seen these. I call them firms that aren’t a good fit for us usually, but they’re firms where everyone’s got a side hustle. Everyone’s at 1099 and everyone’s kind of got a side hustle. It’s like the business exists, there’s 50 people in it, and they all collectively present as a firm. But as it turns out, they’re all really independent contractors running around like, you know, crazy people.

And they sort of come together on occasion somehow under umbrella, maybe with revenue. Often there’s no cross selling at all. Like there’s not even cross delivery. You sell something, you don’t bring anybody on the team in with you because you’d be giving up a portion of the revenue. So it’s sort of the, again, to me, the antithesis of scale. I think it’s not saying you can’t grow those things and you certainly see those firms that have grown somehow that way.

Jeff McKay (02:57.413)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (03:08.952)
but it doesn’t strike me as something that’s ever going to reach a critical mass, I guess, if that makes sense. So anyway, I’m saying all this to lean us into what a firm scales, what they do differently. And I think it’s not that, but go ahead.

Jeff McKay (03:22.106)
Yeah.

Well, it’s a totally different mindset. Eat with you kill. Another way of saying that is hand to mouth, right? You’re just too busy trying to avoid starvation. And it creates a lot of dysfunction. I mean, because when you’re starving, you do a lot of things that you wouldn’t do if you were not starving. So I think it’s completely different.

mindset. And I mean, there are firms, particularly when they’re fledgling, you have to go hand to mouth, right? You take whatever you can can get. But at some point, you know, fairly early on, you got to move beyond, you know, the hand to mouth stage. And if you’re not,

you’ve got other problems.

Jason Mlicki (04:15.446)
And to your point, I think as we dig into this more, I feel like it’s in that early moment when you’re kind of deciding whether you’re trying to build a firm that’s going to grow or a firm that’s going to scale. If you said to yourself, we want to build something that will scale, you do some things differently. If you say, I want to grow my firm, I want to expand it. I want to add people. want to attract bigger clients with bigger spends, whatever it might be. That looks a little differently.

So the goal today is, I guess, to talk about the firms at scale, what they do differently. And I do think it starts kind of So before we start, you start us out, actually, because I think you actually set the stage with the most important thing before we started recording.

Because it starts in one place. And I agree with you. I think it always starts in one place. So let’s lean into that right away.

Jeff McKay (05:13.293)
Yeah, I think this is the marketer in me coming out and it’s full of glory. but the place to start. And I hate, I really am beginning to hate this expression because it’s, it’s becoming trite, but it is so true. You have to begin with an ideal client profile and maybe drop the ideal, the profile part.

of that. Maybe that’s what makes it trite and people see it as a slide instead of a clear understanding of the market that you serve. When I talk about ideal client profile,

It’s about getting really clear about what you will go after and what you will not, because you align, with the perspective of, of that buyer in the market. And I, and every firm that, that scales achieves it by identifying the perfect client for them to work with. I’m not saying that every client is the perfect client, but

pretty clear. It’s like trying to find a wife, right? If you’re looking for a wife, you have an idea of what you’re looking for to help sort through all the different options. Maybe that’s not the best analogy, but what popped in my mind?

Jason Mlicki (06:44.993)
I don’t know where you’re going with that one. I’m going to steer clear of that. But I actually have a question for you about this for a second, is that one of the things I’ve seen in larger firms is when you bring up this notion of ideal client, it’s really hard for them to wrap their head around the idea that there is only one. That we’re a diverse firm. We’ve got 2,000 people and

Jeff McKay (06:47.695)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (07:10.55)
and five practices and they serve different people and we can’t have one, we have to have nine. What do you say to clients when they, to firms when they talk like that? How do you?

Jeff McKay (07:23.012)
I would just give them an example. Do you think that the ideal client for Goldman Sachs is the same ideal client as Edward Jones?

I those are very different ideal client profiles, but they’re both financial services firms. And their solutions to their customers’ issues and goals are different. But it’s still all finance. But they are very, very different. Different fee structures, different approaches, different client relationship management approaches.

And there’s a litany of differences like that. I look at Lexus versus Chevrolet. Those are very different ideal clients, but they’re still the same car providing transportation, but they’re very different.

Jason Mlicki (08:29.638)
I do think those types of consumer analogies are always really interesting because you think about some of the size of some of these businesses, whether it’s, geez, a huge auto manufacturer like a Toyota or something, or a huge retail company like a Target.

When you talk to, I’ve met some folks that were CMOs and those types of organizations. And when you talk to them, they say the same thing. They paint a very clear picture about a very specific individual consumer that they’re looking to attract. And they have a real clear understanding of that. so I guess I do like that analogy because I’ve said that to people in the past. I’m like, if they can build a business of that size,

serving is why the clientele is they actually serve and still do it through this lens of there is a single ideal consumer. Why in the world can’t we as a diversified professional services firm that’s maybe one one thousandth the size at best, right? Why is why do we think it’s so much harder? You know, one the things I’ve also thought about this ideal client, I agree with you, by the way, because ideal client profile has been,

Jeff McKay (09:34.842)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (09:45.166)
Now it’s actually been shortened to ICP. Marketers have ruined it and made it an acronym. So it’s an ICP. And so now it’s gobbledygook nobody understands. But the one thing I’ve noticed about it is when I talk to more and more firms, there’s a lot of firms that they can describe to me demographically what that person is. And they can say, well, it’s this type of organization. It’s this size.

it’s this type of buyer, it’s this level, it’s this type of spend, they can almost always tell me what spend they’re looking for. But what they usually can’t tell me, and the ones that the firms I’ve worked with that are great, that are really exceptional at what they do from a marketing perspective, can tell me about kind of the mindsets. They can tell me about what they’re struggling with.

as businesses, as individuals, they can tell me how they look at the world, their worldview. can tell me, how they feel about, you know, whatever it is there, where their businesses in the life cycle, where their business fits in the world, where they fit within their business, like all of that kind of like. Kind of emotional, I call them psychographics, but like everything underlying the buyer. And I feel like that’s.

where the separation is, if you’re going to get this right, is you have to really understand your clients at that level, not just, well, they’re COOs of large manufacturers. OK. That’s good to know. So scale starts there, right?

Jeff McKay (11:16.826)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (11:23.482)
Yeah. And I just had this conversation with somebody. Can you remember what prompted it? There’s so much skepticism about can this be done in professional services and larger professional services? And I could provide two large firm examples. Hewitt is an excellent example.

And we used to segment the market based on people’s strategies of given firms. And when we looked at the market, the way that a Goldman Sachs, or let’s say a McKinsey to give a different firm, the way a McKinsey sets its people’s strategy.

its reward structure, its benefit structure, and all the things that go into developing, motivating, recruiting, retaining a workforce is very different hiring MBAs than it is for a McDonald’s who’s hiring an hourly worker that has a turnover rate of probably a 95%.

And how you go about that in the structures that you put in place are completely different. And the conversation that you’re having with the chief people officer, chief HR officer, and how you attract them to your offer are very different. They just are. But it’s the same core solutions or capabilities that firms are bringing to market.

Jason Mlicki (13:16.152)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (13:20.442)
But how you’re talking to the market, how you’re resonating with the market, how you’re getting scale around your market instead of having 30 different messages for 30 different buyers is very different.

Jason Mlicki (13:37.518)
Well, it’s funny because I feel like you made an analogy there. I don’t know that you intended to, because you talked about talent attraction, not customer attraction. But to your point, it’s very easy to look at a McKinsey and say, these are the types of people that McKinsey wants to hire.

And I want to be clear, I’m not talking about demographics here. What I’m talking about is the types of individuals that are going to be successful in McKinsey, regardless of what role you stick them in, whether they’re coming in as a data scientist or an economist versus your classic MBA, can’t win into consulting, right? And a lot of those firms, these big firms, that’s what their talent profile looks like now. It’s a lot more academically diverse than it used to be.

And yet I also guarantee you if you went to the chief people officer of those organizations, they still know what the type of person they’re looking for to be successful. And it’s super easy. And I think every firm can relate to that. There is a certain type of person that’s really successful here. They have these attitudes, these behaviors. They’re driven this way.

And so I think all you’re doing is turning the mirror around and saying, we should be doing the same thing for our customers. And if we can’t do that, then we just haven’t done the work yet. Because we’ve done it for our people, I guarantee you. Whether we’ve done it explicitly or implicitly, we know it. Every firm does. But doing it explicitly. OK, so that’s the first thing. think.

So the first element of scale is really knowing who your best clients really are and knowing what really makes them tick so that you can build something for them. What do you see as the second thing? There’s a number of things we talked about in here, but I think they all kind of roll together into one.

Jeff McKay (15:33.319)
I think the way that firms go about solving the problem, the solutions that they create are built around that ideal client and allows them to have scale. When you think about, this is another CPG example, but I think it’s applicable.

you think about Starbucks. Starbucks knows coffee.

Jason Mlicki (16:11.182)
You used to.

Jeff McKay (16:11.396)
And they, they, right. Well, yeah, they used to. but what allowed them to scale is it was coffee. Everything was built around coffee. The training was built around coffee. The machines were around coffee. the product was coffee. They became really, really good at coffee.

That allowed them to scale McDonald’s when they first started out. mean, look at their menu. was, it was just hamburgers and it was just a couple of burgers, fries, milkshake, right? Maybe, sodas. That was it. It’s like you’re in and out burger nowadays. Your favorite place is very simple, right? And when you’re only doing one thing, you get really, really good at doing that. That one thing.

Jason Mlicki (16:45.315)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (16:53.516)
Yeah, yeah, three things.

Jeff McKay (17:04.806)
And you can add on over time because the market will give you permission to do that. But it comes after you’ve become really good at doing the one thing.

Jason Mlicki (17:21.922)
Yeah. To me, the one thing is this sort of foundational IP. There’s a difference between saying, to your point, this is our ideal client. This is the problem that he or she has that’s sticky and not going away. And current solutions are insufficient.

And you develop foundational IP that attacks that problem that says, here is a different way of solving this, a better way of solving this. I actually think the perfect example of this was just on the show was Matt Dixon. Like you look at what he’s building at DCM insights. That’s the perfect example. He says, okay, we want to understand what it is that high performing business development folks and professional services firms do differently from their peers.

And once we understand that we’ve built foundational IP that becomes the backbone of the marketing engine, the thought leadership, the book, the HPR articles, the podcast episodes, and the backbone of the training, which is the tool set that’s used to go and make money. Right? So it’s, it’s, it’s the foundational IP that governs sales and delivery all in one. And to your point,

They go super narrow on that. They say, OK, that’s the only problem we’re going to solve. So when we come in the door and we solve that problem and the client says, man, you guys were great, we really want some help with client service delivery. We don’t feel like we’re doing the best things we can do with client retention. That’s the pivotal point where the firm has to make a call and say, well, if we do that,

then we’re going sideways and we may lose the thread on what’s enabling us to scale. And there’s a point in time when it’s smart to do that and there’s a point in time when it’s not so smart to do that. But firms that scale, think, are better at saying, well, no, that’s off the track of where we’re headed. We’re headed over here and we don’t want to go there. Whereas a firm that’s trying to grow would say, absolutely.

Jason Mlicki (19:33.634)
You know, the business development problem was the foot in the door. Now we’re going to land and expand. And we expand aggressively across every part of the business, every possible way that we can. solve all kinds of new problems, bring in all kinds of new talent, all kinds of new solutions, all kinds of stuff. But the firm that wants to scale says, no, that’s not our problem. We solve this problem with this solution.

I suppose if they do it really well, they’re in there kind of maybe for a very long time because it’s like, you know, there’s always the need to improve your ability to solve that problem.

Jeff McKay (20:13.604)
Yeah. And I think about, you know, myself and even rattleback is similar. I’ve been marketing for 30 years.

I know a lot about SEO. I can design, I can build websites. I can do a lot of different things as a marketer, but I don’t do those for clients, right? Because my forte and where I scale is in marketing strategy, go to market, and the fractional CMO stuff of coordinating all this stuff.

Jason Mlicki (20:39.906)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (20:55.11)
of making sure that marketing has strategic impact. That’s what my clients want. They want strategic impact. They want marketing to impact the pipeline. And that’s where my focus is. Not on posting things to LinkedIn. You know, can I set up automation to post things to LinkedIn? Yeah. But is that where I want to be? I mean, there’s thousands of firms that do that type of stuff.

It’s the same thing. And with Rattleback, I mean, your specialty is thought leadership. You’re very good at it. Do you want to be doing SEO? You can do it. I mean, you’ve demonstrated for yourself, but do you want to be doing that? Hell no.

Jason Mlicki (21:45.326)
Yeah, so really, I mean, to start, if you want to scale the firm, it starts with clear understanding of the ideal client and focus. And then usually a foundational IP layer sitting underneath everything. Like if you don’t have those things, the idea that you’re going to scale something is almost not realistic. I was going say almost impossible, but it’s just not realistic. That’s like the most foundational critical things.

Jeff McKay (21:46.8)
Thank

Jason Mlicki (22:15.362)
What comes next? What else?

Jeff McKay (22:15.652)
And a third one, well, a third one that we’ve talked about that we didn’t enumerate it is there’s a mindset. I’m scaling, I’m not.

Jason Mlicki (22:23.596)
Yeah, I would call that a fourth one because I rattled off three. So the fourth is mindset. So talk about the mindset.

Jeff McKay (22:28.422)
Yeah, so I think the mindset is

We’re not just going to add bodies and watch the revenue number go up. We want to see revenue per employee go up. We want to see profitability go up. We want to achieve economies of scale. And that’s the mindset, not just let’s go get another client and add some more revenue. I mean, as I said before, that’s okay in the short

But it’s going to hurt you in the long term. And if you don’t have the proper mindset so that you’re able to say no to those, you’re not going to achieve scale.

Jason Mlicki (23:24.078)
It’s funny because I like where you went with mindset. There’s this whole discussion, percolating right now around software as a service and services software. These things are of blurring and merging into one thing. And one of the fundamentally interesting things about software companies historically is that the whole premise of software is you sort of solve a problem once and you never solve it again. Once it’s been solved the first time,

you’ve built the code to solve it. Now you just reuse the code over and over again and build on top of the code, right? I that’s the whole premise of software. Services firms are kind of the polar opposite of that, right? You solve the problem once and then you kind of solve it over and over and over and over again. You know, oftentimes, bespoke every single time. don’t even like stop to be like, well, what did we learn from that? Can we reuse some of that? Can we do it again? They just kind of just, you know, again, solve the problem again.

Jeff McKay (24:12.806)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (24:20.654)
And I feel like with this collision, it’s sort of forcing firms to think differently about that to say, we got to think a little bit more like a software company. We got to think more about like, once we solved it, how can we use that solution again? And how do we maybe customize it or how do we keep a foundational piece of it and how do we build upon it? And that to me is part of your, your mindset. It’s where you have to think about business a little differently than you used to think about it.

I’ve also bumped into firms over the years where when I ask them about what they want, one of my fundamental questions in the sale is always, what do you really want? It’s kind of a big picture, vague question. And a of times when they talk about growth, I’ll get firms that won’t even talk in revenue. They’ll talk in employee growth. They won’t tell me. They’ll say, well, they don’t have a revenue target, but we have 10 people who would like to be at 30. We have 50 who would like to be at 100.

Jeff McKay (25:08.006)
Mmm. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (25:13.902)
why do you want to be at 100? Why? Why do you want to grow? And then they’ll go on all these other things that have really nothing to do with revenue or revenue per employee or profit. They’re just sort of like, they’re just very different. And I’ve also seen firms where growth is geographic, right? We have an office in Columbus and it does these things and we’re going to open it off and we sell very regionally.

We’re going to open an office in Detroit and it’s going to do all the same things with new people. And so it’s just sort of like replicating, of like almost building like a, like a franchise does, I guess. McDonald’s opens new restaurants and all over the world. And that’s not scale, right? That’s not because, because you’re just, you’re again, like you said, mindset, your revenue and employment are kind of growing together at the same pace. So, sorry, went a little long there, I?

Jeff McKay (26:08.612)
No.

Jason Mlicki (26:08.759)
you

Jeff McKay (26:12.742)
I like that thinking.

Jason Mlicki (26:12.942)
What else goes into this? There’s a couple of things left and then we should probably change gears.

Jeff McKay (26:26.662)
What else is there? Oh, I think one of the big ones. And this kind of builds off the mindset in the ICP, but it’s very specific and it’s a very hard discipline for firms to develop. And it’s the ability to say no. No to a new solution, a new product.

a new customer, a new market, because it doesn’t enable scale. We had Brian Caffarelli on one of our best episodes, Good Sale, Bad Sale, Good Revenue, Bad Revenue. I can’t remember exactly what the name of it was, but there’s good revenue and there’s bad revenue. And I think the best firms and the firms that scale effectively

develop that muscle to say no. And it is probably the hardest muscle for professional services developed, particularly if you’re not a one firm firm, you’re decentralized, there’s a lot of partner autonomy.

Jeff McKay (27:49.487)
If you’re not saying no, you’re not, it doesn’t allow you to say, say no to what is not good. Does not allow you say yes to what is good.

Jason Mlicki (28:02.69)
You know, it’s funny. You look at almost every great company that exists beyond professional services, just in general. almost every one is built on a leader that has made a living of saying no, right? Like saying, no, we’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. know, Steve jobs most famous video was the, you know, the focus thing where he comes back after being removed, he returns and says, we’re throwing up, we’re returning all this off. We’re not doing any of this stuff. We’re just doing these three or four things.

And in fact, recently, a more recent example is that, you it’s been all over the news that, chat GPT shut down, open AI shut down their Sora AI video generation tool because really it was a huge, opportunity cost situation where, you know, it’s sucking up, you know, computing capacity and organizational resources and money. And it’s sort of like, but that they didn’t see the end game. It’s like, we have to focus on less things. So even, you know,

these mega scaler scaling AI firms are reaching to the power of focus, right? Recognizing that they can’t do everything, even though on the surface you think AI can do anything and there’s limitless capital for them, but they’re even saying, well, we gotta get focused. So yeah, I liked that one a lot.

Jeff McKay (29:24.006)
Yeah. Well, we’re seeing another example in the opposite direction. The thing that made Southwest Airlines so special and allowed it to scale was its ability to say no. And it’s lost that ability. Now, now it’s just another airline like every other. I mean, there’s nothing that makes Southwest Airlines distinguishable from

from United Airlines or whatever. Maybe their people are a little more jovial, but even that seems to be dissipating. It’s kind of a shame. Although I do like having my assigned seat.

Jason Mlicki (30:06.988)
Yeah, yeah, it is the same.

Well, it surely makes life easier. to your point, think back, it’s the coming out people don’t, some of our listeners may not remember this because they’re, well, we’re older, but coming out of 9-11, everyone thought the whole airline industry was gonna collapse, right? Like, it’s like, is anybody gonna be, who’s gonna survive? And the one airline that thrived coming out of it was Southwest. And it was the one that, if you were to make a bet on,

September 12, 2002 or 2001, who was going to fail? It would have been Southwest because you think these short haul carriers were in a really tough spot because of all the changes that the TSA was going to bring us. But they thrived because they were super focused and they were super unique in how they approached them. So let’s move on. We’re getting off topic here a little bit, but let’s just talk about

the role of marketing in all of this. How does marketing help if a firm leader says, don’t just want to grow, we want to scale, meaning that we want to create something that functions more like a flywheel, grows revenue and grows revenue per employee at the same time. How does marketing fit in all of this?

Jeff McKay (31:40.721)
Well, it goes back to my number one. If marketing is not the voice saying we need to focus on an ideal client, I wonder what you’re doing as a function. Because marketing should be fighting vehemently on that front to get the appropriate focus that the firm needs.

Duh. If marketing is not doing that, what’s your purpose? So marketing. Be the voice of the client. Be the bully in the room that says, we’re still not focused. We got to get focused. Got to get focused. And it’s the hardest thing to do, but it’s the most important one.

Jason Mlicki (32:14.326)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (32:36.854)
It’s funny, I have a second thing and I think it’s something I wish I would see more marketers do, which is I would like to see more marketers actually recognize that marketing is not marketing in this world. And what I mean by that is thought leadership. As you said, a lot of my work is around thought leadership. And I think a lot of marketers think about thought leadership too narrowly.

They think about it as something that they’re creating to market the firm and create awareness, maybe get relevancy and generate some leads. But you go back again, I’ll refer back to Matt Dixon again, we talked about him with him, the idea of a commercial insight thought leadership at its core ought to be deriving foundational IP that’s so differentiated that it not only becomes

marketing output that also becomes the fundamental structure of service delivery and products, product design. And not many marketers think that way. They think my job is to get leads on the door. And yes, job is to get leads in the door. But if you could think more deeply about IP, you can create something that’s…

much more valuable to everyone involved, much more valuable to the firm, much more valuable to the client, much more valuable to your people, all those things. So it’s like, stop thinking about marketing as marketing, I think is my advice on that. If that makes sense.

Jeff McKay (34:08.517)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that, that reminds me when I was working on the Prudent Petal growth framework, of course, I relied on you to bounce ideas off of. And as I was labeling components of, of the model, there was one built around the, the brand preference driver of expertise.

And I said, the key word here is insights. And you and I went round and round. You’re like, no, it’s, it’s thought leadership or no, it’s, I can’t remember what the other term was, but we went round and round. I’m like, no, it has to be insights. And you’re like, Jeff, I don’t think that’s the right word, but it is the right word because if you’re marketing in your thought leadership, no, no.

Jason Mlicki (35:02.67)
is trying to prove you’re right on one.

Jeff McKay (35:06.063)
No, because you just said it yourself. If you’re not providing an insight to your market, insight on the people in your market for your market, then your marketing is not hitting the mark.

your goal in fights.

Jason Mlicki (35:26.19)
It’s almost like there, it’s almost, you know, in the past, we’ve used this notion of, you know, uh, capital M marketing and little M marketing. It’s the same thing. Capital I insight, real insight, insight, you know, using the Patnaik’s language that you’ve worked really hard to discover that no one else knows that has value and meaning and use.

Jeff McKay (35:35.141)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (35:52.576)
Not just, we got a bunch of insights. Go to our website, check out all our insights.

Jeff McKay (35:56.872)
Yeah, you can’t scale 30 insights, right?

Jason Mlicki (36:02.306)
Nor can you have 30 insights, to be brutally honest.

Jeff McKay (36:05.103)
Yeah, that’s true too. That’s true, right? That’s a point. Good point.

Jason Mlicki (36:10.434)
So what else should marketing be doing to help us?

Jeff McKay (36:14.885)
Well, I think the linking of the insight to the solution and what allows that connection to occur is the intellectual capital frameworks that link the two. Marketing should be actively driving those, shaping those. And if you’re in a firm, you’re like, well, marketing can’t possibly do that.

then you have the wrong, either the wrong marketer or the wrong expectations for marketing. Because they should be providing that value and should have a deep enough understanding of your business, business in general, and the client in order to help shape that. They don’t have to be the one that produces it on their own.

but they should be actively involved in the formulation of that, I think.

Jason Mlicki (37:20.364)
Yeah. Also, what I like about what you said, too, I think marketing can be the one that says there’s more than one way to provide the solution. I mentioned early on, there’s a firm that I worked with for a number of years called RBL Group, which is actually Norm Snomalwood and Dave Ulrich’s.

HR oriented consulting firm. And what I loved about those guys was they had a really keen understanding of this. They always would look at it and say, well, we have this IP. How can we deliver the IP to the market? We can deliver it through bespoke consulting. We can deliver it through productized training, training that is repeatable, or we can deliver it through some type of other means, a book or online training module or.

video series, all things that can make money, but all deriving from the same fundamental IP. And those guys are, they were really smart about that. And I think that that’s where marketing can play a big role is to help maybe, know, firm leaders or practitioners think more differently about how this insight could be applied.

and recognize that, our solution has always been to go provide consulting on this. Maybe we can actually build a product of some kind. What would that look like? And who would buy it and that kind of stuff? OK. Anything else marketing could be doing or should be doing?

Jeff McKay (38:50.343)
Well, I’ll just build on what you said and formalize it is they should be commercializing those solutions, productizing them. I don’t like that word. I prefer commercialize.

to shape them in a way that they scale. Normally what you see is a list of capabilities on a firm and firms love to talk in terms of capabilities.

Jeff McKay (39:35.236)
It’s, I just don’t think that’s the way firms buy. Yes, you need to have those, but clients buy solutions. They buy outcomes. They buy results. And that’s the formulation that marketing needs to be making for firms, not articulating and listing capabilities.

Jason Mlicki (39:42.574)
clients.

Jason Mlicki (40:06.552)
What’s your point? think that the world has changed a lot in the last probably 20 years. 20 years ago, buyers said, well, we need expertise in this area to solve a problem that we have. And now they go to the market and say, well, I don’t have time to go thumbing through pages and pages of capabilities to understand the types of problems you’ve solved. I need you to tell me specifically the problems you solve and what the solution is.

in a well-packaged page or collection of pages. And if you can’t do that, I’m just going to move on because I don’t have time. I don’t have time for you.

Jeff McKay (40:45.371)
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s becoming even more so in an AI world.

Right? I don’t think firms are shifting. Buyers are shifting their thinking from capabilities to outcomes. And your solution needs to show them how you get to the outcome.

Jason Mlicki (41:10.188)
Yeah. Yeah. And if they can’t see it quickly and clearly, they’re probably going to move on. So OK. All right. Well, then let’s wrap this up. Actually, I think we’re in a really nice place. Maybe let’s just finish with, what are some questions a firm leader or a marketing leader might ask themselves to say, are we built to scale?

If I was saying to myself, think we would like to scale, are we ready? What questions would I want to ask myself?

to determine the answer.

Jeff McKay (41:55.174)
I think a key one, what metrics can we point to that indicate that we’ve achieved scale, i.e. we’re more productive in terms of our revenue or profit generation per unit of input. And unit of input is going to be a

a person more often than not in professional services. So what metrics can we point to that show we’re scaling? Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit per employee? It’s not going to be utilization. It’s going to be something different.

Jason Mlicki (42:50.36)
Well, I was just going to say that because it’s funny. You think about like most firms, utilization is the most important metric. And it’s almost, and going back to your comment about mindset earlier, it’s almost like if that’s the most important metric, then you already are starting at a place where you have the wrong mindset. Because you’re trying to squeeze as much as you can out of every single person. When, if you want to scale, you’re really trying to get more revenue per person or upside potential per person.

And that’s the wrong metric, most likely. So you probably have the wrong mindset. So it’s almost like, think about what you measure. Are you measuring the right things to establish the right mindsets? it’s like a virtuous circle of some kind. What else?

Jeff McKay (43:48.232)
There needs to be a question around, and you kind of alluded to this, is are we dependent upon just key individuals or is the thinking of the firm more broad based? Because if everything’s coming through some kind of bottleneck,

you’re not going to achieve scale. So I think the thinking of the firm needs to transcend, you know, individuals. And I think that’s when you’ve commercialized your IP versus having a very smart person just be in the room.

Jason Mlicki (44:33.155)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (44:44.967)
to answer the question versus an individual that’s able to orchestrate the outcome by utilizing the systems that the firm has put in place.

Jason Mlicki (45:00.13)
Yeah. Yeah, it’s really our buyers coming to us because we have really smart, talented people, or are they coming to us because we have a really compelling insight that makes them want to work with us. And it’s almost like the people that deliver it are less relevant.

the insight’s so powerful that I want the insight, want you to come in and deliver the solution that the insight derives and who delivers it is not that as important to me. In the last conversation we had on this, I introduced the concept of recurring revenue and reoccurring revenue. And I think that’s a really good one to look at. How much of our business reoccurs, meaning that clients come back to us because it’s a…

good relationship, they like the work that we do, they’re happy with the work we do, there’s problems we solve, they like the people they work with, those are all great things. Recurring revenue is structural. Clients come back because what we’re providing them and the service or products or solutions we’re providing to them are something they can’t really live without. You think about, again, back to that sort of conversations about

Well, how software and services are blurring. I think that’s a really good piece of this is that there are going to be opportunities for firms to create recurring revenue models that blends people and software in ways that they haven’t in the past. That then is built to scale better.

Jeff McKay (46:46.235)
I think another one that’s important, somewhat related to that is are the results that we’re producing for clients consistent and improving? Right, if we’re saying, hey, we’re going to help you produce X outcome, are we consistently producing X outcome? And is that outcome getting better?

Jason Mlicki (46:59.149)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (47:15.591)
you know, from a macro level for all of our clients, because that would indicate that we’re achieving economies of scale and economies of learning that we’re getting smarter doing the exact same stuff, the exact same stuff in air quotes over and over again, that we’re taking, sand out of the gears of the system.

in getting to that result.

Jeff McKay (47:48.847)
And that, that is going to be critical, I think, in an AI world because people are going to expect.

better, faster and cheaper from services. And if you’re getting better, faster and cheaper, you’re achieving scale.

Jason Mlicki (48:10.35)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (48:14.456)
Fair point. All right.

Jeff McKay (48:15.823)
Although I don’t see the cost of my Starbucks coming down.

Jason Mlicki (48:25.331)
yeah, no, I don’t think so. Not anytime soon. That’s for sure. If ever.

Hi, my friend. Well, this was interesting. This was fun. This was interesting. I’m glad we took the time to talk about this because it does force you to think a little differently about your business. Are we trying to grow something or are we trying to scale something? And what’s the difference and why does it matter? But I do think for every firm, regardless of where you come down on these topics,

there’s not a right or wrong. It’s not saying that, you know, if you’re trying to grow a firm, that that’s, you know, not difficult in and of itself or something that you shouldn’t, you know, say, well, we’re not, we’re not doing it right. If we’re not trying to scale, it’s more just, you know, this topic again, kind of came to me because it started as I was hearing this, this, this question a lot from prospects and, you know, can you help us scale? And I go, what do mean by scale? What are you actually trying to accomplish? And I think it’s, I think it’s important to distinguish the two.

if you’re going to try to do it.

Jeff McKay (49:32.091)
Yeah. The key word, if you want to scale, you got to focus. Got to focus on a client. You got to focus on a solution. You got to focus on an outcome. Yep. Focus on an insight. And it’s not to say those can’t evolve, but they evolve as you scale or after you scale. But focus is the key word.

Jason Mlicki (49:36.386)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (49:56.556)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (50:01.304)
Focus is the key. Yeah, focus is the key to everything. So, all right, man. Well, thanks for going on this. Thanks for doing this series with me. I enjoyed it. It was helpful.

Jeff McKay (50:13.767)
All right, I’ll you buddy.

Jason Mlicki (50:15.426)
Cool. See ya.