Mindshop’s 5C’s of Profitable Growth

1. Capability

The definition of a business advisory service line is unique to each firm, depending on their objectives; it could be offering business health checks, strategic planning workshops, leadership coaching or a myriad of permutations and combinations. Whatever form a business advisory service line takes, staff in the wider firm can build capability through just-in-time learning to raise confidence in understanding and delivering business advisory services.

Mindshop’s Five Phases of Business Advisory Success

Firms achieving success in business advisory services use support providers (like Mindshop) to guide their teams through business advisory fundamentals learning programs, developing skills to use in their day-to-day working lives and to deliver additional value for clients. At a bare minimum, staff gain the ability to understand and 'sell' advisory services delivered by others, with the potential to add 20% to pricing by simply building confidence and having a firm-wide business advisory mindset.

2. Capacity

With attracting and retaining staff a common struggle globally, it’s a challenge for many to deliver core services, let alone move into offering business advisory services. But to do nothing opens the door for competitors to capitalise on evolving client needs. Here’s some ideas to free up or build greater capacity for business advisory services:

• Tap into offshore and/or outsourced team members.
• Delegate or stop doing tasks peripheral to the achievement of goals and free up 20% of your time.
• Move on poor quality clients by identifying which are low (or no) profit.
• Build better systems and processes.
• Undertake a waste audit on the firm.
• Allocate the right clients to the right team members.

3. Clarity

Do you have a clear business advisory service line with scaled tiers of intensity?

A clear product offering understood by all (internally and externally) articulates how you solve the pressing problems of your target markets and gives them affordable options, through ‘human’ stories.

Underpin the value you’re going to deliver by offering retainer and value-based pricing, showing you’re confident in the significant impact your services will have on clients’ success.

Clarity in a business advisory model has a knock-on effect; internal team and external referrers are more likely to understand your service options and refer existing and/or new clients.

4. Commitment

Leaders setting the agenda and leading by example can drive change readiness and successfully oversee the implementation of business advisory service lines. A ‘minimum viable product’ approach, not ‘gold plating’ everything and getting caught in a perfection web will accelerate success and build confidence.

Show a strong commitment to the implementation of a business advisory service line by removing any ‘rocks in the river’ hindering success. Broadcast to the wider firm the need to focus on the implementation of a business advisory service line as a common goal with a clear understanding of 'why we are doing what we are doing', holding those tasked with implementation accountable for achievement of milestones along the way and enabling champions to drive the process.

5. Cut through

In a cluttered market business advisors need to be great problem solvers with clear niche target markets to get cut through. We recommend a few simple tactics:

1. Promote personal brands on LinkedIn.
2. Create a referral strategy outlining a clear model and approach.
3. Demonstrate capability through webinars, speaking engagements (where the audience is your target market), and by using simple tools in internal and client meetings.
4. Consistently develop and distribute clever content in your marketing messaging. Use tools such as ChatGPT to accelerate creativity and save hours developing content, (but with the caveat that you need to embed clever, authentic thinking and not just use AI output verbatim).
5. Keep it simple when you’re talking to prospects: share war stories, start with a simple health check diagnostic or book a two-hour problem-solving meeting and use basic tools to turn a ‘chat’ into a structured, valuable conversation.

Reset – Reskill – Refire

To scale business advisory services for profitable growth, the 5C’s can be summarised as follows:

1. Reset - build capacity to capitalise on the right opportunities.
2. Reskill - by developing capabilities and services, &
3. Refire - with focused marketing and referrals.

Good luck for your journey to profitable growth with business advisory services.