The Summit - May 2023

You now have revenue and margin reporting in the bag. It's time to start learning the art of hitting a number. At this level you are not paid to miss revenue numbers, you are paid to hit them. That means looking at all of your resources and determining how you are going to meet the target given the backlog available. Speaking of which, when was the last time you had your team clean it? Your company is probably going to want growth, so how are you going to get it? That's easy, learn to sell services. But in selling services you also need to learn to price services and understand how to protect your margin. You are now expected to interface with Sales and help close deals. Learn to inject trust (not truth) into the sales cycle by helping the customer recognize the leadership you bring to the situation. 

At this level you need to run a tight ship. That means meeting with your managers on a weekly cadence. One meeting for revenue, one meeting for human resource planning, one meeting for project escalations. If you care, they care, so make a clear statement about what you care about. The successful execution of every project int he portfolio. From there, you can make anything happen.

You should probably start thinking about your statement of work templates. Are they adequate? Can you negotiate them well? What clauses can you tighten to make sure your team has leverage when it comes to the important moments of a project?

You are now more distant from projects so you start to look at them as numbers rather than people. This is dangerous. You need to ask your managers for escalations. They are there, you just need to find them. Rather than attempt to read project reports, read your team. Are your managers meeting with customers? Check in on a few. Ask to attend some steering committee meetings and be a project sponsor on a few of your team's larger projects. Again, if you care they care and your P&L is only one bad project a way from getting shipwrecked, so stay alert.

Continue to develop your negotiation skills. The situations will now be more intense if they reach your desk and they are likely to be more subjective. The more you can understand the professional services business environment the better you will be able to negotiate it.

You may start to develop your own approach to project governance. Continue to develop this as you gain experience. How will you keep your portfolio on track?

While you need continue to engage with your team, you need to also see them as the source of your revenue generating capability. You need to ensure you are building an environment that makes them want to stay rather than trying to keep them from leaving. You need to start thinking about the knowledge that is stored in those big brains and how you can access it so that you can innovate. Improve the services you offer, create new services, publish best practices or whatever you can extract that can be turned into value. You need to determine how you can differentiate your services from your competitors.

You should also start thinking about how you onboard new hires but also how you help your team develop their skills. How can you teach them your way of getting things done? How quickly can you turn someone with technical skills into a true consultant? Work it out and put a plan into action. It can be tied together with shoestring to start as long as you have it up and running. Start thinking about where you find your new hires. Does your organization have tables at career day events? Do they come from within an industry? If so, how do you engage with it? How can you become a thought leader in it? Everyone wants to come a work for the thought leader!

You are now the owner of the PS strategy. What is it? What is your role within the organization? Who do you need to achieve it and how will you make it happen? You now own PS Marketing and well as the ability to sell. How are you going to use professional services to sell your company's products or even better, how are you going to make customers want to buy your people over your competitors? You need to start of your operating environment as a well orchestrated machine that you have fine tuned by getting the best out of the people you have. You work directly with the CFO and Chief Revenue Officer because you are a massive part of your company's revenue attainment.  Accuracy in forecast bookings, revenue and margin matter. 

Watch for revenue leak. Watch for unpaid invoices. Be quick to proactively escalate to customer if invoices haven't been paid. 

Your may own the partner strategy, the offshore strategy, the retention strategy, the packaged services strategy or whatever myriad of initiatives you will need to undertake in order to keep the business moving forward. But most importantly, I'm going to repeat something I've already highlighted, you need to know what professional services needs to be for your company to achieve its goals. There is no point in fine tuning this engine to get 5% more margin at the cost of finishing projects on time. There's no point increasing billable hours if what you need is more customer investment. Build the team your company needs, not the team your ego wants.

While you can probably establish a Project Management Office and a Center of Excellence, you still need to be available for customer escalations. Especially, the big ones. We don't want you wasting your time with project matters, but again, you have to demonstrate the number one thing that helps you help your team is the successful execution of customer-facing projects. Get out and visit customers. Take the project team with you. It's a great way to get to know them. 

How's your methodology? Is it working? How do you know? Do you have one for each type of project you implement? How can you speed up time to live?

Most importantly, how does your professional services team see its job? Are the passive towards project delivery or proactive? You want the latter, but you have to work at it to get it. Lead from the front and run towards the biggest escalations you can find. Encourage people to bring you problems so you things proactively escalate. If someone brings you any escalation, don't get annoyed. It might be the last one they bring to you and then you're stuck trying to find them.

You will probably have an FPA (Financial Planning and Analytics) person from Finance to help you look at your data. Use this person if you have access to them. They can be a great resource to help with the multitude of data that is constantly changing within a PS environment. 

People management at this level is about making sure you have a team that feels in confident in knowing how you want things done, but they feel confident enough to get it done in a way that suits their needs. How you treat your direct reports will influence how they treat their direct reports. Focus on your manager's career development and they will focus on their team's career development. Be good to your managers and you'll develop a good service culture. Remember to back your team first. That's what they want from the big boss a sense that when the chips are down, they have a supporter, not an attacker. If you are quick to judge, then people will be slow to lead.

You need to establish a hiring model. How can you bring people in and have trained quickly? Where will they come from? How will you prepare them to be proactive project leaders in front of the customer? How do you use training to lower the cost of your resources and develop strong leaders? What's your succession plan?

Check in on career development for individuals all the way the last consultant. Make sure they have one. Make sure you know who the most burned out consultants and give them a call. There's nothing like a quick call from the big boss when your burnout level starts to reach "Fatigue" or even worse, "Discontentment".

Watch utilization. Encourage people to work the hours they are assigned so that revenue leak is minimized. Work out a bonus structure that is fair to everyone.