From Solo to Enterprise: A Timelapse of Business Development Maturity

Imagine you could fast-forward your firm's growth and watch it like a time-lapse video going through different stages:

• Solo 
• Small 
• Mid-size 
• Enterprise

What needs to happen in your sales and marketing functions to achieve growth at each stage? How do sales and marketing challenges evolve?

That's what this episode is all about. 

Listen as John and Mark guide you through this sales and marketing maturation journey, along with guest appearances from Reuben Swartz and Mel Lester. We explore topics like:

• The importance of documentation, processes and systems (at every stage)
• How to keep the entrepreneurial flame lit as firms grow
• Why rainmakers don't scale, and how to leverage a seller-doer model
• What firms typically do when the referral well runs dry
• The role of automation and efficiency at larger firms

Show notes:

• According to the 2024 census, 60% of businesses in the US are one-person businesses. (source)
  Of businesses with employees, 50% have only 1-4 FTEs. (source)
• SPI Professional Services Maturity Model: https://spiresearch.com/ps-maturity-model/

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

Hello, business developers and welcome to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm John and I'm joined as always by my trusty cohost, Mark Wainwright. Mark, how you doing today?

Mark Wainwright: 0:30

I am well, John, how are you today?

John Tyreman: 0:32

I'm doing all right. Doing all right.

Mark Wainwright: 0:34

And today we are, you were curious and I was curious about what's business development, marketing, selling. In professional services firms looks like across small firms, even as small as kind of solo practitioners, all the way up to mid size and and larger firms. And there's this sort of growth that happens over time. So from an audience and kind of listener perspective, it's, you know, where are you now? Where do you see you and your organization, maybe if there's an organization headed and you know, when we look at the different organizations, consulting firms architecture firms, engineering firms at different sizes, development stages, what is this business development thing look like? as an added bonus we have some guest voices coming to, coming to join us today because As we just said, we're very curious about this. I am, as you are a solo practitioner in the world of professional services, and I work with small firms, larger firms, mostly midsize. Firms, but, you know, across the spectrum and I see them at different levels of maturity, I have walked alongside small firms and larger firms as they have kind of grown and matured. And some of the voices that we've brought on our podcast today have done so as well. They have, they have seen and worked with firms of different sizes from the solos all the way up to the larger firms. So they have a good. Good perspective to share.

John Tyreman: 2:24

So Mark, I want to anchor our conversation with a couple of stats.

Mark Wainwright: 2:28

I love it.

John Tyreman: 2:29

So according to a 24 census, 60 percent of businesses in the United States are one person businesses. Does that come to surprise you at all?

Mark Wainwright: 2:40

You know, it, it would have at one point when back in the day, all I did was work in larger organizations. But now as a solo practitioner, it doesn't surprise me. It doesn't surprise me in the least. Yeah.

John Tyreman: 2:54

Let's, let's layer on another stat on top of that. So of the businesses with employees. So that remaining 40%, 50 percent of those have only one to four full time employees. So if we're thinking about this, 80 percent of businesses have fewer than five employees.

Mark Wainwright: 3:15

And, and again, no surprise walking alongside organizations, seeing how much of a challenge it is to grow and to mature. And yeah, no, no surprise there. So a vast number of professional services out there, maybe this aligns with our audience, maybe it. Maybe it doesn't. My sense is, is that a lot of people in our audience work with, you know, mid to larger size organizations. Maybe there's some solo practitioners out there. But uh, yeah, huge number of individuals working in very smaller solo firms. And I think that underscores just the challenge of, of growth.

John Tyreman: 3:58

Yeah. So how can you break these barriers and grow beyond that 80 percent of the market? And so I think for this podcast episode, and I think this is a great visual. What I love is like, if you were to close your eyes and if you were to hit fast forward on your business's growth, and you're able to watch it like a fly on the wall, you know, what would that time lapse video look like of your sales and marketing operation within your business. And that's what this episode is going to focus on. What does that time lapse video look like? Mark. You said, I think you said something the other day that I thought was really interesting and you shared this report. You, you said process is the driver of maturation. And I thought that was really interesting. And you shared this SPI, this service performance insight report. And it's SPI research. com. We'll have a link in the show notes if you want to download it. And I hadn't really thought about this before, but you. It brought an interesting perspective of regardless of your size of an organization, your business development operation, its maturity is based on structure of processes, whether you're a solo consultant or whether you're an enterprise level firm who has 10, 000 employees, you know, the level to which, or the degree to which your business development operation is systematized and, and structured will determine the The success in terms of the key metrics. And we'll dig into some of those down the

Mark Wainwright: 5:23

Yeah. and I know we, we get a lot of eye rolls. I get a lot of eye rolls when I beat the drum of process and process improvement. I have very close, actually personal friends, some professional friends who, you know, are in the world of process. Improvement and it seems like a boring thing to kind of come in and talk about because, you know, process improvement is not always the thing that's above the hold above the fold on the, on the headlines, right? But as we will hear from some of the guests. Voices and through some of the, the information we've received from SPI, which I think is a fantastic report that they do annually that yes, in fact, the critical, critical factor of growth is maturation of organizational processes around all different types of functional areas. And obviously we're most interested in this whole new business thing,

John Tyreman: 6:24

It's worth just touching on a couple key stats from this report and then we can move on to our guest voices and taking a look at that time lapse video. And so as we're, as we're talking through some of these stats, SPI has organized the research sample into these five different levels. And so they look at the market in terms of level one. These are initiated firms. They have ad hoc processes that represents about 30 percent of the market. And so that you can think about like the hunter gatherers cavemen, if you will, on our maturity. And so that goes up to the level two. This is functional X excellence. This is where processes start to become repeatable. You may have documented some down and you're trying to train someone else on how to do some. This is very rudimentary. And then that represents 25%. And so level three, another 25%, this is project excellence. Standard set of operating processes have been deployed across your firm. And then level four is institutionalized that represents 15%. They've got a line metrics. They've got controls for all of these metrics across the firm, across their operations. And then finally level five. Which represents only 5 percent of the market. According to this SPI report they call these collaborative excellence. This is where firms focus on continuous improvement. So whether you're a solo operator, whether you've got a handful of employees or whether you're a midsize operation I think just taking a look at this and again, the links in the, in the show notes, kind of maybe see where you stand. On in, in terms of one of these levels. And then and then you can benchmark yourself in terms of some of the KPIs.

Mark Wainwright: 8:04

I came across this report a long time ago. SPI has been doing this for a number of years. I think it's very good. And actually the funny thing is, is that these five levels of Maturity are, are drawn from the Department of Defense, and this is something that I talked about on one of my podcast appearances over five, maybe five years ago, or maybe more and it's funny to reflect on, on all of that, but really what you said right there, my takeaway from that is, and this is all self reported. My takeaway from what you just said right there, John, is that you, you had five buckets there that stepped their way up a full 80%. Of the firms have self reported that they are, only halfway through this five step maturation process. And these are firms that have likely been around for a while. Small firms, large firms, whatever else a full 80 percent of them have said that. Yeah, we've only we're only halfway. You know, we've only started really creating some, some processes that we've, we've some new ones, but we have some that are, that are kind of set that we're, that we've got out in the organization and they are being, you know, embraced and executed at varying levels. So 80 percent of the firms out there are doing okay. Right. Which says to me, wow, there's only 20 percent of the firms out there who are actually putting themselves in sort of the upper echelon of, of, of, you know, process stuff. And if, like we said, growth is driven by good processes, then a lot of these firms have, as you mentioned earlier, some barriers in place. That they need to break through.

John Tyreman: 9:40

A hundred percent. And we won't get into the details of the report, but there are some KPIs that break it down by all these different levels. You can look at percentage of bids, one percentage of referenceable clients, which I think is an interesting metric year over year change in revenue annual revenue per billable consultant, annual revenue per employee, which are two key growth metrics. Profit in terms of EBITDA. So there's some really great metrics that you can use in this report. All right, Mark, let's get to this, like this whole like time lapse video scenario here. So I've organized these stages into four different stages in terms of like size of the firm. We talked about the levels of maturity. Here are the four different stages in terms of size. And I did this by a number of full time employees. So stage one is the solo freelancers, solopreneurs, solo consultants. It's just one person. Maybe you've got some 1099s that you're working with. Maybe not. Maybe it's just you. The, the second one is a small firm, and I categorize this as two to 49 full-time employees. I know that small firms can probably have more than that. And then mid-size, I categorize them as 50 to 500, and then enterprise 500 plus. You could make an argument for, you know, four and against some of that just for the sake of this podcast. That's how I grouped them. But would would love to hear if you. Have any arguments the other way?

Mark Wainwright: 11:05

it is my hope that regardless of the type of farmers, regardless of the size of organization that you are in, I'm speaking to our audience here is that, you know, hopefully you have. You are either creating opportunities for yourself in this whole new business world to help kind of lead and create all of this. So yeah, we're, we're, we're, we're talking to solos. We're talking to people in large firms, all that stuff. So yeah, everywhere in between.

John Tyreman: 11:31

All right. So let's talk about this. Like transition from like a solo consultant into a small firm. So you've got a handful of employees, fewer than 50, but more than just yourself. So we talked about the importance of processes and systems. belabor that. I think at this level, I think it's worth pointing out that documenting those processes is how you can start to train and share knowledge across new employees efficiently. I've seen it firsthand where there is not good documentation and there's like this shadowing effect that goes on. You know what I mean? And it takes six, nine, 12 months for an employee to get fully up to speed.

Mark Wainwright: 12:13

boy, just taking a second to think about what it would look like for. Me to grow beyond myself right now. Yeah, that would take a ton of time, a ton of my work, and then a lot of time for someone to come in and, and do that. So yeah, it's a, it's a huge deal making that.

John Tyreman: 12:35

And then of course, you know, like you need to understand your profit equation, right? You need to understand how you make money and then how the business makes money. One of my clients has a podcast and he's a financial analyst and he talks about how banks really like to see an owner having a W 2 income. And then having quarterly disbursements as to like two separate kinds of revenue.

Mark Wainwright: 12:59

Yeah. Yeah. I do not.

John Tyreman: 13:03

Well,

Mark Wainwright: 13:04

Right. Most solos don't, but yeah, from a business, from a bank business, financial standpoint, it makes a ton of sense because the easiest thing we can do is just underpay or, you know, don't pay ourselves you know, and we just, we just, you know, hopefully, hopefully there's a couple of pennies left sitting on the desk at the end of the month.

John Tyreman: 13:23

right, right. But if your, if your goal is to grow beyond just being a solo consultant and growing a business that you need to understand that profit equation and those unit economics.

Mark Wainwright: 13:35

Yeah. Yeah. Because then it moves from just paying one W two to paying two W twos, which is not as huge of a mindset as like, Oh my gosh, I don't even know what this whole W two thing world is all about. What is, what, what am I doing here? So, yeah. Okay.

John Tyreman: 13:49

So then it kind of leads me to like that next question. And we've talked about this in the past and we've touched on it a little bit, but the 1099 versus W2, when does it make sense to hire? So I think I, I would love to spend just a minute or two, just kind of like talking through that, and I would love to get your sense on what are the markers that you would look for to where you would hire a W 2.

Mark Wainwright: 14:11

I've often said the whole sort of friends don't let friends W two. So, you know, you're, you're, I'm, I'm not a good person to talk to about this, but, but And this is the challenge, right? Is that small organizations solos, I mean, you know, we're still talking kind of, we can even talk small firms here, but sort of the mindset is that there's just a bunch of people wearing a bunch of hats, or as we have said in the past, a bunch of heads you know, so you got a lot of people doing a lot of different things. And from a 1099 standpoint, you know, I could have a handful of individuals doing 1099 You know, freelance consulting work, whatever it is, fractional work for me. And then the switch would happen where I would say, all right, now I need to take all these 10 99s and. Combine them into one person or maybe two people and turn that into a W2, which is sounds great on paper, but is really, really hard to do because all of a sudden what you do is you take three, three or four different, you know, helping hands, 10 99s and combine them into one W2 that you bring in and you want. You want them to do 25 percent admin, you know, 50 percent work with clients, 25%, you know, go find when new business marketing work, whatever it is. So that's the challenge. And that's probably what happens to a lot of these organizations is solos. They've got some people helping them out here and there. They decide that they need to hire a W two and then they take all these different things and dump them into this one W two. And

John Tyreman: 15:48

sink them.

Mark Wainwright: 15:49

yeah, and then they hope that's, they hope that's, that's going to work. I think there's a better path. I think there's and this ties a little bit into what Ruben, Ruben says. I think at least that's what I teased out is from what Ruben says you know, about how you grow and, the offerings that you, that you put out there in the marketplace. And, you know, and it ties in because I think that what he outlines is, as a solo consultant, you can get some big clients, you know, you can get some big clients with some big dollars and then it's a really easy step. Yeah. If you've got a big, you know, half million, million dollar contract sitting in front of you, it's really easy to grow. So he touches on that a little bit.

John Tyreman: 16:31

that's true. Well, you teed them up, Mark. So let's throw to Ruben. Here comes Ruben Swartz.

Reuben Swartz: 16:36

There are lots of ways to grow a firm that don't necessarily involve adding more people.

John Tyreman: 16:41

And

Reuben Swartz: 16:42

so if you are a solo person, you're thinking, gosh, I don't want to manage a sales team. I don't want to do all. I don't want to mention people maybe period. Well, you can still grow. You can grow your impact. You can grow your income. You can grow your intellectual engagement in other ways without having to necessarily take on more people. Now there's some things that you can only do with a, with a team obviously, but I don't think it's a requirement that growth means that Okay, great. I've got to go get Salesforce and, and an actual Salesforce and manage all these people and blah, blah, blah, blah.

John Tyreman: 17:14

What can you give some examples of what that looks like for solo consultants? How can they maybe, maybe an example of an offering that a solo consultant could, or, or like a specific kind of service or maybe a product or, or something that a solo consultant could offer that is kind of taking their business to higher margin revenue because they are. They're keeping their head, their head count low.

Reuben Swartz: 17:40

Sure. So I think you, you hit on it, on it right there. One is you can package up your expertise in ways that don't require your time as much. So, uh, online courses, books, et cetera. And then the other thing is getting even tighter with that ideal client profile. So that instead of doing, you know, 50, 000 projects, you're basically applying similar skills, maybe at a higher, more challenging level, but now they're 250, 000 projects. Uh, or their million dollar projects, right there. There's often we are limiting ourselves because we think, gosh, that's a lot of money. No one's going to pay that. But if you get very focused on your niche and go help the people who most desperately need your help, there's a, Lot of room to to grow that that revenue and impact and of course that kind of ties in these things can go together, right? If you spend less time doing the actual client work, but it's much more valuable if you broke it down to a per hour basis Well, then you can have somebody who helps you produce your online course or writes your book or or whatever to free you up from from some of those those obligations and where I see a lot of people get caught up with this is They blend together You The clients that are most meaningful to them, which are often the ones that pay them the most money that have sort of the most demanding work and all that, and the ones that pay them the least money, they might even be nonprofits like where they're basically working pro bono, and they end up averaging them in their head and they get stuck in the middle. And one thing I say is, hey, go serve those. super high end corporate clients. Make, make the money, do the work. Uh, they're only going to pay what they value. So, so go make the money and then do the other stuff pro bono, like don't even charge, like just go do it cause it feels good. But those are separate things that happen to use your same expertise.

Mark Wainwright: 19:36

Ruben's Ruben's audience are, are solos. I'm sure some of the folks out there who listen to our podcast are, are solos as well. You know, he definitely has a, has a bias and, and, you know, in what he said right there, you know, he's like, we just limit ourselves. Solos, small firms will just limit themselves as far as the type, type of clients they bring on the, the type of type of contracts that they sign themselves up for. And I think there's a huge upside. There's a huge potential for solos to land big contracts. And the point I was making earlier was that when in fact you do land that contract, you know, you can deliver it yourself, but if, you know, if it goes beyond what you can do, there's a clear opportunity to have 1099s come alongside you and help you out with the work or W2s. So, you know, even though he has a bias for those solos, I could clearly see in what he said right there. I could say, Oh. What he just said is there's an easy way to move, to move from the solo to a small firm from a finding and winning new business standpoint. And that to me was, we limit ourselves. We think too small. We don't, we don't pursue big fish you know, and nobody out there from a new business standpoint should be looking at their firm saying, you know, we can't grow, you know, I'm a solo. I can't grow up beyond a certain, you know, level. Point you know, he has the, the, the trick is that he mentions is that you need to find ways to do more with less.

John Tyreman: 21:05

That's exactly.

Mark Wainwright: 21:06

And if that, and if that means if, if you stay small as a solo, great, but that's a clear entree into growing your organization, either with tiny nines or W twos. But yeah, that was my big takeaway from him is that, Oh, the limits we put on ourselves, you know, are these, these artificial barriers. And that it's totally possible to go out there and find.

John Tyreman: 21:32

Sell first and then figure out how to deliver later. A little

Mark Wainwright: 21:35

Yeah, there's a, right, there's a little bit of a chuckle with that because, you know, all of the, you know, all the, the, the firms out there, and even the, the, the sort of subject matter of this is process process process, right? If a small, the small professional services firm lands a huge. A whale, right? Like I call them whales.

John Tyreman: 21:53

Me too.

Mark Wainwright: 21:53

If you land a whale, then all of a sudden all your process stuff goes out the window, you know, or maybe it doesn't, maybe you've got great processes in place that you're able to chew through it. You know, you're gonna be like, Oh, we've got, we're, we're ready to go. It's highly unlikely that, you know, a solo practitioner out there has a process in place to immediately chew through, you know, a million dollar contract. But you never know, you never

John Tyreman: 22:15

well, maybe it's not a whale, maybe it's a Marlin. And then you slog through it and then you go back and you're like, all right, we got to update the process here, here, and here. If we want to take on the bigger

Mark Wainwright: 22:24

Right. Good. Good. Good point. Good point.

John Tyreman: 22:27

So let's, let's move on to that kind of evolution or that maturation from that small organization to a midsize organization. So we're, we've, we've gone through, you know, in a solo firm, it's very much a founder led sale. Right. Because you're a solo consultant, you've got to wear all those different hats or Lego heads. And so now we've grown to a small firm where we've got a handful of employees. Let's say we've got 20 employees and one of them is dedicated to business development, or maybe we've got, you know, the equivalent of one, but it's spread out over some seller doers. So those are the two most common different types of marketing and BD configurations. So there's more, more structure. There, there's a need for more systems in place. Like we talked about, there's also this need for talent management, right? And then creating career paths. And we've talked about this before that include marketing and sales responsibilities, it's not just kitchen sink. But there is setting an expectation that, that folks will contribute to the business development.

Mark Wainwright: 23:35

yeah, the you know, the, that SPI reports cut the, you know, lays out those 5 different maturity levels cuts across all different size firms. It cuts across all different types of firms and you know, it highlights the importance of. All these different functional areas happening at all different levels of maturity with all different types of size of firms and kind of what, what Mel talks about a little bit here and what we're talking about in this sort of going from a small sized firm to a medium sized firm stands true, meaning that you know, you have to continue to grow in all these functional areas across all of your employees, small firm to, to mid sized firm, you have to, you can't just continue to have the one. Partner, principal, whoever else it is being the sole rainmaker. You need to distribute these responsibilities. You need to have good organizational practices that that back all this up.

John Tyreman: 24:30

Yeah. Let's, let's throw it to Mel since we're talking about that talent management piece, cause I think that's important. He touches on that. So here comes Mel Lester.

Mel Lester: 24:39

most firms, they start out with this sort of entrepreneurial culture, uh, where that's, there's a focus on, you know, clients and doing the work. And then as they grow larger and the business becomes more complex or the, um, business of operating a company becomes more complex. You have to get more structured and you have to have more systems in place and that sort of thing. And that can be a tough transition to make. And in many cases the principals who were very involved in doing the work as they grow, then they have to take more of a leadership role and do less of the work and let other people Step into those roles. And one of the key things there is that as you as you have visions of growth is that you have to increase the bandwidth of your business development activities. And so, in other words, you can no longer rely on those few principles, perhaps that with a small firm could do the bulk of the selling. And, uh, and now you have to develop others to step into that role. And, uh, so that's, that's part of it. Now it's interesting as you look at these kinds of growth dynamics, there's two critical functions that I have observed that are, you know, necessary for success in our business, and that is the ability to attract clients. And then the ability to attract talent, the people to perform the work for those clients. And obviously, it's critically important to retain both of those. Retain as many clients that you want to work with as you can, and as many of the employees that you want to hold on to as you can. Uh, one of the things I found fascinating is, is that for both of those critical functions Typically, they're handled by only a very small subset of the firm. Most of the selling in most firms is done by a small number of people. Most of the recruiting is done by a small, in many cases we leave it up to HR to at least, you know, drive the train and then we'll, we'll do the interviews and make the selections. But we don't have many of our people actively involved in Out there, you know, recruiting people for our company and targeting the people that we'd like to work for our company. And so, one of the things I have, uh, been interested in for some time is creating, broadening the participation in both of those functions. Uh, we've seen that to a large degree on the recruiting side, where more companies now are doing referral recruiting, where they're, you know, some companies offer a referral bonus. That's not as effective as getting people actively involved where everybody's out there taking, you know, taking advantage of the people they know. And actively recruiting for their firm. So you create a culture in which what you want to do is shift from the culture where you've got basically a firm made up of consumers who depend upon the rainmakers and the recruiters to meet their needs, rather than having a role in making that happen. And to me, to create that, that greater bandwidth for growth. Both in rainmaking and recruiting, you want to have broader participation in both of those critical functions.

John Tyreman: 28:04

All right, Mark, I liked how Mel referred to that, like as a coach going from a culture of consumers. So folks within the organization who are reliant on the Rainmakers to bring in revenue. To a culture of creators where everybody, the team is actively involved in both recruiting and sales. So I thought that was a really interesting kind of paradigm shift that Mel laid out.

Mark Wainwright: 28:30

I'm so synced up with Mel on that, you know, it, you know, that just, that just totally sings to me in that, these really critical, you know, functional areas, not the least of which is this whole big business development thing needs to you know, be born by many across an organization, not just, A few, one rain rain maker in your organization, create sort of a precarious. You know, situation. And we want to, we want to avoid that, you know, we want many hands involved in it and that's what we're, I mean, that's what this podcast is all about. Right. It's like, that's, that's what we, that's what we want. And from a talent perspective as well. He, he draws very close parallels between sort of sales, marketing, new business stuff and talent, know, which I think is totally, it's totally appropriate, I don't bump into. Talent a ton, but I do actually in an increasing fashion, because once I've worked with an organization for long enough, I start asking them questions about, Hey, the new people, you know, you're either the young folks that are coming up or the new people that are coming into your organization is everyone completely aware and prepared for, the, the. Culture you're trying to create here, which is everybody carries the load. Everybody finds and wins new work. Everybody participates, you know, lots of oars in the water.

John Tyreman: 29:55

So talent management is critical as, as you start to grow and you need to train people that are W2s within your organization. There's probably 1099s that you'll need to train as well. And, you know, speaking of that one of the, in working with mid sized firms, one of the big marketing challenges that I've experienced across, across industries is accounting and financial services, AEC, consulting. Is this phenomenon that happens when firms reach a certain size, they, they articulate this, what happens when the referral well runs dry, right? So they've relied on referrals to grow their business to, and that's how they've grown to the point that they are. And sure, there's still probably some juice they can squeeze around refining their referral strategy. And kind of leveraging their clients, leveraging their employees for referrals. But it's usually at this point in a firm's growth, where they start to. Kind of explore other different lead generation or prospecting options.

Mark Wainwright: 31:01

good point. Good

John Tyreman: 31:03

And this is where they bring in agencies, they bring in freelancers, consultants to help them achieve that and figure out what that looks like.

Mark Wainwright: 31:10

Yeah. And, and the the, the point you made about the sort of, you know, culture of consumers reliant on Rainmakers to a culture of, of creators, that has to happen as well. It's, this isn't something that when the referral, Well runs dry. We need to create, we need to go find, create new business opportunities that it needs to happen across the organization. And yeah, that's a critical step here. And there's that whole sort of you know, that entrepreneurial spirit. That's that we want people to have founders of organizations have an entrepreneurial spirit. It's just kind of. Kind of, that's, that's who they are, right? They started the started the business, whether it's one or just a handful of, of individuals ideally, they are building and sort of fostering that in, in In, in others that join them.

John Tyreman: 31:59

Yeah. So how do you keep that entrepreneurial flame lit as you grow? And so we've got another clip from Mel Lester that we'll play here shortly. And he kind of takes a, takes a look at this in terms of like, how can you, the client or better serve the client. And I think that was like an interesting perspective All right, here comes Mel.

Mel Lester: 32:23

some companies require that all their project managers at least sell to their existing clients and many of them struggle with that. And part of that is, is this sort of my optic view of just, I'm just doing, doing the work that's under contract. And they don't take a broader view of how can I help our clients. You know, be more successful, taking a broader view of, uh, you know, helping them thrive. And one of the, the, the, uh, new terms have come up that I love is transitioning from a B to B company, business to business. To a B4B company, business for business. In other words, shift from just having a transactional, you know, exchange of you pay us, we'll give you some service or give you a, develop a solution for you to where we are now focused on helping our clients be successful overall. And, and our, you know, our work may be a small portion of that larger story in which the, the client is pursuing their own business outcomes, their own success goals, and we need to tap into that. Uh, and by doing so we create greater value, greater value means more meaningful work, which then is a pull to bring people into our company and hold onto them. So you can make your business development goals. And your recruiting goals align so that it's creating opportunities to serve our clients better, to do more meaningful work, to have a greater impact. And, uh, and thus be able to have better clients and better people to do the work for them.

John Tyreman: 34:09

All right, again, and that was Mel Lester. And he's talking about having that mindset of serving and not selling. So great perspective from Mel.

Mark Wainwright: 34:18

Yeah, I, I really enjoy that. it's not top of mind. I think for people who are less experienced people who are just. to do new business. You know, this is, this speaks to that, that deeper level of new business development. And we've talked about this in, in the past, and I don't want to digress too, too far on this, but I know that a lot of people think they need to develop new business, need to find and win work with. You know, prospective clients who are actively buying, who, you know, have the request for proposals out there who, you know, they've defined, they have a specific need and they're just looking for a consultant or, you know, worst case of vendor to help them with it. This speaks to creating an organizational culture where people are thinking constantly, how can I. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how to help my clients when maybe those clients aren't actively looking for help. How can I understand, how can I learn more about them? I can, how can I understand them and then introduce some ideas that will help them that maybe they didn't occur to them that maybe they didn't think, think about. So, yeah, this is this is what Mel talks about. This is what we talk about all the time. Is. Moving to that small to midsize organization. How do we have a large number, relatively speaking, a large number of individuals inside the organization building and maintaining this entrepreneurial mindset where they are engaging with their current clients to figure out how they can be of service, right? And even with new prospective clients, how they can approach those. Those interactions with this really strong sense of curiosity to understand them deeply. So, yeah, this is, I'm totally with Mel on on all of this.

John Tyreman: 36:10

don't want to spend too much time on this last section. But I do want to touch on some of the, the challenges that arise as firms grow from that mid size To larger you know, a lot of that in my experience and looking at the professional services market is driven by mergers and acquisitions. So there's, you know, firms, bigger firms, buying smaller firms, either to expand into a new geography or to expand their service capabilities. And oftentimes what happens is, you know, there's brands that need to be rolled up. There's processes again, process. There's that word that needs to be overlaid and aligned across teams. And so there's, there's a lot of like efficiency is a big word that comes up when these midsize firms are trying to grow. And it becomes, you know, where are the economies of scale? You know, how do we create efficiencies within our business development function? How can we create efficiencies in generating leads at scale to hit ever growing growth targets? Right. So that's, that's kind of like, those are some of the big questions that arise as those. Firms start to grow.

Mark Wainwright: 37:20

and the point to go back to that SPI research report that they have those five levels of maturity, even these very large firms, midsize firms moving to these enterprise size firms, There's, there are many of them that, that are kind of wallowing, that they, they, they haven't reached the highest levels of maturity and performance. And it's because they they wrestle with, you know, you wrote some stuff down here about, lead generation, maybe they're still. ignoring it, you know, they're not doing a good job of it. Maybe they're, taking their their thready internal resources and just saying, go rather than really looking at it from a bigger perspective and what they should. What they should outsource, what they should, what expertise do they need to go get not just in a w two, but, you know, what consultants they need to work with in order to help them with all of that. You know, so, even large organizations don't have the expertise that they. That they need in order to really move to that, that fifth level of maturity, where they have processes that they are constantly improving, whether it's through what they do all internally, or whether it's using external folks as well. And you also have here about, you know, leveraging technology, you know, when firms get to be really big, they really have the opportunity to leverage, leverage technology. but some don't, you know, I've worked with very large firms who. Have a, have a very poor approach to organizational technology.

John Tyreman: 38:49

I want to go back to something that you said, Mark, and it just kind of like dots just kind of connected for me. And it was, you know, you were referencing that SPI report and that reports all about processes, systems, efficiency. organization around that, not just in your business development function across all aspects of your business. But since this podcast episode is focused on marketing and sales,, the larger you grow without progressing along that organizational maturity level, the harder it becomes to, to level up along that SPI index as you get larger.

Mark Wainwright: 39:28

You can see the, the, the, and also from small firm to large firm solo to small to, you know, it's like, like, I think there's a huge advantage, not just moving along that much, those five step maturity levels, but also the small to large because I think most large organizations completely lose touch with that entrepreneurial spirit. Where it just doesn't exist anymore which may be a lot of, I mean, some of the firms I work with, find themselves in competitive situations where they're the small guy, you know, the David Goliath thing, you know, small guy fighting against the large organization. And that's 1 of the things they tout for better or for worse, right or wrong. They will say that they're small, agile, hungry. You know, compared to a much larger organization, but that does happen, you know, and, and reflecting on this conversation, I would say one of the biggest challenges with the large organizations from a new business standpoint, either with existing clients or with new clients is that entrepreneurial spirit is that, that, that drive, because John, you and I know as solos. It's a big part of our world, you know, and some lose track of it. Some, you know, larger organizations can start to put that into silos can, can, you know, shift it off to certain individuals who are focused on that. I get that. I'll always be the one that's waving the flag saying. All of the experts inside of your organization need to participate in new business. But yeah, it's there's a, a few really important things as we move to this last really big, big organization, because I'm, there's probably a handful of people out there in the audience that are part of these really large organizations and they, they're constantly, you know, there's a question mark that says, what are we missing? And that's one of the things, that's one of the things, the entrepreneurial spirit, the, drive to create new business and all, all founded and based in really good processes as is, our subject matter today.

John Tyreman: 41:25

Excellent. Well, I, this, this has been really fun, Mark. I didn't really, I didn't know how this episode was going to turn out because there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things in this outline that we put in here. But I think this was just a fascinating conversation and maybe a topic that will, you know, evolve our thinking on and revisit in the future.

Mark Wainwright: 41:43

No doubt. No doubt. The, the process stuff is always that kind of boring eye rolly stuff, but I'll tell you what, it, it

John Tyreman: 41:49

What's the key to growth

Mark Wainwright: 41:50

it's key to growth and it just, it, it, it just lets it really kind of turbocharges your organization. It's like, okay, now we've got the process in place. Now what we need is just the, the people with the gumption and the entrepreneurial spirit to get out there and go do it

John Tyreman: 42:06

people and process, right? People in process. Well, Mark, this was great. Until next time.

Mark Wainwright: 42:12

until next time.