Episode 7: Winning the War for Clients

Artificial intelligence is changing professional services faster than anything Mitchell has seen in nearly 40 years in the industry. While many firms are focused on the technology itself, the bigger question is what happens when AI changes the economics of how professional services are bought and sold.

In this episode of Mitchell’s Moments Coaching Podcast, executive coach Mitchell Schuckman introduces a concept he calls The War for Clients. As AI reduces the cost and effort required to deliver many traditional professional services, firms face increasing pressure to differentiate themselves and create new value for clients.

Drawing on his experience in tax, consulting, business development, and executive coaching, Mitchell explains why technical expertise alone is no longer enough. The professionals who thrive will be those who embrace what he calls the builder mindset, developing deeper client relationships, understanding what success looks like for their clients, and creating value that goes beyond transactional service delivery.

This episode serves as the introduction to Mitchell's new Builder Mindset series and explores how firms and professionals can win in a rapidly changing marketplace. 

This episode explores:

• Why AI is reshaping the economics of professional services
• The difference between the war for talent and the emerging war for clients
• How revenue pressure is changing the competitive landscape
• Why relationship building matters more than ever in an AI enabled world
• What it means to develop a builder mindset and create lasting client value

Mitchell’s Moments delivers short, focused conversations designed to provide practical leadership insights you can apply immediately.

Learn more about Mitchell Schuckman and The Schuckman Group at
 theschuckmangroup.com

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Each episode delivers short, practical insights on leadership, coaching, business development, and navigating today’s changing business world.

You can also learn more about Mitchell Schuckman and his coaching and leadership programs at
www.theschuckmangroup.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hello and welcome to Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast. This is episode number five, I believe. And I'm Mitchell Shuckman, and I am the founder and CEO of the Shuckman Group, where I provide executive coaching, business development consulting, and other leadership services to my clients. If you follow me on social media, especially on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hold on. It's not episode five. It's not episode five, because I just posted episode five.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Oh, okay, well good. We'll start again. I don't need to restart this, right? You'll just edit it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah, no, I'm just gonna edit it out. Um one thing I will say is at this point now. I mean we could if you want to keep it going.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Um I can drop the episode numbers.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

So Red episode, are you redoing the ones that you No? So then the ones that you gave me were five and six. Okay. Um we're on episode seven. Okay. Second is you don't always in every episode need to give, like, you can give a short background of like who you are in the beginning. Okay. You don't always need to do the whole 20 minutes or less thing, like all that. You can just do just jump straight into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Okay. Now you got two minutes of of recording to delete.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Hi, I'm Mitchell Shuckman, and welcome to Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast. This is episode number seven, and let's get right into it. Because if you've been following me on LinkedIn, for example, or you subscribe to my newsletter, which you can by the way at theshuckmangroup.com, you'll know that I recently launched a series called The Builder Mindset: Winning the War for Clients in Professional Services. So I'm going to use this episode to tell you what on earth that's all about and why it's super important. So, for those of you who know me, you'll know that I'm an accountant. I spent my career doing taxes at a big tax and accounting firm. But during my career, I pivoted from professional providing professional services to selling professional services to coaching individuals who want to be better at selling professional services. And we are at a very unique moment in the history of professional services and the market for those services. So, first, let me just pause for a second and define professional services. So, professional services in my mind are things like taxes, auditing and accounting services, legal services, engineering, architecture, executive search, all of the things that really have people maybe assisted by technology, but generally it's people providing services to other people or companies. So that's professional services. And the reason this is so important is because right now professional services are having, I mean, a lot of people see it as a crisis. I see it as a huge opportunity. Um, but let's let's explain why. It's AI, and please don't stop this podcast simply because I mentioned the word AI, because it's being mentioned so often. AI in professional services changes the landscape for the services and the buying and selling of those services. That's why I created this series, articles all summer, summer of 26, the entire summer, podcast episodes like this one, discussing what I call the builder mindset. What it takes to be a rainmaker or a builder, a grower of professional services practices in the age of AI. And I'm calling this the war for clients. So, why am I calling it the war for clients? And then we'll get into it a little bit more about what you can do about it. So, here's the deal. If you've worked in professional services as long as I have, what you'll know very obviously is something called the war for talent. It's an overused phrase. I've heard it a million times, but professional services firms like accounting firms, law firms, all of these firms, they have always fought each other to get the best people. The mindset was always: if we have the best people providing services to our clients, then we will provide the best services and we will make the most money because we will have the most clients. The war for talent. I've called where we are today the war for clients. Why? Because AI is shrinking revenue on predictable recurring work. So if you look at things like tax compliance, like tax returns, legal managed services, transfer pricing documentation, auditing services, other outsourcing of managed, other outsourcing or other managed services relationships. These are repeatable, process-driven services that are provided by professional services firms. AI is enabling those services. AI is making the delivery of those services more predictable. I'm sorry, more quick, more easy, less human involvement. So what's happening when that when that happens, clients are expecting fees to go down. And honestly, rightfully so. Now, clients may be over expecting prices to go down, but prices should go down. For example, if it takes less human hours to do the work, then presumably it takes less effort, and presumably there's less cost involved in doing the work, and some of that cost savings by the service provider should benefit the client. Now, I wouldn't call it hour for hour, because a lot of the hours that are being pushed out of these repeatable processes, a lot of these hours are staff hours, the lower cost hours. Sometimes those hours are in service centers, delivery centers, offshore. So those hours that are coming out of the process because of AI tend to be the cheaper hours, but there are still hours coming out of the process. So the other thing I would say is so so should and let's all let's not let's not underestimate the fact that professional services firms have to invest money in AI, in the technology, in the training, in the development of tools. So there are expenses that are going into this AI delivery model. So if you assume that the professional services firms are paying for AI investments and they are reducing hours, but they tend to be the lower cost hours, there will be a price reduction, but it may not be as huge as clients expect. Okay. Even so, price reduction is a problem for professional services firms because they how do they go, how are they going to make up that revenue? Well, unfortunately, some people are starting to see that the number of jobs in professional services is going down. There have been layoffs, there are fewer internships, there are fewer entry-level uh staff people being hired. The jobs aren't going away. There are fewer jobs. So, if there are going to be fewer jobs, what else is there for professional services firms to do? Well, of course, there are create additional ways to create revenue, so identifying additional ways to bring value to clients. But the other way is to be more effective in the marketplace for that AI-driven repeatable work. Why am I telling you all of this background? Because this background is perhaps the most chaotic and most game-changing landscape I have ever experienced in my almost 40 years in professional services. And if that's and that is why I'm calling it the war for clients. So, what do we do about the war for clients? Well, we talked about the operational stuff, which is really not why I'm here. I'm not here to talk about how to generate better AI tools and how to right-size your staffing model and how to retrain your people to be better at using AI. What I'm here to talk about is the thing that I know well and I do well, and I have been providing a lot of coaching in, which is how do we get more clients? How do we become better at selling professional services? And for me, that comes down to what I call becoming a builder, being someone who's willing to be in the market, not just doing two things. One, being an even better service provider to your existing clients, and I'll talk about what that means in a second, and how to be better at talking to companies and people who are not your clients, they're someone else's clients, but you want them to be your clients. So, how can you be in the market better, both serving existing clients and attracting other clients? And for me, that is a human game. That is, you know, the understanding the other person more deeply. That is asking questions that go beyond, you know, what's going well for you, but really understanding what your client or what your prospective client needs to deliver for their companies, for their employers to be successful. Understanding what you can do to make them a success. This is something that service providers, if they do it well, they can do it better. More often than not, they don't do it that well. Because the professional services that I often talk about are commoditized. You provide bookkeeping or auditing services, you prepare a tax return, uh, you do a legal managed service or some repeatable legal uh service delivery, and it becomes a transactional business. Understanding the human at the other side of the table, the human being who's going to be buying the services at a deeper level than transactional is really what makes the difference. And remember, this isn't something you can do in a meeting or two. This is something you need to sustain over long periods of time. The relationship that you foster and nurture with your clients, and the relationships that you foster and nurture with people and companies you want to have as clients does not take weeks. It takes months and years of consistently being there, of making investments, of doing things that you may not get paid for, and earning that person and their company's trust in you as a service provider because ultimately I really believe clients are still buying people, and I think they will always buy people. Is it important that you and the company you represent leverage technology? Absolutely. Is it important that you adopt AI and look for new and innovative ways to use it? For sure. Is it important that you use AI to collaborate with your client, making your clients smarter with AI and have them make you smarter with AI? Of course, that's all important. But it's the human being who's doing those things that clients buy. And it's that being present, it's that being consistent, it's that being caring that will differentiate the winners and the losers in the war for clients. So let me pause for one second and pivot to the last thing, which is what I'm what you can expect in the next few podcast episodes and in my blog, which is called The Builder's Mindset: Winning the War for Clients in Professional Services. What I'm going to be doing over the next kind of couple of months during the summer of 2026 is releasing a number of podcast episodes and a number of articles that dive into what it takes to be successful in growing revenue on existing clients and how to gain new clients. And for those of you who are listening who are clients, you can listen to this too because it really is going to highlight the value you should expect as a client from your service providers. And you'll know it when you see it. And when you see it, those are the professionals and the firms that you're going to want to hire to help you as a client be successful. So to summarize, the war for clients is real. AI is creating revenue pressure. Firms are desperate to get more clients and to grow revenue on their existing clients in new ways because the old ways are being compressed because of AI. And in order to make this happen, they are being more aggressive in the market. But to be more aggressive, they need to be more relatable, they need to create value, and they need to be, they need to make their clients the heroes in their own firms and in their own lives. So that's my intro to this new series that I've released and to this war for clients concept, which is becoming very acute right now in the world of professional services. So thank you for joining me for this episode, episode seven of Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast. And we're going to get into all of these issues in a bit more detail in the next few episodes. So thank you for joining the