7 Profitability Challenges for the Professional Service Business

7 PROFITABILITY CHALLENGES FOR THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICE BUSINESS. DO THEY APPLY TO YOU?

Since 1999, we have listened to 100s of business owners tell us what drives them and what impedes them. We then helped them reorganise their operational challenges and delivered customised technology solutions for each of them.

Book a 2 hour workshop with Greg Clarkson to start this process.

We  noticed the same pain points re-appear time and time again.  Our experience has identified 7 profitability challenges that we can address through smart use of technology

Those 7 top profitability challenges are how to:  

    1. Move beyond one-off projects and secure regular, predictable and ideally recurring revenue;
    2. Keep the sales pipeline filled with qualified prospects;
  1. Find, develop and keep the right people in the right jobs;
  2. Keep revenue-generating staff fully productive and engaged in revenue-generating activities;
  3. Minimise the cost of operations and rescue the business from failed projects;
  4. Remove time-wasting, repetitive and expensive tasks through automation;
  5. Keep the business agile and responsive to market changes as it continues to grow.

Over the last 18 years, as we have listened to business owners grapple with each of these challenges, we asked the question: how can we turn these challenges into an opportunity?

We identified 5 key areas that, if considered in the right way, can become profit opportunities rather than challenges.  The 5 key areas are

  1. Sales
  2. People
  3. Operations
  4. Finance; and
  5. Structure

The ‘right way’ is to further break these 5 areas into basic building-blocks and identify the technology used in each block.  The building blocks are then re-arranged and made profitable.  Effectively, we are reassembling building blocks into ‘Profit Stacks’

This is the key innovation.  Most discussions regarding business and technology get stuck at the high level of “we need to improve Sales”. This all too often results in an isolated CRM system implementation.  This discussion is doomed to failure because Sales is a multi-step process and each CRM has its strengths and weakness.  Marrying up the two systems will be a hit and miss affair without the clean understanding of sub-processes.

Also, by defining the sub-processes, a business opens itself up to the possibility of using a best-of-breed application for the one process that needs attention rather than invests in a monolithic ‘one-size fits all’ applications.  The age of software-as-a-service can be realised in that business.

This process is then repeated for the other areas of People, Operations, Finance and Structure.

And Voila!!  It’s amazing how such a simple approach to aligning technology and business activities will address the 7 profitability challenges listed above.

To learn more, you can download the book or contact us to run a 2-hour workshop to customise this process for your business.

Book a 2 hour workshop with Greg Clarkson to start this process.

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