Welcome to Compass
Compass helps your professional services team navigate toward better performance.
Growing a successful professional services practice isn’t easy. Largely this is due to the variability of engagements, clients, and employees found in most firms. But, once you understand some key concepts and management techniques, the journey is far less daunting. Compass is a free resource that is intended to help you improve the performance of your professional services operation. If you have thoughts on how we could improve Compass, just shoot us an email at compass@ruddr.io.
The financial goals of services firms, and most other companies for that matter, are typically to grow revenue and improve profit margin. Most professional services firms accomplish these goals sporadically, but only the best can do so consistently. Why? The under-performers tend to wander from project to project with limited controls and processes while the leading firms meticulously leverage best practices and robust tools.
Compass will guide your professional services journey and help replace the periodic chaos in your business with more predictable performance. Compass starts with the fundamentals and then covers the five key facets of running a professional services organization: sales, client satisfaction, employee satisfaction, productivity, and efficiency.
The Fundamentals
Let’s begin at the beginning. For those new to professional services, this introductory section will help you understand the basics. For those that have been doing this for a while, you might want to skip ahead to our five main sections and pick any topic of interest.
- What are Professional Services?
- Characteristics of Professional Services Companies
- The Business of Satisfaction
- A Delicate Balancing Act
- Key Performance Indicators
- Interpreting Financial Statements
Sales
Nothing happens without a sale. If you have the most talented consultants in the world but don’t drive consistent sales volume, you’ll experience stressful times. In this section of Compass, we will cover:
- Start in a Niche
- Marketing for Professional Services
- The Sales Pipeline
- Basic Best Practices
- Provide Clients with Options
- All Revenue is Not Created Equally
- Forecasting
- Bookings vs. Billings vs. Revenue
- Estimation
- The Legal Stuff
- The Trusted Advisor
- Invest in Existing Clients
- Sales Team Compensation
Client Satisfaction
Services firms with consistently dissatisfied clients eventually go out of business. As a company leader, one of your primary jobs is to ensure that clients are happy with the services and deliverables they receive. In this section of Compass, we will cover:
- Satisfaction is about Experience and Expectations
- Understanding Value Delivery
- Net Promoter Score for Professional Services Firms
- The Relationship Equity Piggy Bank
Employee Satisfaction
Unhappy employees exact a heavy toll on a professional services business. Plus, who wants to spend hours every day in a place where people are grumpy? Since services businesses are “people heavy”, it is especially important that those people are happy. In this section of Compass, we will cover:
- Work-Life Balance
- Culture as a Competitive Advantage
- Performance Evaluation with OKRs
- The Anonymous Employee Survey
Productivity
Since professional services firms generate revenue directly from the output of their employees, high workforce productivity is critical. In this section of Compass, we will cover:
Efficiency
Optimal profitability is only possible through optimal efficiency. Professional services firms must be obsessively efficient. In this section of Compass, we will cover:
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