Growing your business through service work

Lowell Gans figured the secret to growing his business lay in climbing out from under his massive pile of service work. Then, he’d have more time to sell. Unfortunately, he’d been buried under service work for years, and now believed he’d never see the light.

Lowell had been an advisor for close to twenty-five years and did a lot of work with successful business owners. On the plus side, this meant his average case size was large. On the downside, these cases generally involved tons of service work.

As Lowell put it, he had a love-hate relationship with this business. He loved the face-to-face stuff and wished he could do that all day. “That’s what gets me out of bed each morning,” said Lowell. And he loved working with business owners. He understood them and, because of his expertise with tax law and creative investment strategies, felt he was one of the best in the business when it came to fully servicing their financial needs.

But he hated the service side of the business, mainly because he felt it kept him from doing what he did best.

Our coach asked Lowell how many hours a week, he spent face-to-face with his prospects or clients.

“Six to eight,” he answered. “And I know that’s low. I want to get to the point where I’m spending twenty to thirty hours a week face-to-face.”

“And you feel the service side of your business is what’s keeping you from increasing your face-to-face time.”

“Absolutely.”

“Lowell,” I said, “do you have prospects right now that you’re not getting to because you don’t have the time?”

“Sure,” he said, but without much conviction.

“Are these high-quality prospects? Are they the kind of prospects you want to work with?”

“Not really, I guess,” he answered. “The problem is I don’t have the time to go out and meet the right people. I know there’s so much more I should be doing. I ran a concept lunch a few months ago, and that generated a lot of leads for me. It was a real boon. But the new business has kept me so busy with service work that I haven’t been able to run any more lunches.”

Our coach then asked, “So, tomorrow, if I showed up with three business owners who wanted to do business with you, what would you say?”

Lowell laughed, “I’d love it, of course, for the first few minutes, till I realized that I probably couldn’t handle the new business.”

“Lowell,” our coach explained, “I think part of your problem is the feeling that you are maxed out. You’ve been running hard, and I know what that’s like. A few years ago, in my business, we experienced a frustrating seasonality in our revenue. Back then, I was the sole rainmaker, but I was also the major service provider. I’d go out and make a bunch of sales, then for the next few months, and I’d be delivering programs and workshops. One form of seasonality comes from the external marketplace, like tax time for advisors and accountants. You’re swamped for the first couple of months of the year, and then things die down because your clients mentally drop out of the market for a while. But another form of seasonality is the kind we experienced in our business, where the dry seasons followed every cluster of sales I made, because, like you, after I made sales, I’d be too busy with the service side to continue selling. Then, when the service work died down, I’d rev up my sales activity. Fortunately, we don’t have that issue in our business anymore.”

Lowell asked how I’d solved our seasonality.

“We came at the problem from several angles. One obvious thing we did was take on new people in sales. Today, we have close to ten people in business development, working in North America as well as internationally. Obviously, their contribution has smoothed out our revenue stream. On the service side, while I still play a service role in our organization, I’m no longer in charge of delivery. We have a VP of delivery who works with a dozen or so facilitators. The development and hiring of all of these resources didn’t happen overnight. The growth in our capability to market, sell and service evolved over several years, but everything stemmed from a well-planned strategy that we developed back when I started our business. And that’s what I want you to do: spend some time working on your business, rather than simply in your business to develop a plan for how you can take on more clients and service them. But before we get there, there’s another major issue I want you to address, and that’s your concept of service.”

Lowell looked at me curiously.

“From the way you’ve been talking about service, it’s clear to me that you see service as merely the fulfilment side of your business, meaning that service is something different from sales and marketing. Would you agree?”

“I suppose so.”

“To me, that’s a problematic mindset, and I think it’s crucial that you rethink your approach to service work. Don’t think of service as separate from the rest of your business. I want you to expand your concept of service to include a sales and marketing component. In fact, in our organization, we now view service as internal marketing.”

Lowell asked me for an example.

“Well, in your business, an integrated approach to conducting annual client meetings would address not just service issues — change of beneficiary or that type of thing — but also new sales issues, such as estate planning needs, as well as marketing opportunities. And by the latter, I mean exploring with your client things like referrals and recommendations. Are there people your client can introduce you to? And what about the other way around? Are their people in your network who can help your client solve problems they might be facing? What can you do to add value to the relationship? Whenever you add value, you increase what we call client capital — the value of your client relationship. High-value relationships are not only more likely to stay with you but also more likely to lead to other high-quality clients.

“So, service isn’t just the administrative or delivery side of your business. It’s a way to expand your business. When you take this approach, you’ll find that your pipeline will fill with high-quality prospects. Which, as we’ve already seen, leads to more service. And that’s a good thing because more service means more prospects and clients. Right?”

Lowell nodded, “But only if I can meet the service demand.”

“Correct, which is why I want you to think about how you are going to do that. One of the things you’ll need to do is segment your client list. Which clients should you be servicing personally? And which clients can you have someone else service? Furthermore, which aspects of your service work can you automate, or delegate to others?”

Despite the hectic pace of his business, Lowell agreed he needed to spend more time planning. A few months later, the rewards for his planning effort were clear. He’d hired a full-time administrative person to handle the low-level service work, and a sub-producer to work with his “C” and “D” clients. These two changes enabled Lowell to spend more time servicing his top clients, and now that he took an integrated approach to service work, he’d been able to significantly increase the number of high-quality prospects he met. He was now spending close to twenty hours a week face-to-face with top prospects and top clients. Not quite the thirty hours a week he still hoped for, but with the increase in revenue he’d forecasted for the year, he’d be able to make another hire in a couple of months that would free him up to add in more face-to-face time each week.

Lessons Learned

Lowell learned three important lessons about service work: