STAR Professionals
Achieving stardom in the new world
of professional services
By Phil Gott
Comments on this draft would be welcomed and
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STAR Professionals
Achieving stardom in the new world of professional services
INTRODUCTION
About this book
Overview
STAR Professionals Tool Kit
Your feedback
A NEW MODEL FOR SUCCESS IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
What do you mean, success?
Start with your future
Do you want to be rich and famous…really?
Success is not something you save up for
So what is professional success?
Achieving success in the changing world of professional services
The changing world of careers
The changing world of professional services
Jump aboard a vehicle that’s going your way
STAR Professionals
There’s more to it than Finders, Minders & Grinders
The myth of the well-rounded professional
The STAR model for success in professional services
Three success dimensions and six professional roles to choose from
Take control
What’s your passion?
Setting a course; vision and goals
Start from where you are
Motivation and commitment
What’s stopping you?
TWO INESCAPABLE PROFESSIONAL INTELLIGENCES AND HOW TO BUILD THEM
A commitment to learning
Seek out learning opportunities
Hone your talents
How to maximise your learning
Acquiring new knowledge
Develop new skills
Changing your beliefs
Recognising and dealing with change
Lifelong learning
Emotional intelligence
Taking the reins
Self confidence
Self control
Self image
Understanding others
Getting your point across
Using the tools of influence
Build successful relationships with people
Dealing with different types of people
Relationships matter
7 STEPS TO STARDOM THROUGH WINNING AND DEVELOPING CLIENTS
1 Put clients first
2 Sell professional services professionally
The selling process
Using written proposals
3 Find out what clients really want
What clients want
Recognising needs and wants
Orientation meetings
4 Use sales triads to persuade clients you can help them
Persuading clients that you can benefit them
Sales triads
5 Delight your clients by “icing the cake”
Why service matters so much
Winning repeat business and referrals from clients
Client-centred cross selling
Delighting your clients
Dealing with dissatisfied clients
Client service leadership
6 Ask clients for feedback
7 Shake-off the hourly billing mindset and guarantee excellent value
Commanding higher prices for your professional services
Who knows best?
Guarantee your work
7 STEPS TO STARDOM THROUGH LEADERSHIP
1 Put people first
Why leadership matters
Leadership starts here
Appealing to the emerging new professional
Organising professional firms
2 Apply the right balance of leadership and management
What leadership is
Leadership vs management
3 Build teams around a shared sense of purpose, or vision
Types of teams
What true teamwork is and how to develop it
A shared sense of purpose, or vision
Shared values and team identity
Playing to team members’ strengths
Open communication & involvement
4 Encourage and enforce a culture of high performance
5 Help your people get what they want
Plugging into your people’s dreams
Becoming a talent magnet
6 Insist that people be the best they can be
Farming your own talent
Delegating
Giving feedback
Recognising and rewarding performance
7 Become a great coach
What great coaches do
How to coach
7 STEPS TO STARDOM THROUGH PIONEERING
1 Put ideas first
Innovation comes of age
The benefits of innovation
2 Go to the edge, and beyond
Creativity is all in the mind
3 Collaborate within and beyond your organisation
Working with colleagues to generate ideas
Collaborating beyond your organisational boundaries
4 Add sparkle and substance to products and services
Developing new products and services
Different services for every client
5 Choose a theme and make it your own
Focus
Develop a compelling message or interesting angle
Entering guru territory
6 Foster creativity
First create the culture
Countering the resistance
7 Get yourself known
Raising profile
Why do it?
How to go about it
Writing articles that get published
Writing news releases that get noticed
Getting on TV and radio, and come out well
The conference circuit
Milking it
Conclusion ?
RESOURCE KIT
Check out your success drive
Trends shaping the future of professional services
Tips on clarifying your career vision and goals
So you think you don’t need a career plan?
Strategies to help you follow through on goals
A checklist of development opportunities
Understanding your preferred learning style
Fast tips on listening
Fast tips on questioning
Fast tips on reading body language
Communicating effectively in writing
Communicating effectively by telephone
Face to face presentations and meetings
Dealing with different types of people
DRIVERS
ANALYSTS
AMIABLES
EXPRESSIVES
Marketing tools and how to use them
Attending networking events: a three-stage process
Internal seminars
Speaking at external conferences
Writing articles
Getting media coverage
Telemarketing
Permission marketing
Adverts
Brochures
Business cards
Personal barriers to selling & how to overcome them
What clients want
Spurious arguments against orientation meetings
Setting up an orientation meeting
Orientation meeting – tips and a checklist
Decision-makers and how to spot them
Economic decision maker
Users
Influencers
Gatekeepers
Coach
Proposal documents; what to include and what to leave out
Ten steps to a successful client care review
Five steps to construct “sales triads” to convince a client you can help them
Ask your client
Value Agreements
Dealing with fee pressure
Steps to create your team’s common purpose
Steps to create your team’s norms
Team role preferences
Fast tips on delegating
Giving feedback
Fast tips on coaching
Four steps to innovation
Tips for running a prolific brainstorming session
Six thinking hats
Preface:
- Free download (whole or chapters)
- How to use the e-book – links, hovers etc
- Encouraged to forward to friends and colleagues, or links so that they can download
- If prefer traditional book style can purchase
INTRODUCTION
About this book
This is a book about you, your future, and how you can succeed in the changing world of professional services. Whether you are a youngish partner looking to energise your career, or a recently qualified professional moving beyond the initial horizon of qualification, this is a book for you. Here you will find guidance to help you chart your career; you will be shown how to develop the essential skills every successful professional needs; and you will find tips and techniques to help you win in your chosen professional role.
Success is within the reach of anyone committed to finding it. The professions certainly offer unlimited scope. Indeed, opportunities abound. But they will not be offered up to you. You will have to seek them out and be ready to grasp them. Professional services are the new future of wealth creation, and you (and professionals like you) are the new future of professional services.
The professional landscape is changing as a newer breed of knowledge workers joins the traditional professions. Because the professional world is changing dramatically, there are no proven role models. The factors that brought people to success today are unlikely to do so tomorrow. (Indeed, those considered successful today might be in need of most change if they are to cling on to their success.) This book will introduce you to a new model for success in professional services.
With change afoot, this book should be seen as both a success guide and a survival guide because professional careers of the future promise a roller-coaster ride. There is ample scope for anyone to win, but the unwary will mainly lose.
This is not a book about professional service organisations (PSOs)[i] or firms. No “organisation” can read this book, only people can. And only people can change organisations. Individuals are becoming the prime force, tipping the balance of power away from the organisation. The language we use and the paradigms we apply need to recognise that organisations serve their people, not the other way around. At the end of the day, PSOs will only succeed if the people within them, including those leading them, are successful.
This is therefore a book written for individuals – written for you. Because only when individuals are passionately pursuing a purpose – their professional goals – will their organisation get the best from them. Individual success is not achieved at the expense of their organisation. It is achieved to the benefit of their organisation. It is a win-win situation. PSOs win when their people win.
This book will show you how you can win and, by doing so, will help your organisation to win too.
Overview
What made professionals successful in the past, will not necessarily do so in the future. This book will introduce you to a new model for achieving success in professional services. The core is to locate and passionately commit yourself to some purposeful goals. The changing nature of professional organisations puts you in control of your career. It’s a formidable responsibility. You can no longer expect an employer to provide stability or direction for you; you must find it from within yourself by creating and pursuing a compelling ambition. Achieving success will mean facing some big questions.
We shall then examine some of the essential skills you will need as a foundation for your success. To get ahead you will need to pursue a one-person learning campaign and you will need to hone your emotional intelligence (in other words your skills of communication, building relationships, self image etc.).
From this foundation we will look at three dimensions - client service, leadership and pioneering – that all professionals need to be good at. However, being good is not enough to lead to success. You will need to be excellent at something. The notion of a well-rounded professional is no longer appropriate in developing a professional success model. High achievers are rarely well-rounded. They are sharp, honing their talents to precision. That’s what you will need to do and this book will show you how.
STAR Professionals Tool Kit
A book like this can include only limited information. So to give you access to further practical guidance, whilst avoiding swamping you with information here, a special companion web site provides a free “tool kit”. Look out for the symbol throughout the book for links to the web site.
Your feedback
Later in this book you will read about the importance of getting feedback from your clients. I too appreciate feedback so please let me know what you think about this book. Tell me what you like and tell me if your experience has taught you different lessons about success. I would love to hear from you.
Wishing you success.
Phil Gott
A NEW MODEL FOR SUCCESS IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
What do you mean, success?
Start with your future
This book is about success. Your success. But what does success mean? It’s a big question, and one that few people pursuing success ever take the trouble to ask, let alone find an answer to. Yet unless you plan for it or, even more basically, unless you know what success really is, you are most unlikely ever to achieve it. You are more likely to join a growing band of professionals who devote themselves to an uninspiring and unfulfilling “career” driven by billing targets rather than by a personal drive to achieve something genuinely worthwhile. It doesn’t have to be so.
Do you want to be rich and famous…really?
Does success to you mean making lots of money? There are countless “successful” people making money who are dissatisfied with their lives. Some have pursued satisfying careers at the expense of other parts of their lives – broken marriages, lost children, neglected friendships – which they only later realise are important to them. Even worse, others suffer these woes devoting themselves to careers that give them little real reward other than a fat salary and a prestigious job title. Can this really be regarded as success? It doesn’t bear too much scrutiny.
Does success to you mean becoming famous. Again, fame does not necessarily bring happiness – tabloid newspapers abound with stories of icons who lead miserable lives. Is this success? Not really.
If success is framed in the context of fame and fortune, it is clearly a state that will elude the masses. That’s not to say that there is anything morally wrong with making money. Lots of it. So long as it is made ethically in exchange for value, it can even be argued that making money is positively virtuous[ii].
The difficulty is in somehow equating money with success. The two are very different things. You can be successful without making any money at all. Try arguing that Mother Theresa was unsuccessful because of her lack of wealth. Conversely you can gain lots of money and still not be successful. Otherwise every lottery winner and wealthy heir would be heralded as great successes.
Yet still people embark on a career driven by all kinds of forces, only later reflecting on what they really want to get from it. I know I did.
It wasn’t until I was about to be made a partner at a top accountancy firm that I really looked at what that would entail and decided I didn’t like what I saw. My sponsoring partner tried to persuade me to stick with it: “It doesn’t have to be a life-long commitment Phil” he explained helpfully. “Just so long as you stay for ten years..”
That sealed it for me. Ten years was a lifetime. So I left, still very unsure of what I wanted to do, but at least knowing one more thing that I didn’t want to do. And so for me started a journey that led me to my first big failure, that skirted the fringes of personal bankruptcy, and that seemingly only accidentally brought me onto a path that I believe will not merely lead me to success, but is success itself. For I am now sure that success is not a destination at all, but a rich and exciting journey.
What dismays me is that many people in the professions are still motoring headlong towards some undefined goal while life races past them unnoticed. If you are one of those people, may your mid-life crisis come soon so you have time to benefit from a more considered career choice. It’s never too late to stop, take stock, change direction and find your success.
Success is not something you save up for
As a kid I used to help out at our local grocery shop. Mr & Mrs Foster toiled 12 or more hours a day, at least six days a week. They lived cheaply above the shop, they boasted and bemoaned that they hadn’t had a holiday in 22 years, and they drove a car that drew looks because it had gradually become a classic. But they were working for their retirement you see. Looking forward to the day when they could start to enjoy what they had earned. And when they sold up they bought a comfortable bungalow, a brand new car and the best their money could buy. Forty years of hard graft to fund their ten years or so of contented retirement.
It’s been called the “deferred life plan” and it has become a tragedy of our times. It’s not just shopkeepers, small business owners and pensionable employees who have fallen into the trap.
Many a professional is counting away the years, even the decades, to retirement. Yet retirement, as we have known it, may no longer exist by the time you reach it.[iii]
Retirement has to change. We all need to start re-defining how we will live after the age of 65. This need to redefine work and retirement can be seen as bad news. It should not. The end of retirement can become the beginning of life fulfilment as we design our work not only to deliver the means for life, but also the point of it.
The impending reinvention of retirement may therefore be a blessing. It may force more people to see that there is another way. Position yourself for a long and fulfilling career. Chase your passion, not your pension.
Refreshingly, in professional services, age can mean growth rather than decay. Terence Conran is approaching 70 but his ideas merely get more ambitious. Michael Young who has started 49 institutions in his time, including the forerunner of Britain’s Open University, is in his 80s and three years ago founded his most ambitious project yet, a school for social entrepreneurs.[iv]Check these facts