How Professional Service Firms Grow
A practical guide for managing partners
Growing a professional service firm is straightforward until you are leading one. The strategy is usually clear enough. What is hard is getting a partnership of equity owners to execute it – people who are also colleagues, sometimes friends, and who have their own view of where the firm should go.
Most managing partners know exactly where the problems are. The client portfolio that has drifted too wide. The partner whose performance has been an issue for two years. The business development that everyone agrees matters but never quite happens. The difficulty is not identifying these things. It is moving the firm on them without fracturing the relationships that hold it together.
This guide is for managing partners who are dealing with that tension. It draws on 25 years of growth committee work across law, accountancy and engineering firms and sets out specifically what the firms that make progress do differently – and why the ones that do not tend to get stuck in the same places.
If you recognise your firm in any of this, this guide gives you a clearer picture of where to focus and how to move things forward.
About
Robin Johnson
Robin Johnson has spent 25 years working alongside managing partners of law, accountancy and engineering firms on the commercial decisions that are hardest to handle from the inside. He founded OvationXL.
The guide is intended as a practical resource in its own right. If, after reading it, you would like to continue the conversation, you are very welcome to contact Robin directly and in confidence.