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We want to help firms build great businesses and sustain them. Being future proof is a critical part of that. Over the last months we focused a lot of our blogs on the topics of people and processes but to build future proof businesses firms need to do a lot more. We see the following areas as critical for success.

Nowadays, most initial interviews are conducted via video calls and ‘old fashioned’ telephone interviews are seldom incorporated into the interview process. While potentially controversial, I’m about to argue that a simple telephone conversation could prevent you from making a bad hire. Here is why.

In the words of Steve Jobs “innovation is the only way to win” and understanding your clients’ needs and wants is fundamental to creating winning products and services. Design thinking, a customer centric methodology for innovating, asks one fundamental question that you need to answer in order to get this right and that is ‘Who needs a way to do what and why?’. Empathy mapping is a smart way for everyone in a business to get on the same page about who their customer(s) are,

Our last blog focused on helping you work out your capacity for work using a simple calculator. This time, we are taking a deeper dive into understanding how your client numbers and other factors affect your capacity.

Do you ever feel like there isn’t enough time to get all your priorities done? It’s possible that it’s simply down to the fact that you haven’t got sufficient capacity to deal with all that you set out to do. I’m afraid that time isn’t elastic and we have a finite number of minutes, hours, days, months, and years to play with.

‘Lack of engagement from the team’ is an issue that comes up frequently and there may be a good reason why! Afterall, how often do you truly enable and empower your employees to be part of the ‘decision making’? How often do you create opportunities for solutions to be generated as part of a truly collaborative process? How often do you ask for feedback and take it onboard?

Many moons ago and prior to becoming a practice management and operations consultant, I was a Practice Manager and Partner of a financial planning practice. While Richard, the Managing Partner and the main Adviser and I used to work extremely well together, there were some challenges that we both faced as we came at things from two very different perspectives.

Great entrepreneurs and innovators tend to have an infinite capacity for generating ideas, but implementation is typically overlooked by them. It’s important to remember that any idea is only as good as its implementation and poor execution can kill the best of them.

or most firms I work with ongoing client servicing contributes to a very large proportion of their annual revenue (in the region of 70-90%). Aside from regulatory obligations of ensuring ongoing suitability of advice, annual reviews are a core component of the ongoing service most of you provide, so it’s critical that they are excellent.

If you have a Practice Manager in your business, take a moment to consider your business without them. If you don’t have a Practice Manager, take a moment to imagine your day dedicated only to clients, completely focussed on your client to-do-list with the knowledge that the entire team is working to their strengths and on the tasks that only they can do. That is the primary difference between the haves and the have nots, you will already see the competitive advantage but t