Flexibility and agility are crucial for modern professional services firms, giving them the ability to adapt to the latest industry trends and seize opportunities as they occur. That doesn’t mean however that your business should float like a rudderless ship, without a clear direction and vision. Strategy development is crucial for success in business today.
A solid strategy provides the principles and framework within which your marketing and business development teams can operate, and ensures that you are working towards the right long term goals.
In spite of this, holistic strategy is overlooked by many firms today. How well defined is your long term strategy?
Professional Services Strategy Development Principles
When articulating your strategy there are several things to keep in mind, including:
- Build on solid foundations – Take time to clarify your strength, weaknesses and current positioning in the market? Do you have a tightly defined customer segment that you are targeting and what is your current perception among these customers? This will underpin all other elements of your strategy.
- Factor in agility – Make sure you are clear on the distinction between a strategy and a plan. Strategy sets out what you’d like to achieve and broad strokes for how you will achieve it, but allows flexibility for the actual implementation as you get closer to it.
- Look to the future – Your strategy should be forward-looking, both in what you aspire to be and the methods you can leverage to get there. How can you factor in use of the latest digital marketing tools or methods to speed up your business growth? Doing the same things you did last year, will yield the same results you got last year. How will your strategy enable you to change, grow and improve as a business?
- Analyse your results – Be clear in your strategy about how you will measure success, and what you’ll do if you don’t achieve it. Modern digital businesses are built using agile methodologies, testing different approaches to learn which works best and constantly iterating to improve.
Strategy Development by AsOne
Your industry may change dramatically over the next few years, especially with the ongoing uncertainty around Brexit. But having a flexible strategy in place will enable you to have confidence that no matter what happens, your business is well placed to thrive.
In our experience, many professional services firms are so focused on working to successfully deliver client projects that they don’t have time to look ahead at their own business development. By partnering with AsOne, you can delegate that responsibility to industry experts who will help to ensure that you have a steady stream of enquiries coming in, no matter what the business environment looks like.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch for more information on how AsOne can support your strategy development. For companies based in North East England, we’re proud to support the NEBSF funding scheme, meaning that eligible businesses could be entitled to up to 40% off their first project.
