Full Sail Partners Blog | Professional Services (21)

Adding client feedback results to your project evaluation plan provides an incredible return on investment. Conversely, by failing to identify key satisfaction metrics, your projects are less efficient, and you have less insight in to the mindset of your clients. Ask yourself, in the modern competitive business environment, can your firm afford to overlook anything -- let alone the satisfaction of your clients?

Our easy to use client satisfaction solution, The Client Feedback Tool, allows clients to quickly and easily provide insightful data that will ensure that projects stay on course, and meet or exceed expectations. Utilizing our tool, asking your clients how your processes work takes them only two minutes to complete - but the information provided gives both parties valuable data to assure effective, successful projects.

Based on our research, including 100K pieces of data from our clients, we've listed 4 ways that feedback will add to your bottom line.

• Identify your top 10% most loyal clients. Do you have a way to identify which clients value you most?  Using the information provided using the Client Feedback Tool, our clients have identified their top 10% most loyal clients and converted this knowledge into increased billings, increasing fees by 3% to their top-rating clients.  For a $10 million firm, this translates into roughly $30k in additional profit each year.
   
• Retain one client on the "bubble." One-third of our subscribers came to us after losing a major client.  In every case, these firms were surprised by the defection and realized they were blind to a pattern of problems the client never brought to light.  Frequent feedback greatly reduces the chances of this happening.
  
  According to PSMJ Resources: 
  
  
  • AEC firms spend four times more money replacing a client than the costs of retaining one.  
  • Even if you replace the lost revenue of a departed client, the added cost of winning a new client typically exceeds $22k.
   
• Increase marketing efficiency by 3%. The average AEC firm spends 11% of their revenue marketing, while seeing only 25% of pursued work turns into billable work.  Adding client feedback informs you of your market successes and identifies where your firm’s strengths are.  By marketing your strengths to your best market sectors, you’ll not only target the markets that are most satisfying (and profitable), you will also reduce wasted effort pursuing work that doesn't match your firm's core services.  Even a 3% increase in efficiency will save a $10 million firm over $33k a year.
• Reduce key staff departure by 5%. PSMJ Resources again reports that replacing your best staff costs in excess of $100k per departure.  Most key staff don’t leave for better salary. They leave because they feel unappreciated, unvalued, and because they feel their growth is not supported.  Quantitative feedback gives you the tools and information to recognize performance.  In fact, your clients will be directly recognizing your staff’s efforts as they provide feedback.  Research based on nearly 10 years of helping our clients collect feedback indicates that their clients rate staff performance as "Exceptional" 22% of the time.  This satisfying work environment will help retain (and identify) your best people, saving an average of $67k each year.

It’s simple, regardless of firm size, incorporating feedback in to your project evaluation plan can increase profits 13% or more just by applying these tools and strategies.

Garnering the client feedback metrics needed for your project evaluation plan is easy with a simple and powerful system like The Client Feedback Tool.  

What are the major productivity killers for firms in the Professional Services? For most firms, some of the biggest ones revolve around information overload, duplicated effort and other inefficiencies. 

Fortunately, team collaboration tools can address each of these areas — and thus have a positive impact on the productivity of individuals and teams throughout an organization. 

First, let’s consider the element of information overload — which for many people is exemplified in the form of an overflowing email inbox. We all know the frustration of seeing fifteen different emails with the same subject line, where people are actually commenting each other’s earlier messages — and then trying to untangle the sequence of the discussion to make some sense of it. Not only does this type of information overload take time to sort through, but the reality is that with so many emails piling up, important messages can get lost or go unread. 

Another major factor that negatively affects productivity is duplication of effort. It’s common for multiple people in a firm to be working on the same problem — but is some cases, rather than working as a team, they’re operating in unconnected silos. Even if the whole team was in the same meeting, subsets of the group may have informal follow-up meetings, or even chance encounters in a hallway. Any one of these can result in parallel (and duplicated) efforts. 

Inefficiencies come in a variety of flavors, ranging from the annoying to the scary. One of my favorites is the issue of document versioning. This is especially likely when multiple people are working separately on the same document. Unless a firm has a solid solution in place, it’s all too likely for multiple versions of a document to spring to life, each with its own edits and authors. Sorting through the different versions to create one final document can be a time-consuming source of frustration. 

Real team collaboration is a beautiful thing

Now let’s switch gears and talk about some of the productivity gains a firm can realize by implementing effective team collaboration tools. 

One of the most essential functions that collaboration tools perform is organizing team members’ communications into a centralized repository of conversations around specific tasks and issues within the project. In the Kona tool, for example, individuals can have conversations with one colleague, a small group within the team, or the entire team. They can also see the various subtasks, view a centralized project calendar and share information with the entire team. 

Team collaboration tools can enable project managers to set up their groups so that certain members are able to see all conversations, while others have a more limited view. This capability can be especially critical when collaborating with clients. 

Kona in particular has found an effective way to address the problem of sharing documents among members of a team – one that ensures that everyone is working off the latest version. Instead of sending colleagues the actual document as an email attachment, users can send links to where the master files are stored (including such online services as Dropbox, Box or Google Drive). 

Last but not least, when collaboration tools are web-enabled, like Kona, they’re ideal for optimizing the way people work in the real world. After all, not all of our productive time is spent at work; we can also be productive when we’re in between doing other tasks, whether at home, on business trips or elsewhere. Team collaboration tools allow individuals to continue being productive, wherever and whenever inspiration hits. 

Summing up

Until a firm finds an effective way to address factors like information overload, duplication of effort, and inefficiencies, its productivity will probably suffer. Team collaboration solutions may hold the key to making the most of your team’s collective abilities — and at the same time, minimizing the overlaps, dropped balls and other issues that may be limiting your productivity.
 

Let’s be clear: people are not squirrels. That being said, when you’re trying to get your firm’s employees to interact with each other effectively, it may seem like trying to herd the little woodland creatures.

Most firms’ leaders already know that the most effective answers to this challenge involve improving collaboration, communication and teamwork. Easier said than done, right?

Fortunately, social collaboration tools can improve the effectiveness of not only your individual employees themselves, but also the separate functions within the firm and also the organization as a whole. Here are some of the ways a firm can use these innovative tools to add value throughout the organization.

Executives

From the CEO or partner’s perspective, social collaboration tools have the potential to improve productivity at every level within the organization. Here’s how:

• Individual employees are empowered to share information and collaborate on projects more efficiently and keep their managers and colleagues up-to-date in real time.
• Functional units can collaborate more effectively, because managers have better insight into the status of all ongoing projects. Managers also have a central location for all project communication that doesn’t disappear when an employee leaves.
• Differentiating your firm from the competition by providing a collaborative environment for not only your internal team members, but outside consultants and clients. 

As an example, collaboration tools such as Kona make it far easier to include clients as team members throughout the process. Compared to other firms that simply use emails and phone calls to keep clients in the loop, a firm using these tools can enable more integrated and up-to-date communication with clients, and at the same time, create a more enjoyable customer experience. 

Project Managers

On each project, project managers can get better visibility into milestones and issues, improving project efficiency as well as the client’s experience in several ways:

• Improves team members’ communication and accountability, while reducing time wasted in status meetings.
• Strengthens the project manager’s relationship with the client, and also differentiates the firm.
• Brings new staff up-to-speed more rapidly, shortening the time required before they can contribute.
• Creates a centralized record of working issues, tagged and easily searchable. 

Marketing/Business Development

Professionals in a firm’s marketing/BD function, like its executives, stand to benefit in the long term from the differentiation that can result from effectively managed social collaboration tools. They also benefit in more tactical ways:

• Improves communication and accountability in proposal planning, development, and review, including go/no-go decisions.
• Streamlines event planning and tradeshow preparation.
• Provides unified view of specific tasks across multiple BD proposal efforts happening simultaneously.
• Enables greater consistency and knowledge transfer across multiple groups working on proposals and other repeatable processes. 

Information Technology

IT departments can use these tools to address a range of technical needs and, at the same time, change the culture to one that is more collaborative. Among its impacts, a social collaboration tool:

• Enhances internal and external collaboration while protecting network information.
• Is less expensive than traditional collaboration solutions such as SharePoint.
• Improves management of complex IT projects and saves time by enabling peer support.
• Allows the CIO and other leaders to be more aware and experience the “pulse” of individual projects and issues.

Human Resources

For the HR function, these tools can help in ways that are both strategic and logistical. Social collaboration tools:

• Streamline and expedite recruiting and on-boarding processes.
• Use two-way internal communication about tasks, events, and topics to create a more collaborative environment and improve employee engagement.
• Allow HR employees to be more productive in planning and implementing internal events and initiatives.

Accounting

For the accounting function, social collaboration tools bring new efficiencies to a variety of ongoing processes in multiple ways:

• Rather than having to dig through email chains and contact multiple individuals for updates and answers, accounting professionals can streamline the month-end close process by generating repeatable steps to organize and capture financial information.
• Contract management can be improved by creating templates with specific steps and forms to guide each project.
• Accounting staff can create a private but accessible space to capture progress and follow-up on A/R issues, assign individual responsibilities and maintain a centralized log of progress toward resolution.

The Collaborative Edge

In a sense, your most important asset could also be a liability:  If your staff cannot collaborate effectively, you’re not optimizing your firm’s capabilities. Social collaboration tools have the potential to improve collaborative capabilities at every level and in every area of your organization, bringing about measurable improvements. At the same time, they can help you create a better client experience and differentiate your firm from others — critical factors in attracting and retaining clients and employees.  

The weather this winter has played havoc with the daily lives of millions of individuals, as well as countless businesses. 

One industry that has felt the impact in a unique way is that of professional services firms. These firms rely heavily on collaboration among their team members to manage and work on their projects. Unless they were already prepared to allow employees to work remotely, when the bad weather hit, many of them had to simply shut down until employees could once again manage to get to the office. 

Fortunately, technology is offering better and better project collaboration tools that allow team members to work together no matter where they’re located. But that’s just the tip of the snowdrift, so to speak. These solutions also make life easier for individual project managers and team members, increase the amount of creative collaboration among members of the team, and ultimately result in better projects. What’s more, they allow firms to easily include clients based in other locations, helping to maintain and build communication when meeting face-to-face isn’t an option. 

Let’s look at some of the key capabilities that effective project collaboration tools enable within a firm.

• Communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. The most essential capability is making sure all the people involved on a project are able to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other. Any given project can include various employees and teams within the firm, as well as assorted external individuals, such as client representatives, consultants, and attorneys. A group this diverse often presents challenges in terms of finding communication channels and applications software that everyone can access and use — whether from their desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones.
• Organizing the work. A second major function of effective project collaboration tools is to manage the tasks that are involved in each particular project. This function allows the project manager to use a central, intuitive resource to manage the many individual deadlines that are typically managed through email and Excel spreadsheets to complete milestones.
• Streamlining document management. A third major function that effective collaboration tools address is that of document-sharing. Using a tool such as Kona, for example, allows you to share documents that your entire team (including external members) can view. As a result, instead of searching through dozens of emails to find the documents you need, you and your team have a centralized location. In addition, users have the option of uploading files directly to Kona or using other file-sharing solutions, like Dropbox, Google Docs, or SharePoint.
• A better view across projects. An effective project collaboration tool allows project managers to have a view across all the projects they are managing. As a result, they not only have insight into the specific tasks, conversations and files for the current project, but can also view upcoming tasks and new conversations and files in one widely-accessible environment. 

Better collaboration, better results

For firms in the professional services space, project collaboration tools offer a wide array of functionalities that can help improve not only the interactions of a given project’s team, but ultimately, the quality of the ideas and solutions the firm delivers to the client. An added benefit of technology-enabled collaboration is that it can help create a better experience for the clients involved — and that can help a firm differentiate itself from its competition.

When it comes to proving the value of marketing efforts, often professional services marketers have to prove their worth to the financial department through a language that they understand – Marketing Metrics! This often means a series of pre-determined metrics for measuring marketing ROI (return on investment). 

Marketers are often challenged with measuring marketing ROI. Many times it’s because we are don’t have access to the right type of data or in some cases it’s because we don’t know what to measure. This is where having a good relationship with finance can help you be a better marketer. To better develop the relationship and expectations between marketing and finance, we suggest fostering a relationship of understanding and sharing. 

Having the financial department on your side is one of the greatest feats any marketer can accomplish – If finance buys in, you can be assured that it is only a matter of time until everyone else falls in place! 

No matter how copasetic our relationship is with our financial department, we have to be ready to report on marketing ROI at a moment’s notice so here are some steps to take to gain a better relationship. 

Talking the Talk 

If you are looking at building a better relationship with accounting, in my experience the first bridge to cross is to put yourself in their shoes. When you think about what functions accounting is responsible for, you can easily understand their hesitancy to buy in to the marketing plan without cold hard data to evaluate. Instead of running from this hurdle, attack it straight on! Schedule a kick-off meeting with finance to address the plan, and allow them to voice any concerns. 

The goal during the kick-off session is to ease accounting’s anxiety.  Allow the finance department a chance to express their suggestions and concerns. Continue to reassure the finance team that through the marketing metrics established by your firm, you will be consistently measuring marketing ROI throughout the year to ensure that the marketing team’s plans and efforts stay on track.

Walking the Walk 

The quickest way to gain buy in is to lead by example. You know your job better than finance knows your job. Identify areas that your marketing efforts affect that might not be easily identified.  One way a Marketer can begin to do this on their own is to think about the data that you need to do their job better. Come to the kick off meeting ready to show your finance team that you understand their concerns, by identifying previously overlooked metrics for measuring marketing ROI. This will demonstrate to finance that you are looking at metrics that can help impact the growth of the company and further prove your value to the firm. 

If you are interested in learning more, review this blog article that discusses evaluating your business growth plan with metrics. This introduction can be applied to developing marketing metrics that help identify how your efforts are helping the firm grow. 

Here are important questions marketers can ask accounting to start the conversation on how the firm can start measuring marketing ROI:

1. Retaining & Gaining Clients: I’m looking to understand our total customer growth. Do we have a way to determine by percentage and revenue the amount of our work we’ve received is new vs. existing clients throughout the year?
2. Pursuing the Right Client: I’m been looking at how we can be more strategic in our pursuit of clients. Would it be beneficial to advise you when I see we are pursuing more work with clients that we are having AR issues with?
3. Forecasting and Backlog: Can you help me understand what our break-even is and do we have a way to see what our current backlog is? I’d like to help make sure we have enough business coming in the pipeline for each market or division.
4. Effectiveness: Can you help me better understand how I affect the bottom line? Developing metrics that help you understand the financials behind your results can help you fine tune your approach. 

Often times your finance team is not questioning the value of the marketing team -- they are however questioning the tactics (and results!) being used. Often times as marketers we can get lost down in the weeds and lose sight of the overall firm goals. By proving efforts through metrics and marketing ROI, we start speaking a language that our financial team can understand. 

As professional services marketers, start showing your finance team that you care by measuring marketing ROI, and building better relationships between marketing and finance to demonstrate the value of promotional efforts.

For more information, view the below webinar: 

Business leaders have any number of sophisticated computer programs and models to help them predict future business results. Despite these resources, however, in its essence financial forecasting is still a guessing game. 

That being said, there are several fundamental strategies that can improve one’s chances of making accurate forecasts.

1. Understand how and where you’ve succeeded.

The first strategy is to look at historical data to gain insight into exactly where past successes and challenges have come from. This inquiry includes reviewing the various sources of your leads, how your sales team manages them, and where you tend to have the greatest success. For example, you might try to determine:

• Whether your sales most often result from calling into existing clients to find additional work, from cold calling to purchased lists, or alternate sources.
• The extent to which your success has depended on the person doing the calling, the script used for the call, the number of contacts made, or other factors.
• The lasting impact of sales — i.e., which sales turned into continuing relationships and additional work. Of course, there are many factors that affect this statistic, but it can still provide useful insight for your financial forecasting. 

The key is investing the time and energy needed to gain fact-based insights into what has worked — and not worked — in the past.

2. Take a cold, hard look around you.

A second essential strategy of financial forecasting is to look closely at your current operating environment, and conduct a brutally honest analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities (SWOT). 

Your SWOT analysis should begin with a realistic exploration of the many factors that could increase, or decrease, the likelihood of your success. Some questions you might want to answer:

• What is your reputation in the marketplace — what are you known for doing well, and where should you try to improve?
• Is the local or regional economy growing, stagnant, or shrinking? More specifically, what is the condition of the economy as it affects your clients?
• Are there factors that could encourage your clients to maintain or even expand the services they are buying from you? Are there conditions that might threaten projects that they have planned with you but not yet started, or that could prevent them from engaging with you in the future?
• What is your competition doing to take advantage of the current market? Where are they weak, and how can you exploit that weakness? 

The underlying strategy in doing your SWOT analysis is to be totally honest and realistic about where you excel and where you come up short — and determine what you can realistically achieve in your competitive environment. 

3. Test your assumptions and adjust as necessary. 

A third essential strategy in effective financial forecasting is to track and monitor your results. There is a range of ways to do so, but based on our experience working with professional services firms, one of the best is to invest in a purpose-built ERP such as Deltek Vision. This solution can provide a firm with up-to-the minute, comprehensive visibility into all of the assumptions and results related to its financial forecasting. Just as importantly, it connects and organizes data from both the front office (i.e., project) function as well as the back office (accounting), and automates a wide variety of essentially manual processes — including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), business development and more. Not only will the insight you gain help you tweak your assumptions to improve future forecasting efforts, but more importantly, you can make midcourse corrections to keep your firm on course. 

Keep your eye on the prize.

Whether you use one-off spreadsheets, software programs for specific functions, or a comprehensive solution like Deltek Vision, the key is to collect metrics that matter to you on an ongoing basis, measure results against your financial forecast, and make adjustments as necessary. 

You’ll never be able to see a completely accurate view of your company’s future. However, through financial forecasting, you will gain enough of a realistic sense of what’s coming that you’ll be able to stick to a plan and outmaneuver the competition. 

For most professional services firms, planning for growth is a natural part of business. There are different strategies for doing so, and choosing the best one depends on your ultimate growth objectives. But whatever your goals, understanding how your growth plan affects your cash flow plan is essential to achieving the results you seek.

The way you grow affects cash flow planning.

Organic growth. There are a number of ways to grow one’s business organically. For example, in a generally healthy economy, your firm could continue doing “business as usual” (i.e., not increase your marketing or business development activity) and still experience significant growth from the improving economy. This type of growth is typically slow-paced; you can keep up with the increased demand either by using existing staff or gradually “ramping up” your staffing to meet the growth curve.

A somewhat more aggressive growth plan might be to expand your client base in the same market niche and geographic area where you’re already doing business. In such a scenario, you are typically increasing your marketing and business development outreach to generate business. As this outreach occurs, you may experience rapid growth that requires you to have staff immediately available to meet the increased client demands.

Strategic growth. Alternatively, you might be planning to significantly expand your service offerings or target market. For example, an engineering firm might add a new service line, or expand into another geographic market. In such cases, you could expect to take on additional marketing and staffing expenses, along with expenses for market research (please do not skip this step), software and equipment and possibly even new office space. These added expenses occur up front, well before you bring dollar one through the door. 

Expect a time lag before reaching ROI.

The fundamental point to keep in mind is that your cash flow will take a hit, probably at least for 90 days for increased staffing costs, and longer for marketing costs. The reason for this is the unavoidable lag between when you begin investing in expansion, and when you actually start reaping the benefit.

Here’s the general reason for the time lag. Once you decide to expand, there are several types of expenses you’ll incur at the beginning of your growth effort — investments that will not bear fruit immediately. For example, there are costs to hire and train new employees, with probably 60 days before they’re doing billable work. Even if you’re very efficient and bill on day 61, then the earliest you should expect payment for their work will be another 30 days, making it a minimum total of 90 days where cash is going out, but no additional revenue is coming in.  

How to meet the demand: sub-consultants vs. salaried staff.

In general, hiring consultants requires less of a cash investment than full- or part-time staff, as they typically will not get paid until you get paid (Paid When Paid, or PWP). This advantage may be offset, however, by the fact that consultants can also be more challenging to manage and they have their own clients (and potentially conflicting commitments as well). Additionally, you still have to invest manager time to assign and manage the sub-consultants’ performance.

On the other hand, while full- or part-time staff may be more costly to hire, they will likely gain institutional and process knowledge as they work, which should make them increasingly valuable to your company. Additionally, they are typically focused on the company’s needs and requirements; you can control their priorities.

Tracking cash flow and return.

The other part of cash flow planning during a growth period (or at any time, for that matter) is monitoring your expenditures and results (hopefully in the form of additional revenue). As with any plan, it’s essential to have an idea of the effort you need to expend, and what results you expect from that effort. Even if your plan is “business as usual” because of an improving market, you should understand what results you expect from the improving market. If you are increasing your marketing effort in your existing market, you should know what you expect from that effort in the form of additional leads, opportunities, clients and, of course, revenue. Without the increased revenue, what is the justification of the increased marketing effort (and assumed increased cost)?

There are a number of approaches for tracking results, ranging from one-off spreadsheets to purpose-built ERP solutions.

In our experience, one of the most effective strategies is to find a solution that accomplishes several key functions at once. Deltek Vision, for example, is a purpose-built ERP solution that provides a unified platform for connecting the front and back office functions — providing up-to-the-minute insight into cash flow planning, as well as accounts receivable, billability and utilization statistics, and much more. It even includes integrated solutions for automating major parts of your processes for customer relationship management, proposal development and tracking.

Watch the details, but don’t neglect the big picture.

Keep in mind that the timeframes for generating ROI mentioned in this article are generalizations. In fact, they’re based on an ideal scenario that assumes making good hires, efficiently training and integrating them, finding a receptive market … and getting paid on time.

Naturally, as the fine print often says, actual results may vary. This makes it even more important to build-in expectations that cash flow will take a significant hit for at least a few months before you start reaping the rewards of you investment.

Growth is rarely painless or easy — but knowing what to expect is far better than wading into a growth plan without knowing when it will start paying off.

Guest blog written by Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

It’s old news that technology has changed the way we interact – and that includes the way we purchase goods and services. But the professional services industry has largely lagged behind other sectors in reacting to this change, continuing to rely on traditional forms of marketing that are both more expensive and less effective. The small percentage of firms that have embraced online marketing, however, have seen marked success. In our recent study on online marketing, we learned that professional services firms employing online marketing techniques grow 4X faster, and are 2X more profitable than other firms. Why is this so? What is it about online marketing that is so effective? To understand why online marketing works, we need to understand today’s buyers. 

How Buyers Choose Professional Services Firms 

Technology has changed the way that buyers search for and evaluate professional services firms. Based on our research, we know that 71% of buyers still ask their friends and colleagues first when they search for a new professional services firm. At first glance, this seems like the old way of doing business. What’s changed is that, after receiving the referral, these buyers can now go online to do their own research on the firms that were recommended. 

The Internet has allowed buyers to take much more control of their purchasing process. In fact, in their recent study of over 1,400 B2B consumers, the Corporate Executive Board found that 57% of a typical purchasing decision occurs before the buyer ever has a conversation with a service provider. This represents a drastic break from the past. 

Even more notable, the third largest group in our study—11% of professional service buyers—said they skip the referral process altogether, going directly online to search for firms. Combined with the first group of buyers who use the Internet to check up on firms referred from their network, this means that altogether 82% of professional services buyers go online at some point in their buying process to evaluate a firm. 

The Digital Generation 

The Internet has drastically changed the marketing landscape for professional services firms, and we expect that landscape to continue changing. Consider that most workers under the age of 35 have never worked in an office without Internet access. Research shows that for this rising category of leaders, using online resources to evaluate and communicate with firms is second nature. And, as this digital generation ages and takes on increasingly senior leadership positions, they will give technology an expanding role in their buying and decision-making process. 

Putting It All Together 

Technology has forever changed the way that consumers interact with, and purchase, professional services. Those firms that learn to embrace the advantages offered by these new technologies will continue to grow and profit, widening the gap that already exists between technology adopters and non-adopters. For professional services firms, ignoring online marketing means living in the past. 

Read more about the way professional services marketing is changing in Hinge’s new coauthored book, Professional Services Marketing 

About the Author:

Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D., is Managing Partner at Hinge, a marketing firm that specializes in branding and marketing for professional services. Hinge is a leader in rebranding firms to help them grow faster and maximize value. Lee can be reached at LFrederiksen@hingemarketing.com or 703-391-8870. 

Interested in implementing an holistic solution to help your marketing team better manage your efforts? Check out Deltek Vision CRM and get a leg up on your competition.

What is forecasting? Forecasting is a tool that many professional services firms use to help management make decisions based on past and current data trends. 

There are two types of forecasting we will focus on in this article: 

1. Utilization forecasting
2. Cash flow forecasting

For professional services firms, forecasting starts with the analysis of the work that is yet to be performed and equating that to overall firm revenue. The revenue then becomes the basis for the accountant to project cash flows coming in, considering average day’s receivables, to drive what cash is available versus the cash required to cover current expenses.

Without these forecasts, it makes it much more difficult for management to schedule, staff, plan or perform the work in production that is necessary without them sitting up in bed at night on a regular basis. 

So let’s break the process down into steps and then focus on the key benefits of what is forecasting. 

1. To properly track utilizations, it is important to establish two budgeted figures, target utilization and available utilization. Both should be established for every staff person and documented by employee in your system.
   Definitions:

• Target Utilization is a function of the targeted billable hours over the standard hours in the work week.
• Available Utilization is a function of all available hours minus just the benefit hours.

One engineering firm we are working with used to post the labor utilization “curves” on their message board in their lunch room and it was measured against budgeted utilization for the year as a constant.  This singular graph showed what the firm was projecting for scheduled utilization against target and available which kept staff cognizant of both the need to schedule fully.  The graph also served as a tool for staff to promote billable hours against project deadlines.

From this data, management was able to see the most important single factor for the firm, how far out they were scheduled, and if they needed to adjust staff or move project timelines to increase project throughput.  Since labor costs against labor revenue is the single most influential impact on a firm’s bottom line, forecasting in this way had this firm’s management sleeping better, while it also empowered the firm’s staff to keep an eye on utilization. 

Since this level of tracking was in place at this particular firm, it also allowed their senior financial person to produce informative forecasts of revenue, which in turn, promoted the morale of everyone in the firm. 

To note, when the firm had many proposals out with the results tracking per the graph above, and the firm had the ability to look at un-scheduled but awarded professional service hours as well, they knew when staffing could not meet the demand of the impending work and were able to stage clients expectation with delivery dates or let HR know that hiring was needed on the horizon. 

So, is your firm enabling forecasting to better win work and deploy resources? If not, after reading this blog do you recognize the importance of implementing forecasting at your firm? I would forecast that the answer is “yes”!  

Budgeting and forecasting is part art, part science. For too many firms, however, it is also a frustrating process that takes a lot of effort to produce less than optimal results.

All too often, the budgeting and forecasting process breaks down because the two parties involved — the executive management team and the operations side — see the challenge from opposite ends of the same telescope. It may be a gross generalization, but from what I’ve seen, management often tends to be more aggressive and optimistic about goals and forecasts. On the other hand, the operational side sees the nuts-and-bolts challenges and logistics required to meet management’s goals, and tends to be more conservative in terms of what they think can be achieved with a given budget. 

In addition to this fundamental dynamic, another challenge related to budgeting and forecasting is that unless it’s handled well, it can lead to a lack of buy-in on the part of various parties. Even worse, it can result in a budget that ends up sitting on a shelf for the rest of the year, which is not in anyone’s best interest. 

Key strategies for success

Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help an organization improve its chances of a successful budgeting and forecasting process. 

1. Start early. Think about the budget process as one of dialogue and compromise — so allow time for both management and operations to develop their budgets and plans, and then to negotiate an acceptable compromise. If you’re aiming to complete your budget by December 31, for example, consider asking management to commit to establishing and publishing their corporate goals no later than October 31. 

2. Be transparent and clear about the process. If you let everyone know up front that the budgeting process is a dialogue and compromise, there may be more chance that all parties will embrace it and comply with expectations. 

3. Have the management team kick off the process. After all, their vision for the corporate goals and general forecasts should be what drives the organization. In general, it’s a good strategy to use previous years’ results as a baseline, incorporating any relevant data about changing market and economic conditions, new products in development, and so on. Once the management team has published its goals, the operational managers develop budgets for reaching those goals. This is not the order in which it’s always done, but in my experience, it’s a more effective approach and leads to better results. 

4. Have a meeting of the minds. Last but not least, block off some time to bring the two sides together around the budget documents and negotiate a compromise. As in any compromise, it’s critical that both sides understand that they are not going to get everything they want. But by finding an agreeable compromise, the organization can develop a budget and forecast that’s both aspirational and achievable. 

Budgeting and forecasting succeeds when it brings together two very different perspectives of the organization and finds an effective meeting point. Obviously, it needs to help the organization move forward in a strategic direction; but to become a plan that staff can buy into and implement; it also needs to be realistic and achievable. Above all, don’t forget that a realistic, well-thought-out budget is essential to the firm’s financial success.