In Search of a Referral, Not Another Project
I had an interesting conversation with a client recently. As we were wrapping up a successful project, he said something to the effect of, “Your team did such a great job. I’m sorry there aren’t any follow-on projects.”
I gave him a somewhat perplexed look as if to say, “Why are you apologizing to me? We delivered the project because we said we would, not because we were trying to get another contract.” That’s when it hit me: he had worked with so many consultants over the years who were simply “farming” for their next gig that he assumed that’s what we were doing too.
Upon realizing what was going on, I laughed, took a deep breath, and told the client: “I don’t want another project. I want a referral!”
Allow me to explain.
While many consulting companies rely heavily on follow-on work with existing clients for their financial security, we have a different approach. In fact, it’s in our name! FlexPoint’s entire existence is centered around the idea of helping clients at “inflection points” in their journeys and then empowering and equipping them to succeed on the next phase of their journey without us. We give our clients resources, training, and coaching to master the basics of business transformation themselves and target our consulting services on the contribution areas that will level up our clients’ transformation. In other words, we’re trying “envision, empower, and equip” instead of “landing and expanding.”
Now, it’s not to say all our engagements are short or that we don’t build strong, lasting partnerships that result in follow-on work. We of course have clients asking us to help them on longer-term initiatives and to help them address challenges in other parts of their business. In both cases, our partnerships with clients can easily span across multiple years. But the point is that our business model is not wholly dependent on signing never-ended extensions and change orders.
Rather, we do great work for our clients and trust that they will help us grow by referring us to colleagues, friends, family, and even competitors who may be facing similar challenges that require some of our superpowers – strategic planning and roadmapping, technology transformation advisory and implementation leadership, organizational change management, and interim leadership support, to name a few.
Read on to learn more about Why, What, and How our unique consulting model works. And if you’ve had a great experience working with FlexPoint in the past, don’t be shy about referring us to others in your network!
The Why
But why do we choose the more difficult path of doing empowering, targeted work for a larger number of clients vs. doing ongoing contractor support for a smaller number of clients?
Three big ideas drive our work:
1: Our clients are the best stewards of their long-term success. We partner with clients who are seeking a trusted advisor when navigating change. Our goal is to empower our clients with an actionable plan to guide them through the hurdles of implementing change. We develop this plan together by co-creating a vision and then teaching clients how to fish, so they’re not stuck with consultants forever.
2: People are the key drivers of change; technology and process follow. Before focusing on technology solutioning, we take a deep dive into the “people stuff.” We prioritize human-centered elements like change management, agile coaching, and experience design. With an aligned team of stakeholders, clients are better prepared to deploy improved technology and processes.
3: We strive to know and value our clients and teammates as people. As advocates for our clients’ people, we help clients create lasting change for their organization. We truly care about what’s in the best interest of our clients’ team and their business, so we take the time to get to know them before we start pitching ideas.
The What
And so, we provide a spectrum of business transformation services to empower our clients at various points in their growth journeys, from vision and strategy through confident delivery:
Defining a vision, strategy, and course for the future: we offer consulting services like strategic assessments, transformation roadmaps, and CXO quick start advisory.
Empowering and equipping teams to lead through change: we work with clients on projects like change readiness assessments, program health checks, and change management advisory.
Building a strong foundation for sustained excellence: we offer specialized transformation services like IT modernization planning, operational transformation, business process optimization, and software vendor selections.
Providing reliable collaboration to achieve the ambitious goals our clients are after: we often fill key roles for our clients’ most important initiatives, like program and project management, agile transformation coach, and fractional chief of staff.
Ultimately, we aim to provide the consulting services that will level up our clients’ success, now and in the future.
The How
Okay, you may be thinking, that all sounds great. But how do you accomplish this? Four critical areas come to mind.
First, we hire rockstar talent with a proven track record of delighting clients.
I have very high standards for the folks I bring on to the team. Each of us has a different business transformation expertise profile; the constant across the team is delivering well for clients day in and day out. Our clients can attest: the FlexPoint team deeply cares about doing what was promised, and then some.
Second, we create compelling frameworks, models, and templates to use in serving clients.
With a top-notch team assembled, we combine our various areas of expertise to create easily customizable materials. When we have a bit of extra time, we put together frameworks that have worked well in the past. We share starter materials across teams – for instance, change playbooks and migration checklists – along with coaching for how best to use them.
This is fueled by a deep curiosity throughout the team (we genuinely want to learn and grow!), as well as incredibly high standards for delivery. We combine our models and templates in different ways for each client – having them ready to go allows us to focus on what is unique to the team we’re working with, and then respond quickly as we take in new information.
Third, we nurture an aspirational culture that collectively levels us all up.
At FlexPoint, we’re really clear that we want to do our work in a way that does right by our clients and our teammates. To that end, I worked with early team members to identify seven elements of our aspirational culture, and we strive to get as close to achieving these each day as we can.
At FlexPoint Consulting, we strive to:
Empower & Enable Others: We position our clients to succeed after we leave and provide actionable feedback to team members.
Give More Than We Take: We go the extra mile to ensure our clients are successful and generate energy for the team.
Create Clarity: We turn chaos and confusion into clarity and alignment, and we provide clear expectations.
Deliver On Promises: We do what we say we’re going to do and earn trust through consistent performance.
Be Selfless & Authentic: We respect and include others, while embracing our unique identity as a firm.
Be Humble and Curious: We seek to understand before we start pitching ideas, and we seek to learn and grow always.
Do the Right Thing: We take care of our clients and our team members. And, above all, we work to make Mom proud.
Describing our target observable behaviors enriches hiring decisions, anchors feedback discussions, and helps us guide project decision-making.
As an example of the final item, we had a software selection project hit a decision-making snag late in the timeline. We decided that the Do the Right Thing approach was to facilitate additional discussions and demonstrations without charging the client more. All told, the FlexPoint team supported this client in the extra consideration effort for five months beyond the original contract. The client sponsor was grateful for our un-billed consulting services, and we were happy to have acted in line with our aspirational culture values in doing right by them.
Finally, we truly engage employees in building this business and this team.
From an employee engagement and retention perspective, I explicitly give permission to all team members (and remind the team several times a year) that each and every FlexPoint Consulting team member is encouraged to call us back to our values if they think we’re not striking the right balance. In moments of tradeoffs and tough decisions, you’ll hear me and other team members say something like, “the Humble and Curious approach would be…” or “let me remind us that we want to Do the Right Thing, even if it takes more time.”
Those are crucial moments for us to lean into what we’ve agreed is important to us, and I am careful to support people who step out and remind us all of our cultural priorities.
The results? Our employee engagement survey has an average score of 4.58 of 5 and a net promoter score of 10 of 10. We’re proud of the company and the team we’re building, and it shows in the work we do for our clients.
In Closing
It’s true: I don’t want another project from our clients, I want a referral. That’s why we make a point to delight our clients so much that they will be eager to recommend us to colleagues that would benefit from business transformation consulting.
We’ve seen over the years that doing right by those around us truly will sustain an excellent business for us. And it helps us love coming to work every day, knowing that we’re contributing to critical moments in our clients’ growth journeys.