How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm

3 Keys to Unlock Purpose and Profit

Don Scales, Fran Biderman-Gross

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119621553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

We live in a values-driven world. As times change, businesses must evolve. The way that leaders have run companies for generations is no longer relevant.Today -- Purpose wins over products. Values win over features. Stories win over pitches.Everyone everywhere craves fulfillment. You must share the reason why you exist and infuse it into everything you do, in order to thrive. Many leaders see the shift in the market and make an effort to adapt. Companies quickly learn that one-off workshops and off-sites are not enough. Purpose is more than a press release. Your vision and mission statements should live in practice as well as print, and permeate through every aspect of your organization. You must close the gap between the messages you declare and the experiences you deliver. How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm shares the vital experience and valuable insights that leaders require to evolve their organizations and navigate the values-driven world we live in. •Live your purpose to stay alive and build a faithful following of clients and team members.
•Employ your authentic values as your guide through the modern market and drive profitability.
•Share meaningful stories that emotionally connect with todays clientele to transform them into tomorrows brand ambassadors. 3 keys to unlock purpose and profit will enable you to turn the obstacles of the shifting market into your greatest opportunities, soar above your competitors, and grow your revenue beyond your highest projections.

1
Create Your Three Keys

Profit is not a purpose, it is a result. To have purpose means the things we do are of real value to others.

—Simon Sinek, Start with Why

It is very easy to tell someone what you do. It is far more complex to clearly articulate why you do what you do and, most importantly, why you believe in what you do.

What you will learn in this chapter drives at the core of how to build a successful business. Purpose is the first of the Three Keys that support your brand. Your purpose is why you do what you do, and you must uncover it before you can articulate the values you believe in and the story of who you are. Before you declare what you have to offer the world, explain why it matters.

Correctly defined, purpose captures the essence of your business existence, ultimately driving deep emotional connections with your clients and employees. When both of these synergies occur, as a leader you have a 360-degree feedback loop for any decision you want to make. More tangibly, it is a litmus test for streamlining the entire operation of your company, whether you are a startup venture or an established multinational corporation. Correctly defined purpose ensures that your operations—from the services you offer to the clients you target and accept, the employees you hire, and even the vendors you choose—all match a particular standard and ethos.

At the same time, purpose alone does not form the foundation of your brand. It is only the beginning of the journey. To build a rock-solid foundation, purpose must be combined with comprehensive values and a cohesive story. In this chapter, we'll explore all Three Keys: purpose, values, and story.

Before getting into the Three Keys, let's understand more about what your brand actually is to begin with.

Understand Your Brand Foundation

Every company requires a foundation for all of its communications, both internal and external. If not, communications are ad hoc, uncoordinated, risk confusing the market at large, and immediately commoditize your product or service. This is why the communications foundation must come from the brand foundation. Without it, you are just a ship adrift in the middle of the ocean without a compass.

A well-defined brand has two parts:

• Verbal: sets the meaning and messaging for all communications
• Visual: represents the brand visually with logo, color, typefaces, and the like

Companies need to establish the verbal part of the brand before they can begin to design the visual representation. The verbal brand informs the logo. If a business hasn't fully defined and developed their verbal part first, they are planting the seeds of failure. The business might end up with a beautiful design but it will lack meaning. This is one of the reasons why organizations change their logo so often, especially in the early years: a complete lack of strategic clarity.

Don on Fran's Process: “This is why Fran asks her clients deep, fundamental questions about their purpose and values before beginning any visual design work—and ultimately, this is why her logo design and global rebranding for Investis Digital was spot on. The logo was not just a pretty design; it had meaning, and context connected to our purpose, which made it the obvious choice.”

Conventional wisdom believes a brand foundation is for external use, mainly marketing (covered in Chapter 6). Many believe the brand foundation is the corporate logo and style guide, with rules about fonts and color. This is only partially right—those things are all parts of branding. But what we are talking about here is comprehensively different. A business does not transform itself from inside out because of a pretty logo and style guide; it takes investment in countless deep conversations, strategic decisions, and the ability of leadership to embrace change for themselves and their business. This is what purpose does: catapult strategic change in order to align all aspects of the business, creating new profitable relationships and collaborations.

For instance, if you got out from behind your desk right this second and asked each employee, “What does our organization mean to you?” the responses would be robotic at best. They would most likely be unable to recite any part of what the company supposedly believes: the vision, mission, purpose, and values. If this is the case in your company, you have some critical strategic work to do. Sure, you may have a guide that articulates your vision, mission, purpose, and values. Most likely if you do, these are all described inside a brand book of sorts. The real question is: “Are you and the rest of your team living them every single day, and using them to inform every single decision?”

The answer: of course not.

Understand the Three Keys

The brand foundation every services business requires to compete in a 21st-century hypercompetitive world is composed of the Three Keys—purpose, values, and story. Done right, these provide the basis of everything you do in your business, and are infused in every communication, process, and internal and external interaction. In order to be strategic, you must place the brand foundation at the center of your business. To begin the process, you have to understand what your firm is all about and why you are even in business. You cannot properly lead an organization, design its structure, execute sales and marketing, or hire the right people without a brand foundation. Literally, you cannot. You might get lucky once or twice, but eventually, your luck will run out and the house of cards will collapse.

With a brand foundation strategically implemented across all aspects of the organization, you can start leading your organization in ways that bring increased productivity and communication, which in turn translate into greater profits. Throughout this book, we show you how the Three Keys eventually emerge in every successful business and provide insight into why and how you should be implementing them into your business, too. The appendix walks you through the process of identifying and defining your purpose, values, and story.

Purpose: The First Key

Purpose is the starting point for an organization, regardless of size. Purpose acts as an anchor that guides everyday decisions and behaviors. You start your brand foundation with your purpose: it becomes the magnet that attracts the right people, partners, and profits while repelling all the wrong ones. A clearly defined purpose improves communication, which ensures increasingly strategic sales and, ultimately, faster closing rates. Purpose is the key to elevating your B-players into A-players, and A-players into the few superstars who drive 80 percent of the business.

Your purpose is the fundamental linchpin for driving the massive change or exponential impact you seek in this world. In “The Business Case for Purpose,” the Harvard Business Review defined organizational purpose as “an aspirational reason for being which inspires and provides a call to action for an organization and its partners and stakeholders and provides benefit to local and global society.”¹ Purpose redefines and focuses the things you do every day to achieve a strategic end result that speaks to your core beliefs. To compete as a professional service company in the 21st century, you need to be able to clearly articulate your purpose. When you do that, the business gains strategic clarity about what it does and whom it is done for, and the end result the leadership expects.

Purpose has three elements:

• Your Why
• A bold vision
• A compelling mission

Why

Looking at the way businesses communicate, we see a clear pattern. Most companies first talk about what they do—the product or service they offer. Next, to some extent, they talk about their How—the differentiators. What they believe makes them different from their competitors. And finally, very few ever get to their Why—their belief, cause, or overall purpose. In his seminal work, Start with Why, Simon Sinek identified this as the critical missing piece for building successful companies with compelling offerings.

Great companies start with their purpose, or Why, then move to the How, and finally explain the What. Conventional wisdom is the diametric opposite. Yet, how human beings are hardwired is exactly WHY-HOW-WHAT, not WHAT-HOW-WHY. Since your Why, or purpose, is so critical to your brand foundation and takes the primary role in your communication, it is critical to dig deep to uncover your authentic purpose.

Vision and Mission

Vision and mission are by far two of the most frequently misunderstood business terms. Let's get some q...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Create Your Three Keys
• 2 Values-Based Culture
• 3 Leadership
• 4 Hire Leaders
• 5 The Purposefully Structured Business
• 6 Messages Matter: Marketing and Communications
• 7 Clients Matter
• 8 Mergers and Acquisitions
• 9 Measure Your Purpose
• Conclusion: Use the Three Keys
• Appendix: The Three Keys to a Purposeful Brand Foundation
• Acknowledgments
• Fran's Acknowledgments
• Don's Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement