The Practitioner: Small steps
The Practitioner's firm manages its own expectations
THE BUZZ PHRASE over the past few weeks seems to be ‘Small Steps’.
We have a few issues on the go in the offices at the moment and ‘small steps’ seems to be the answer to all of them!
Issue no 1:
Staff.
Some of the staff are faltering, cracking under the pressure of too much work, and are on the verge of walking out, I fear. Managing them to realise that by pushing them we are giving them an opportunity to improve themselves and develop. Unfortunately, recently it has been like pulling teeth!
Who was it who said that the job would be easy if it wasn’t for clients and staff?
That leads us on to Issue No 2:
Clients.
New clients.
We seem to be having a big push recently on trying to win new clients, lots of new marketing being carried out and ‘small steps’ is our top-secret strategy.
Rather than spend our marketing budget (and more) on one particular thing we have decided to take small steps into lots of different markets.
They include, small adverts in specialist trade press, board advertising at a few local cricket clubs, golf club advertising, and we have even put some budget spend aside for a social media expert to manage the social media side of things for us. Believe me, for the senior partner to agree to that was not just a small step but a MASSIVE step in the right direction.
Existing clients.
I always get concerned that while concentrating on winning new clients we are taking our eye off the ball when it comes to taking care of our existing clients. It brings me back to the staff issues we have been having lately I guess.
If we can develop the staff enough by encouraging them to take small steps then they will soon be able to assist with client care and not just number-crunching sets of accounts.
Making the client accept a new face as their main point of contact is a challenge in itself.
Oh well, small steps…