Ask the owner of a professional services firm what is holding it back and you will usually get a quick, confident answer. New work is slow. The website is tired. Partners are stretched. Fees have not moved in years. Each of these is real. The trouble is that they are rarely the cause. They are what the real problem looks like from the outside.
Symptoms are easy to see
A redesigned website will not help if the firm cannot say who it serves best. A new hire will not ease the pressure if the work is badly organised. More marketing will not lift profit if fees do not cover the true cost of the work. In each case the visible problem is attached to something underneath it, and money spent on the symptom does not move the firm.
This is why so many plans end up in a drawer. They list a dozen sensible actions, none of which is the one that matters most, so effort is spread thin and results are hard to see.
The issue everything else depends on
Every firm has one issue that, once fixed, makes the others easier or removes them altogether. It is not always the biggest problem and it is not always the most urgent. It is the one the rest depend on. For one firm it may be the way fees are set. For another it may be a review step that every job passes through, or the fact that one partner is the only person who can win new work.
Three questions that help you find it
- What keeps coming back? A problem you have solved more than once without it staying solved is usually a symptom of something upstream.
- If this were fixed, what else would get easier? The best candidates are the ones where the honest answer is “quite a lot”.
- What would a stranger notice that we have stopped noticing? Owners live inside their firms. An outside view is often the quickest route to the real issue.
Fix one thing properly
Once the issue is named, the discipline is to put it first and sequence everything else behind it. That can feel uncomfortable, because other problems keep shouting. But a firm that fixes one important thing properly is in a far better position than one that has started ten things and finished none.
This is the idea behind the Hexarch framework. If you would like an outside view on where your own firm’s priority might be, a first conversation is a good place to start.