Our first gamble on hiring great talent
In his fifteenth article for The Consulting Balance, Mark shares how employing a senior member they couldn’t actually afford, was the right thing to do.
When you’re on a tight budget, logic dictates that you shouldn’t spend money on expensive things. But does the same go for investing in people?
In 2017 we were working our way through a myriad of challenges that had a direct impact on our bottom line. We had lost a large client, just started a new consulting practice, and recently saved a strategic client from almost firing us. In the midst of all of this, an opportunity popped up. Victoria Papa, an exemplary practitioner with serious credentials, became available to the market and was talking with us about joining. We didn’t actually have any guaranteed work for her, so bringing her in would be pretty risky.
As we considered it though, not hiring Vicky seemed riskier. She was based near the large, strategic client we had just saved and could easily take the lead for us. After a shaky start with them, our future with this client depended on us far exceeding their expectations. The extra work we had talked our way into was our sweet spot, but we really needed more talent to ensure we could deliver.
I discussed with Andy Lin (SVP at Nexient at the time) how much it would cost to hire Vicky if we didn’t find billable work for her. We figured we could afford about 90 days worth of coverage ourselves. If we didn’t find a role for her in the first 90 days, we’d have a real financial problem. We knew we had several possible roles, but all of them required further selling. As is often true in services, having the talent on board makes selling their role much easier, especially for someone who would lead our engagement with a large client. So we were in a bit of a catch 22.
After some head-scratching we just pulled the trigger and hired her. We were massively relieved when Vicky accepted the job, but asked to take a month off between finishing her current role and starting with us. This was quite the gift because once she signed her contract, we were able to start marketing her to clients and encouraging them to have her lead their engagements.
While we were initially worried about covering her time for the first 90 days, it turned out that we had more than one client that wanted her to join their team in a leading role. With the extra month we’d been given, we’d found her a great position before she’d even started with us. This included account lead at the client who’d called us in to fire us, and then had given us one last chance.
The gamble we took paid off in the long run
Victoria brought multiple skills that became a key part of our playbook as we started to grow the firm. First off, she had a design agency background, having worked at SapientNitro (now Publicis Sapient) for over four years. The really good design agencies have an amazing habit built into their DNA. They won’t let anything (a presentation, a design, a mood board, or even an email) leave the building unless it looks great. People who have lived in this system will become visibly agitated when they see a deliverable going out the door that has typos, ill-considered design, or incorrect branding. This really raised our game across the board and was something we started to build into our culture.
The second critical thing Vicky brought was how she’d progressed in her career as a practitioner. She had been involved in many aspects of building websites, apps, and software for clients. She knew how to do both strategy and execution for what we did. She was also a great salesperson. This combination was something that we found to be critical to our growth. The decision-makers in our client organizations were almost always practitioners themselves. They were only interested in talking to people who could go to the whiteboard and work through how to solve the problem of the day. This built a level of trust that removed a lot of friction from the selling process.
Based on the success we found here, we became much more aggressive about bringing on great talent when people became available. It was always a bit scary to hire an expensive resource without a client role for them, but every time we gave ourselves 90 days of runway, and would inevitably have them billable within the first 30.
It seems counter-productive to spend money to make money, especially when there isn’t a lot to go around. But with careful planning, a calculated risk can pay off in the long run - especially when it applies to stars who will make your business really shine.
It’s a people business – it sounds obvious when I say it, but professional services is a people business. Having amazing talent on your team will lead to clients loving your firm and wanting to work with you more. It also generates referrals to their colleagues. Whenever you get a chance to hire someone that you know is a top 10% or better talent, you should figure out how to do it.
You have to invest to get out of difficult times – when we were struggling to get the company growing and just barely breaking even, it always felt risky to invest ahead of committed revenue and projects. To get out of a business which is flat, you have to invest ahead. Any other approach will lead to slow growth at best.
Have a concrete plan – you can’t just invest without really thinking through the finances. You need to have a plan B and a plan C and be flexible enough to still succeed if neither of those work. Our initial plan was to cover 90 days of our new hire. I knew that if we got to 90 days without a billable role, I’d have a problem. Some of the options I’d have were to sell more staff augmentation type work. Not what we wanted to sell, but it would clear our bench a bit and give us room to carry the new person. A second option would have been to cut some direct expenses. These could be marketing, travel, or other non headcount expenses that we could pause for a few months. Again, not what we would want to do, but it would buy us more time for a few months if we needed it.
Practitioner-led account management wins – I can’t comment enough on how much having practitioners leading our account management and selling more work to clients was key to our growth. Our buyers were sophisticated and they wanted to talk to and buy from someone who could not only keep up with them, but lead them on solving the challenges they were facing.
