A relative of mine recently returned from an eye-wateringly expensive, two week management course in Switzerland. Of several ‘big takehomes’ he enthused about, one was not a formal part of the course at all, but an aside made by a lecturer. Asked to name a trend that he thought would be central in the battle to add value and increase margins, he answered “simplicity”. By way of example, he cited the iPod which, despite being many times the price of some rival products, has triumphed because it is so instinctively easy to use; no instruction manual required. Compare that with, he suggested, his new printer, for which the manual was both necessary and heavier than the product itself, and you start to see his point.
But does the same apply to professional services? I think so. You might say this is obvious - a service is just that, and no service if it is not simple to use. In practice though, opportunities for greater simplicity abound - and clients will favour those who embrace them. Here are some that spring to mind:
‘Non-fixed’ fixed fee arrangements
Clients awarding annually-reviewed contracts for significant volumes of work (I have litigation primarily in mind here, but similar contracts arise in many fields) really, really want fixed fees. In fact, what they want even more is a fixed total annual cost. You, on the other hand, know full well that conscientious professionals are motivated by being properly paid to do a proper job. Consequently, fixed fees discourage initiative and drive away star performers. In other words, in asking for certainty where none exists, clients are pushing their suppliers to follow a course that is not in their own best interests.
Surely though, creating certainty and reconciling differing financial incentives is what risk markets have been doing for decades? Could not a third party take on the risk, paying the professionals for their time, charging the client a fixed fee and, on average, taking a modest cut for doing so? The third parties would also, over time, develop a broader and more accurate picture of which firms delivered true value for money than any one client could obtain - potentially a great service to the industry concerned.
Website homepages each client can personally customise
Large firms rightly have a single website to emphasise their size and strength and, up to a point to keep things simple. The problem is that this can make it hard for clients focused on one field and using just one or two departments, to find them. Given that the most common reason clients return to your website is to get contact details, this is a real obstacle. One solution would be to take a leaf out of the BBC’s book - allow clients to customise their homepage of your site to show, for example, your team’s contact details, your sector’s news and the client area login, encouraging familiarity and contact.
Use of technology such as conference calls and webinars
I recently dropped in on a training session of the Environmental Law Foundation to hear Steve Shaw of Local Works (www.localworks.org) talking to a room full of our volunteers from all over the country about the Sustainable Communities Act. His talk was fascinating and, as a ‘kick-off’, I think delivering it in person and getting the volunteers together was the right thing to do. But it was also expensive, the travel fares alone running into hundreds of pounds. In contrast, the cost of conference calls has now been cut to pretty much zero (see www.powwownow.com, for example) whilst delivering a lecture via the internet requires only basic equipment (and, possibly the greatest challenge, a truly quiet room). No wonder webinars (which combine the two, so a lecture can be given and questions asked by the audience) are taking off. Suddenly, attending a training session becomes easy, quick and inexpensive, i.e., simple.
Getting to you
Useful as technology might be, people still like to get together. This was brought home to a construction client of mine when it moved from a town centre to a business park location. Though quite properly focused on how its staff might react (such moves tend to be unpopular), what the directors underestimated was quite how enthusiastically its clients would respond to its offices being right beside a mid-UK motorway junction (construction people are constantly on the road). Suddenly meetings were agreed to more readily and clients started dropping in unexpectedly, asking if they could borrow a desk and a proper internet connection for an hour or two. Now they occasionally even ask if they can borrow a room for internal meetings. All this valuable contact and goodwill, just because getting to them is so simple.
Simplify your written English
The Campaign for Plain English might have been going for many years now, but its work is far from done. Just this week, I have been helping a client with a response to an invitation to tender which is so complex that it took literally 20 minutes just to work out how best to identify an earlier question (as in ’see our answer to question 1, section…er…’). Confusing language deters good clients, good job applicants and good business. It’s worth the extra effort.
Are your work processes draining value through excessive complexity?
A core step in Christian Schumacher’s Work Structuring methodology (www.work-structuring.com) is the Transformational Analysis. This looks at each step in your work process and questions how much value it is adding. Storage (e.g. matters waiting in your in-tray) scores lowest whilst actions that go to the heart of your firm’s raison d’être (such as the creative steps in solving a client’s problem) score most highly. Typically, many of the lower level steps can be removed, simultaneously simplifying your life and improving productivity.
That note of caution, however: when delivering simplicity to clients (and colleagues), make sure you get the credit for it. Simplicity is as blindingly obvious in hindsight, as it is devilishly hard to achieve in practice. So put your markers down, clearly, along the way.
© Michael Taite May 2009
