What is Intentional Growth?

… and why is intentional growth such an important component towards a healthy growth culture for your firm?

Our experience has shown that firms that have a strong growth culture generally grow at a faster rate than peer firms over time.

Firms that have a strong growth culture typically have professionals who work well together and have a high level of trust among all team members. 

But these firms also have a common focus around intentional growth using a common approach and methodology to organize teams around successfully attracting more profitable clients and by expanding existing clients in more profitable relationships.

The core to this approach revolves around understanding the needs of clients and prospects in each of the firm’s core target markets.  This “outside-in” approach requires professionals to be intellectually curious about problems and/or opportunities that these clients/prospects may be facing.  

Their professionals can then leverage topics and issues to engage their contacts to connect with them – discovering what matters to them.

Applying “third level listening” skills, they have a dialogue with stakeholders at clients/prospects using high gain questions to discover even more, increasing their relevance along the way.  

The goal is to get to the “white-board”, bringing together decision makers from the client/prospect and subject matter experts from their firm to collaborate on possible solutions to the issues that are being faced.

Practice teams play a role in the process, as they help their professionals do through a disciplined targeting process to ensure that account teams are spending their time and effort where the payoff is high.  

And firm leadership reinforces this activity with tone at the top, providing guidance to practice team leaders, and prioritizing firm leaders to align resources with opportunities.

I have helped multiple firms create and implement a comprehensive intentional growth strategy seen the results at firms I have been associated with.  Each of these firms experiences sustainable growth rates in excess of peers, providing increased profits and opportunities for their professionals.