Unconventional Apple: Customer Focused to the Core

By Aaron Taylor

On Monday, Lee Frederiksen wrote a post describing how high growth firms often employ counterintuitive strategies, allowing a company like WebMD to outperform a market phenom like Google. Today, I’d like to talk about a company that has performed far better even than WebMD — a company, by the way, that is known for charting its own course and defying conventional wisdom.

Two weeks ago Apple became the second-largest company in the world by market value (behind ExxonMobil). In the three and a half years since it first introduced the iPhone, the company’s stock price has tripled — an amazing achievement for a company its size.

In a recent post to the O’Reilly technology blog, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mark Sigal discussed the way Apple approaches market segmentation from an entirely different angle than its competition:

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Shrink to Grow: Counterintuitive Strategy for Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frekeriksen, Ph.D.

We all know about the stunning success of Google. But there is a firm that has outperformed Goggle in the stock market after coming back from the death bed. And it all started by shrinking. This is a tale with a lesson for many professional services firms.

Counterintuitive Strategy

Most professional services firms seem to believe that the best way to grow is by offering a greater range of services to a growing range of customers. After all, isn’t diversification a good thing? We don’t want to have all of our eggs in one basket, do we?

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A New Way to Find and Sell Services: Crowdsourcing

By Sean McVey

The term crowdsourcing is defined as outsourcing a service to a crowd of providers.  For example, in the graphic design industry a new crop of web-based services allow small business owners to submit a project to a group of designers.  The idea is that a crowd of workers will produce to a wider range of options at a lower cost. (Of course, what you gain in short-term value you may very well lose in relevance and sophistication. How does a faceless crowd of designers understand the nuances of your business, for instance?)

Now the crowdsourcing concept is being applied to the consulting industry. Whinot.com offers up a gallery of consultants to collaborate with businesses.  Here’s how their process works:

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7 Branding Blunders That Will Cost You Time, Money and Lost Opportunity

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Branding (or re-branding) your professional services firm can be tricky.  After all, your people are your product and they are not subject to “brand control” in the same way a box of breakfast cereal is.  Further, most professional services firms are run by technical experts, not marketing mavens.  So, it’s not surprising that professional services firms are prone to branding missteps.

Our experience and research have uncovered seven common issues that we have documented in a white paper. These common missteps can derail firms: costing them new clients, eating into profitability, and adding countless headaches. Fortunately, they are all avoidable if you know what to look for.

Here is a rundowb of the 7 biggest branding blunders (love that alliteration!):

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The Amazing Story of High Growth, High Value Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Today marks the launch of our new book, Spiraling Up: How to Build a High Growth, High Value Professional Services Firm. To say that the book is an accident is perhaps overstating the case. But this much is true: it is not what we set out to do three years ago. No, our goals were much more modest. We just wanted to grow our firm. And being marketers, we reasoned that the first thing to do was to look more systematically at our target client group.

That first study of 100 professional services firms started a chain of events that led to a book that describes an extraordinary group of firms that outperform their peers on almost every measure of success.  They grow 9 times faster, are 50% more profitable and command a premium valuation in the marketplace. And amazingly, they do it while spending less than average on sales and marketing.

We didn’t start out looking for high performers, nor did we have any pet theories to prove. We just wanted to see what our target clients needed. But as we analyzed the data from the first study, we came across a group of fast growing firms. We isolated what they were doing differently, but were left with a big question: So what?

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Hand to Mouth Marketing

By Lee W. Fredericksen, Ph.D.

Every once in a while you come across a phrase that really captures the essence of what a business situation is all about.  “Bootstrap Financing” or “Gorilla Marketing” are a couple of examples that come to mind.  I just heard a new one that I can’t resist sharing.

It’s “hand to mouth marketing.”  When I heard it from my son Nathan, I asked him where he had first heard it.  He responded that he had “just made it up” to describe the story I had been regaling him with. Of course, I immediately told him that I was stealing it. (So if you’ve heard the term somewhere else, Nathan, you are so busted.)

Here is the story that defines the term.  I had just received a call from a prospect that had just awarded us a major rebranding project.  It was notable for a couple of reasons.

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