How To Build An Employee-Focused Consulting Culture That Boosts Retention and Business

Most consulting firms don’t fail because of bad strategy. They stall because the founder becomes the bottleneck. Well, that’s why I wanted you to hear from John Quirk, who spent decades inside a consulting firm that grew to eight figures, built extraordinary tenure on the team, and ultimately exited. John lived through the messy middle, hiring mistakes, delivery strain, and leadership gaps, and he helped redesign the business from the inside so that it could grow without breaking.

In this episode, you’re going to learn how John shifted from founder-led execution to durable leadership systems, the exact mindset change that allowed the firm to scale past early growth ceilings, and how to build a consulting company people don’t want to leave. That’s both your employees and your clients. If you want to build a firm that creates leverage, longevity, and real optionality, not just more revenue, you’re going to get a lot out of this conversation. Enjoy.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to build an employee-first consulting culture that boosts retention.

• Using continuous employee feedback systems to improve engagement.

• Why founders should lead the hiring process to protect team performance.

• How to create repeatable training systems with a “Five Points of Excellence” framework.

• Turning delivery into growth with a “Mid-Job, Next-Job” client expansion strategy.

• How to keep delivery, sales, and recruiting in sync to prevent growth strain.

• Why “shoulder-to-shoulder” selling prevents scope creep and margin erosion.

• How to compete in an AI-driven future with soft skills and clear differentiation.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

John Quirk is a technology executive and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience. Joining PSC Group in 2004, he advanced to Partner, driving revenue to $15 million and building a “Best Places to Work” culture through his innovative “Five Points of Excellence” framework. In 2021, John successfully sold PSC to Netrix Global, where he served as VP of Modern Applications & Data Intelligence. Today, he is leveraging his expertise to build a new product bringing advanced metrics and insights to the professional services industry, and is a coach in the Clarity Coaching Program.

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Hey John, welcome.

Thank you. Michael, how are you?

I am great and even better to be with you on this call. I’ve been really enjoying having you as part of the Clarity Coaching Program as one of our coaches. On the back of what you’ve accomplished, it is tremendous, and that’s really what I want to dive into today. I want to have you share your journey and what you went through in building and being part of a consulting business that was generating multimillions per year. Through your involvement, your team, and everything that you’ve done, you added millions more per year in that business. So I think your perspective and experience is something that all of our listeners and everyone joining us will really benefit tremendously from.

Well, great, and I’m happy to share, and I love being part of your team. You never get to any point in life without having a lot of people help you along the way. I view this coaching and working with other people really as a great way to give back and to share experiences because I was touched and I’m successful because of so many other people. So, yeah, let’s jump into it.

Love it. Well, I want to go back to PSC, which was the company that you were part of that ultimately was acquired. What recurring pattern did you see in that firm, or even thinking about more broadly other consulting firms, that you feel prevents them from breaking through from that early-stage growth to a more durable kind of delivery and leadership structure? What comes to mind?

Well, PSC specifically was a few things. It was an ongoing entity when I went to work there in 2004. I worked there for eight years before we bought it from the founders. We went through evolutions of what we wanted to be and the kinds of things we were offering. We were primarily a technology consulting company. The real breakthrough came when myself and my partners made the decision that we wanted to be a very employee-focused organization.

It’s easy, especially in the tech consulting world, to fall into this staffing model. People leave, you hire another one. The cost of losing someone and having to replace them is deep. It’s not only expensive in dollars; it’s culturally expensive and leadership-wise expensive. We wanted to make that change. A lot of what that means is really listening to what people have to say. It’s easy as a leader to give lip service to the idea that we’re an open book and we want to hear all of your ideas. However, it’s also easy to find yourself shooting them down very quickly when people have ideas because maybe you’ve tried it already. We were there for a long time, and we tried a lot of things, but you still have to encourage people to speak up.

We did that through a variety of ways. We set almost immediately a goal of being one of the fifty best places in Chicago to work. We were based in suburban Chicago. That involved an anonymous employee survey that we started doing. The results at first were a little eye-opening. We weren’t anywhere close to a top fifty firm, but we worked on those things, and we were very open in how we communicated with the employees about them. By the time we exited, our average employee tenure with us was nine and a half years in a technical consulting business, and the culture was fantastic. We made that list seven years in a row of being one of the best places to work. Again, that was based on what the employees thought and felt.

[05:05] – Use Continuous Employee Feedback Systems to Improve Engagement

I want to go deeper into that. So I love this idea of the survey. Maybe one question that people might have is what were you looking for in that survey? Or what kind of questions did you ask and collect, and how often were you running that survey?

The first survey was actually from the company that was deciding the fifty best places to work. We applied for it. You send them your roster, and they anonymously send them. It was very detailed. There were maybe a couple of hundred questions on it. Then we shared the results with everyone and said, “Well, here are the things that we’re going to work on and fix.” We did that every single year.

We also, for a pretty long period of time, used a tool – I don’t even know if it’s around anymore – called TINYPulse. We could send out one question every couple of weeks. We also set up employee suggestion boxes and things like that. It became such an integral part of our culture and so eye-opening as an owner because what we were finding is employees weren’t asking for double their pay or twice as much vacation. They were like, “Hey, could we have another water fountain in the back half of the office so we don’t have to walk all the time?” or “It would be nice to have more Kleenex boxes around.”

The one that really made a difference is we got very low scores initially on our community involvement and philanthropic work, which we were surprised by because we were actually giving a lot of money to the community. However, the employees didn’t know about it. So what we did instead is we said, “Here’s how much money we’re going to give every year. Put a committee together, and you guys decide what to do.” And they did. They were all sort of team-building things where we would go off and work at homeless shelters and things like that. It was really a culture builder.

I can see how Kleenex to community is compounding. Over time, these things that individually might seem quite small really do add up. At what point do you think this type of initiative makes sense in terms of the lifecycle or stage of a company? If a consulting founder is listening to this right now and they have three people or five people or ten people, do you think this applies to them?

Yes!

That was quick! Would you change the approach in any way for a smaller size company?

I think with a smaller company you have to find ways to include people in your decision-making process. You don’t have to let them make the decision, but you need to talk to them about what decisions I or we need to make, what are their considerations, and why did we choose to do something this way.

The reason that you want to start as soon as you can is because, like we talked about, every employee is critically valuable. The longer you build and the more you grow, having those people who have been there for a long time actually becomes a selling point.

I’ll tell you another little story. The company PSC was founded in 1990, and the first employee that the two founders ever hired was a gentleman by the name of Jeff Smith. Jeff was still there when I got there in 2008. We kept Jeff on until he retired, which was more than twenty-five or thirty years. When you can talk to people in an interview about taking care of people and how they can really build a life with your firm as the foundation of it, I think that becomes a powerful message.

[08:54] – Upgrade Recruiting and Hiring to Protect Team Performance

So, John, it sounds like everyone that came in performed exceptionally well. That may not have necessarily been the case. You often hear there are kind of A players, B players, and C players. How did you manage that or think about that in terms of people in the organization that are not performing at the highest level? There clearly are people that are performing; they’re the A players. What was your approach to dealing with people that might not be in the A-player level just yet, in terms of C and B players?

There are a couple of things there. One, because we came into this as it was already an ongoing entity and we were trying to change the focus a little bit, we did a lot of turnover early in the first couple of years. Then we really worked on our hiring process. The first way that I did that is I hired an outstanding recruiter who worked really closely with me to understand what we were looking for. The second thing that we did is, probably for ten years I did every first interview because if people weren’t going to pass my test, I didn’t want later to be dealing with managers who were saying, “Oh, we should have hired this guy,” or “I want to hire him.”

I just want to stop you for one second and ask a question on this because a lot of people might take a different approach and say, “Well, I’m high up in this organization. Is this the best use of my time to talk to somebody at the first stage of the interview?” They would do the opposite. They would maybe have a few people lower in the organization do those initial interviews, and then only when they’ve passed that do they come to you. So what was the thinking or the logic behind putting your time first and having potentially quite a few interviews?

Making the mental switch that you want to be an employee-focused company and understanding how harmful a bad hire can be, a misfit- it’s draining, time-consuming, and expensive. I did ask myself the question of what’s the best way that I can be spending my time, and I decided this was it. I had a great recruiter, so she did a lot of the awesome screening upfront, and then we trained everybody on how to interview. There was a lot that goes into that. But if you’re in the people business, I’m not sure what you think you’re doing that’s more important than making sure you have the right people on the bus.

Yeah. I heard a saying recently that if you’re under one million dollars per year in your business, you should be focused as a founder on sales, but anything above a million, you really should be in the business of recruiting. And that means the people business.

And as a founder, you have to do a lot of things. So, yeah, it wasn’t the only thing that I was doing, but it was a priority. Once an interview hit my schedule, that time was blocked out.

One situation I think a lot of founders find themselves in as they build a team is that they will have some people on the team that are performing exceptionally well and others that are not performing maybe as well. There can be a bit of this danger of overreliance on just a star performer. How did you manage that? I’m sure that’s a situation that you encountered as well. I’m just wondering what you did to ensure that there was never overreliance on any one person in any function of the business?

Well, I’d like to say that there was never that overreliance, but there always is. There are always your top performers. But I think certainly mentally, and often actually writing it down, I always had in my head at least a contingency plan for what was going to happen if this person left or that person left. When I got to somewhere I didn’t have a contingency plan, then one of my priorities became getting a contingency plan. I have to train somebody else up. I have to think about spreading that work out more.

You’re going to lose people, and as you get bigger, there’s always a sense of dread. “Oh boy, we just lost our top engineer or our best sales guy is moving out of state.” But we recovered from every one of those. As you do it more, you can keep pointing that out to people. Really what it does is it creates opportunities for people to step up into, which goes back to why hiring the right people even at the lowest levels is critically important.

[13:34] – Create Repeatable Training Systems With the Five Points of Excellence

You have this Five Points of Excellence kind of program. I’d love if you could just walk us through what are the five points to begin with.

I’ll get to the five points in a second. What we did is we did a complete reorg in 2014. We moved away from practice leaders and separate practices within the firm, and we moved to what we call a consulting manager model. We sort of pooled resources. As part of all of that and getting to that, the Five Points of Excellence started out as an effort to update our employee training program.

What we ended up doing was deconstructing the business. We had areas of people, delivery, prospecting, clients, and discovery, which is innovation, meaning how you are going to find new things to do. Each one of those then had five specific curriculums in them. So there’s these twenty-five things that we needed to be doing every single day. Not necessarily in the largest amount every day, but every day somebody had to be ready to do a demo, talk to a client, deliver a project, or hire somebody.

Then we created for each one of those a program where myself or one of the other leaders in the company would run what we called awareness level training. I really wanted everybody in my company to know how the consulting business works. That’s a danger if you’re just hiring people and putting them out at clients; they don’t really understand your business. Then we created benchmarks for them so that they could become operational in some of these skills. For example, if somebody wanted to be involved in our hiring process, they had to go through our awareness level training about hiring, which was the HR stuff and my pitch on the company and that sort of thing. If they completed all of those, we would then have them sit in and listen to interviews. Then we would sit in and listen to them do interviews. Once they hit that benchmark where they sort of became independent at that, they would then be used to do that task regardless of what their title or position in the company was.

Was this the employee raising their hand and saying, “Hey, I want to get more involved, maybe I’m in marketing, but I want to get more involved in the hiring,” and they would kind of self-select?

Yes, it was all- None of those courses were required. It was self-selecting, but it was also part of our culture. Every time you got one of those independent levels, you earned a star point. We had five-star consultants, and we had a board up in the lobby with their pictures and number of stars. We gave them out at quarterly meetings. It motivated people to want to do that.

But what it also did was created career paths without creating hierarchy. Instead of saying, “Well, I have to be a manager, I have to do this,” we could show them different ways that we could help them improve their skills. Improving those skills was also helping us as a business. It was mutually beneficial. When you’re an employee-focused company, that has to be at the center of everything: what’s the employee getting out of this?

And did you find that the employees were wanting to take on and develop these new skills and get into these new areas because the driver was really them wanting to do that work and to learn new things, or was it again a career ladder move of being able to increase their compensation, earn more, or something else?

I think it was probably a little bit of both. There were people who were truly interested in some of those things and wanted to learn them. What we also recognized right away was that there was sort of this peer competition that would go on at a quarterly meeting. Someone would earn a star point for something and somebody else would beeline asking, “How did they get that? What do I have to do to get it?” So that worked really well.

Where did that concept come from? I mean, it sounds like a very powerful idea. Where do the seeds for that begin?

It was a working group. We were challenged by the founders to re-establish the training programs that we had. They’d sort of gotten a little bit old and stale and fallen by the wayside. In those meetings, the concept of thinking about what this looks like from a consultant’s point of view rather than from on high came up. It was really a great collaborative effort amongst a half a dozen people.

[18:26] – Turn Delivery Into Growth With “Mid-Job, Next-Job” Client Expansion

If a consulting founder could strengthen one capability internally to really help them to prepare for greater growth, what capability do you feel creates the biggest impact or the multiplier effect? What would you tend to point somebody to? Or if they were thinking about, “I want to develop myself to build this business,” how do you counsel them to think through that?

One of the things that was sort of in the DNA of PSC when I even got there was this concept of ‘Mid-Job, Next-Job’. We wanted everybody in the company to understand the importance of finding work and of selling work. Not that they had to go out and be cold calling, but that as they were working on a project for a few months at a client, that halfway through that, it would be really good if they could ask about other projects that were going on or other things that the company might want to do and be feeding that back into our sales staff, the account manager, or the executives.

As you start to open up and share things with employees that you trust, like what your pipeline looks like and what the upcoming bench looks like, that stuff doesn’t, in my experience, really scare people off. They like knowing what’s going on, and if they know what’s going on and can help, I like that. So I think it would be really having them understand how important it is not only to meet a deliverable and do a good job on this project, but to really use all the soft skills to become a trusted advisor to the client so that the client will be looking for the next project to put you on because they don’t want you to leave or they don’t want this team to leave. That’s how you do it. I think that’s one of the most important things.

I think it’s huge. I mean, just from a business perspective where there’s that common saying that your current clients are your best source of revenue. Very often I think, especially early-stage founders, have this mindset that their business will grow from outside, meaning they always have to bring in new clients. But it’s such a gold mine to find ways to add more value to existing clients. So I think that’s really great advice.

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[22:32] – Keep Delivery, Sales, and Recruiting in Sync to Prevent Growth Strain

John, can you think about a time at PSC where the delivery model got strained or you all were growing and you kind of got to a point where maybe it felt like things are going to break or there’s real tension? Can you describe what that was? And then I’m wondering, what did you do? What kind of redesign or change did you make to fix and overcome that without sacrificing quality?

I can think of two examples of that. One was when we were in the siloed practices. What we were finding is we were doing basically web and cloud technology which all started to merge together. So it didn’t make sense to have an Oracle practice versus an IBM practice because everybody wanted to know how to use Twitter Bootstrap. So there was a lot of cross-pollination that needed to happen, and we found just getting rid of that model was sort of the solution there.

More importantly, I think one way to think about the consulting business, especially in growth mode, is you have to think about it in terms of having three engines that have to be working in harmony. So you have your delivery engine, so delivery has to be going smoothly. You have your sales engine, and you have your recruiting engine. Those things need to be in sync. When they’re not in sync is when the business is pressured.

As soon as you have a project that is in trouble, now the salesperson or the account manager is trying to put out fires with the account. You’re giving away billable work perhaps, trying to make things right. Then so the salespeople, when it comes time to report back on how they’re doing with their pipeline, are like, “Pipeline? Delivery has been causing all these issues. I’ve been spending all my time with my existing clients, I can’t get any pipeline.” And then recruiting maybe had been ramped up really high, so you brought in a lot of new people. The answer there is you just have to pick one and go to work fixing it. You’re not going to fix them all at the same time. I would suggest delivery is the most important one. You have to be delivering with confidence, and part of that is you have to be judicious about the kind of work that you take on. Not all revenue is good revenue.

[25:03] – Sell Shoulder-to-Shoulder to Prevent Scope Creep and Margin Erosion

That makes so much sense because if we think about delivery as the boat, if the boat has holes, then you can put the best engine in the world on it – and I’m not an engineer, so somebody might prove me wrong on this – and at some point, you’re going to start taking on water. As we just talked about, your current clients, when you do great work, that becomes long-term relationships, that becomes referrals, that becomes more projects. So it makes a lot of sense to make sure that delivery is nailed. I guess the challenge a lot of people have is that they end up focusing too much on delivery and not enough on how do we start bringing the pipeline or growing the pipeline so that we can feed more into that. What are your thoughts? At what point or how would you counsel and suggest that a founder think about that balance between time spent on delivery and time spent on building the pipeline?

You need them both. It’s not an on-off switch. As a founder, you’re going to be busy; you’re going to be wearing all of the hats at some time. I think on the delivery side, the way ultimately that we solved that issue is we changed our selling process. Oftentimes in sales or just as a consultant engaging with a client, you feel like you’re on opposite sides of the table. “I want to get this done as fast as I can for the most money. You want me to do more work than we contracted for. Let’s battle it out.”

You, as a selling founder, should always be thinking about how do I get up and move across the table and sit shoulder-to-shoulder with my client? Let’s look across the table at the problem we’re trying to solve. Once you combine that attitude- in our sales process, we really went to selling based on how the client worked. With us doing the estimate, here’s the features they wanted, here’s the estimate. “Well, that’s too much money.” “Okay, what features don’t you want?”

If you take the client with you through the sales process and the estimating process, after we did that, I really have a hard time recalling any difficult conversations I had with clients about scope change because they were in it. They signed off on it. We would do half-day meetings in their offices to work through it. Too often you take a half-hour meeting, you go away, and you send them a proposal. I think our feeling was that if clients weren’t committed to bringing their team in to work with our team for half a day, they probably weren’t that serious about spending the million dollars on the project.

That makes a lot of sense. What’s been your experience and thoughts on high-value customized projects and delivery versus productized offerings and creating more standardized, repeatable offerings?

PSC did custom application development. We tried half a dozen times to productize offerings. We had some success with building out some frameworks of projects that would sort of act as almost accelerators or expediters. It’s really the thing that today people are talking about being able to do with AI to create some of that repeatable work. I think it partially depends on who you’re selling to and what you’re selling. But we were doing technology projects for mid-market companies across industries. There were no two projects that were the same.

I’m sure that this is still front and center of what professional services companies are talking about right now. The push is to get away from hourly billing rates and to get to outcome-based billing. Everyone seems to think that productizing that is the right way to go. I think you need to be really sure of your product. I know we spent a lot of money and a lot of time building out one in particular that we thought was really going to be successful, and I think we sold it once.

To me, the lesson here, and you know my thoughts on this, is that I’m a very big believer that there’s no one way. There’s no best business model; there’s the best one for you. PSC, as an example, was a very successful firm, eight figures in revenue, and customization was the path. You have others that are doing very well, and I’ve interviewed other very successful founders, and one hundred percent of their business is productized. So everyone can find different ways to make it work. The key is finding the right way for you, for your model, for your business, for your team, and so forth.

The consulting umbrella is a big one. There’s lots of things that fall under that for sure.

[30:32] – Protect Consulting Margins With Executive-Level Communication Cadence

What implementation kind of mistake or delivery work-related area did you see show up that tended to erode margin or really impact efficiency or even maybe eliminate some real success of the project? Were there certain things that you’ve seen over the years, John, that really stand out to you as, “Yeah, when that happened, we really started noticing that our margin was eroded or there was some real issue related to delivery”?

Yes. And I can tell you virtually all of them were not technology-related.

What do you mean? Tell me more.

When a CIO is bringing you in to do a big technology project, they don’t expect it to go perfectly. What they do expect is to know when it’s not going perfectly, to understand why, and to understand what you’re doing about it. I feel like so many of the problems that clients point to with consulting firms are all around communication and caring and passion.

One of the things I always love to hear was from a big client, and their CIO told me the thing they loved most about PSC’s people is he felt most of the time they cared more about his business than he did. When you do that, when you communicate effectively, when you care about the client that you’re serving, you build up goodwill. So the first time that something goes wrong, they’re not ready to fire you or throw you off the boat. You have to build up that goodwill. I think you do that through honest communication.

I actually learned that lesson, and I know the day it was: April 11, 1990, because it was the day after my son was born. I had a meeting with a client that signed on for a million-dollar project. We were three weeks into it and two weeks behind. I had to go tell the vice president that. I sat down across from him, and I said, “Here’s what’s happened, here’s why we’re behind, here is what we’re going to do, and I will get back to you in a week with an update.” He was like, “Well, that’s all I need to know.” He wasn’t yelling about it or anything, and we got it back on track.

But everybody that you’re giving a status update to, they’re reporting to somebody else. So you can never make them look bad. You can’t be saying, “We’re on track, we’re on track, we’re on track,” and then two weeks into a six-month project go, “Oops, we’re going to be late,” because this person is now with their credentials on the line.

What’s just as bad as saying, “We’re on track,” if you’re not is not even saying anything, not providing the status updates. I’ve talked to several clients in the last while who are running seven-figure businesses. They’re doing very well, but as they’ve been growing their business, they themselves as founders have realized that they’re not spending the time with their key clients as much as they used to. And I think what you’re really referring to here, John, is the importance of communication. Whether it’s you, the founder, or your team members, you have a system, a process, there’s something in place that is creating that level of communication because that’s what people want most. It’s the uncertainty and the unknowns that can create the biggest issues.

Yeah, and we dealt with that in a few ways. One of the things that we established is for every significant project that we were doing, which I think we defined as a project bigger than a quarter million dollars, part of that whole process was myself and the salesperson were doing a monthly executive review. The only people from the client who were in it were the executive sponsor and, if they insisted, the project manager. It was an opportunity for them to tell me what we could do better and an opportunity for me to tell them what they could do better. Because they don’t always know what’s going on with the project team. We think we’re going to have access to a subject matter expert to help us write stories that we’re going to code, and the person is doing a hundred other things. Well, I have a chance to point that out and say if we could fix that, that would be great. They have a chance to say, “Hey, this person’s personality isn’t really coming across great in meetings.” It gives me a chance to talk to them and fix it before it becomes a problem.

And when was that implemented? I mean, was that as part of the onboarding process? Was that part of the sales process? When did you communicate to the client that this monthly meeting, this monthly touchpoint, was a requirement and part of the engagement?

It was in our sales deck. We would talk about how we communicated because in many ways, we talk about doing agile development and stuff like that. But agile is as much a communication model as it is a development model. It’s, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what I did yesterday, here’s where I’m blocked, here’s where I need help.” We sort of tried to put a lot of those philosophies to work in slightly different ways, but with our clients.

One more question about delivery and systems. Often people are very focused on delivery bringing in clients. In your mind, when’s the right time for a consulting founder to really shift focus from just doing the work or having team members do the work to really building out the systems so that the business can scale and thinking more about the hiring and those pieces? Is it based on revenue? Is it based on number of people or clients? How do you view the right time to shift from just doing the work to actually building the systems for the future of the business?

Well, it’s interesting. One of the things that I’ve been talking about with some of our clients that I’ve been coaching is even as they’re beginning to hire their first or second person, they should be thinking about the systems that they need to do that. So I think it’s an evolution. Again, I don’t think there’s a switch that you just say, “Oh, we’re worth this much in revenue, so now I’m going to just go to work and build systems.” You have to be thinking systematically from the beginning. What you don’t need to do from the beginning is be automated. But you have to have those systems. They have to be documented so that you could pass them on to someone else, or that you can automate them or refine them as you’re going along; otherwise, you end up doing the same thing half a dozen times.

[37:37] – Drive Pipeline Through Referrals, Speaking, and Thought Leadership

Let’s talk about sales, business development, the pipeline. Growing a business to eight figures and beyond obviously requires having certain systems and effective ways of generating business. What did the best practice sales approach look like in the years that you were involved with this company? What were the main paths that the team was taking to generate pipeline and ultimately win business? I know that that’s a big question, John, with a lot of different potential moving parts or pieces to it, but if you were to put a spotlight on the highlights or the most important areas, what would you look at?

I want to be clear. The examples that we’re giving are for a company that is selling business-to-business and looking to sell into the C-suite. We did almost all of that through referrals. The second best path was through speaking engagements. We tried radio ads at one point in the history of the company at various marketing spends, and they never helped us get to as many of the right people as we needed to.

And when you say referrals, I always like to talk about referrals in two ways. You have what I refer to as passive referrals, which is you just do good work and people kind of knock on your door, send you an email like, “Hey, I heard about you,” or somebody just connects you. The other is more active referrals or proactive referrals, where the company actually has a system or a process in place, something that is done consistently. Maybe it’s at stage two of the project you’re asking your champion inside the organization, “Who else do you know?” But essentially it’s not just sitting back and waiting. It’s more proactive. Which approach, when you say referrals, was it more reactive or was it more proactive?

It was both. So I expected that our sales team was going to be proactive in asking those questions and getting out to networking events and looking for introductions. But we also, as I talked about, wanted our staff to be aware of what we were looking for. And so they were passive. But we would often reward them just like we did- We paid pretty good for employee referrals. That was one of the ways that we grew.

On the hiring-recruiting side, you mean, or…

Yeah, for sure, you know, because if people are working with people they like and trust and who are their friends, they don’t want to leave.

That makes sense. And then speaking, was there anything that you specifically targeted there in terms of where you’re trying to get people to speak or what did that look like?

There are so many opportunities to do it. We really did two things. One was blogging. We had a lot of people that were doing their own blogs, and we went out and we got their permission to consolidate them all onto our website.

And when you say people – sorry to interrupt – you mean like employees were writing?

Yeah. I think at one point we had fifteen different employees writing blogs that had their own followings on their own technologies and things like that. Speaking engagements would come up at conferences and submitting papers or speaking topics. Our policy was if you were accepted to speak at a conference, we would pay to send you.

Yeah, yeah.

If people really wanted to go to a conference, the best way to really get to go is figure out how to speak at it. And then often we would send a sales executive along with them to be working the back of the room and things like that. That really generated a lot of positive results.

John, what do you think is the key distinction between a consulting founder running a business doing, say, $750,000 a year, or even a million five per year, and the company doing five million, ten million? What’s the gap that that first founder needs to overcome to get to that second founder level, if you will? Are there certain things that you feel are most important? Is it just a factor of many different things, but are there certain ones you feel, “Oh, generally, you have to have this minimum price point to even get there, like a minimum of a $100,000 engagement,” or are there any kind of principles that you’ve collected that you believe are necessary?

I don’t think so. I know the first company that I ever worked for, I was the ninth employee, and it got built up to like 120 people. The founder’s philosophy was any deal that was sold that was for less than $100,000, he had to approve.

Okay.

He wanted the big projects. There were a lot of little ones going on. If we were going to take on little work, he wanted to know why. And it had to be with a client that had some lifetime expected value, that this was a foot in the door. There are other places that they want to approve the big deals because they don’t want to get hurt.

I think what I’ve learned, and I’ve actually learned a lot of this from my wife, is you have to think big in order to be big. You have to believe that it’s possible. All you have to do is look around and see how many of these small boutique companies have grown into forty, fifty, seventy-five, one hundred person companies. Then it’s back to what you talked about with just what kind of business do you want to own? You can have an exceptionally good life running a thirty or forty-person consulting company from a lifestyle perspective, from an income perspective, and everything else. So you got to pick those things.

[43:48] – Compete in an AI Consulting Future With Soft Skills and Clear Differentiation

When you look at the consulting landscape today, what new challenges do you think founders are already facing or might face? And what are your thoughts on the future? I mean, there’s no question everyone’s talking about AI right now. That’s obviously a very big topic, and I know that you’re working in that space with a new software project that you have going on. But what do you see? What are your thoughts if you were to cast a bit of a projection or a forecast for what you think is coming in the future for consultants that they should pay attention now to? What are some of those things?

I think it is going to come back to all of the soft skills: who can communicate good ideas effectively, who can sell those ideas, who can understand what a person’s pain point is and figure out a unique way to solve it. If you take much of what is being promised about AI in the consulting world to its natural conclusion, there’s just going to be one company with one guy and a bunch of AI agents doing everything over and over again. There’s no differentiation. So there’s always going to be a need for companies to understand what their secret sauce is and how to take and leverage that secret sauce effectively. I think that that is always going to be a role.

So I think that the communication skills, the writing skills are all going to be critically important. I think AI is fantastic for what it is. It is in the middle of some incredible hype cycle at the moment. I think there is a lot of venture capital money going into AI that will probably not see the returns that they’re promising to everyone. But it is going to change the landscape for sure.

Again, the big companies like McKinsey are laying people off because they’re replacing all these junior people with AI agents. Well, where is the knowledge going to come from for the next person who’s going to be in charge of the AI agents, who’s going to be making those changes? So there’s always going to be room for thoughtful, analytical people who can communicate well and are excellent problem solvers. I think there’s always going to be people who want to work for themselves and be their own boss and don’t want a corporate job. They like the challenges of working on project after project at different companies.

Yeah. John, this has been a really fun conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Important Links:

John Quirk
Clarity Coaching Program
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