Jane Williams of Sand Hill, for instance, has one of those epic tales shared by advisors at many large firms. Nestled in Silicon Valley among tech executives (and the people who divorce them), her firm took off in the ’90s, but she says she faced a huge dilemma at the dawn of the last decade when her two partners wanted to retire. She was going to have to buy them out, which would leave her starved for new capital to rebuild the business (and replace their talent). She sold the firm to a bank, eventually bought her firm back and then sought external talent to help succeed her—a search that took two years. In the meantime, she broadened the ownership of the firm, giving it to almost half the overall staff. “In the process we really rekindled the entrepreneurial spirit and I’ve got to credit those new partners.”
In terms of attracting and retaining clients, the panelists suggested you can’t be everything to everyone, said Durbin. “Ninety-seven percent of [high-performing firms] stick to an ideal client profile,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there is one segment and that segment stays static forever … but we hone in on the client that is best for us.”
That means that the firm should be clear about its story. What can you do? What capabilities do you have? “How crisply can everyone on that team actually articulate who that key client segment is and therefore what our capabilities are to be a good fit for that core client segment?” Durbin asked.