When the founders criticize G2, they often mean that these professionals are not “selling”—not networking in the community, looking to develop new relationships or seek new business opportunities. Indeed, G2 professionals are not active enough in sales. Many have to activate their business development skills and stop finding excuses for not contributing to the growth of their firms.
In some ways, the failure comes from the inability of the founders to call the problem by its name: They avoid the word “sell”—many of them don’t like it—and replace it with euphemisms. There is a clear cultural discomfort with selling in our business, and it creates an environment where younger professionals are reluctant to engage in it.
To a certain degree, our profession also needs to find a better way of developing new business. The founders’ point of reference is the days when they networked nonstop looking for prospects. Many financial advisors, for example, started in the insurance and brokerage industry and hated the experience of “asking for business,” but for some reason they now want G2 to do that. Yet while much of what founders did to drive business in those early days was painful, it indeed taught them how to sell, even if they call it something else like client acquisition.
Leaders in an advisory firm must serve as role models for all things related to business development. Leaders should have multiple skills, and sales has to be one of them. There are a couple of reasons for acquiring and developing this talent. First, firm employees look to leadership for the accepted behavior and firm culture. If they see leaders “messaging” the business correctly and frequently, they too will acquire the ability to passionately convey why clients should choose them and the business. Your culture, in other words, will convey the importance of your continued growth. If the next generation entrepreneur cannot drive business, then the following generations will have a very difficult time creating a continuous employee ownership model.
Not all entrepreneurs have the responsibility of driving new business, but they all must be capable of it. If it was always left to somebody else, how would people ever generate value for their own equity?
Alternative Forms of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs and managers do different things. Entrepreneurs can envision the future. They look at qualitative changes while managers look at quantitative ones. Entrepreneurs look at adding more clients and assets and transforming the growth into an enterprise. A manager, on the other hand, changes the business in quantitative ways, making it bigger, larger and more efficient.
An entrepreneur changes a company’s nature—its vision, its abilities, its strengths, its culture. He or she is more than a caretaker.
When the founders of a company retire, those who inherit the business from them face many opportunities to make dramatic qualitative changes. These can be grouped into four categories:
• The opportunity to develop. This mostly means developing people. Professional services firms are in a way nothing more than an academy for professionals. Firms that figure out how to grow their own talent will always have a competitive advantage. Teaching, training and mentoring are usually weaknesses of smaller firms and weaknesses among a company’s first generation. A firm’s G2 can dramatically transform it by improving its ability to recruit and develop talent.