Professional Services Practice Group

Professional service organizations are different from other businesses because they charge for services, experience, and expertise rather than for products. These companies include accounting, advertising, law, IT, engineering firms, financial advisors, and any organization or profession that offers customized knowledge -based services to clients. Their growth is, more than anything, related to their ability to acquire talent and key customer accounts. The profitability of their growth is measured by their ability to balance this topline growth against their compensation and expense overhead.

Hence, the key measurement is more realistically of the “Cost of Services Delivered” than the traditional “Cost of Goods Sold” and their losses come from the departure of experienced professionals, the loss of key Client accounts, or their inability to effectively control their sales and general and administrative overhead. Successful professional service businesses require knowledge of depth and breadth of their industry to create equity value for their principals and maintain it.

The 2Go Advisory Group partners work with clients in the professional services industry. For more than30 years, we have offered expertise in strategic planning, consulting, recruiting, and coaching. Whether you are a small start-up, a mid-size, or Fortune 500 company, our partners have the expertise to strategize, problem solve, and achieve the goals of your organization. The strategies used are universally applicable to most professional service businesses.

Our partners focus on key elements of professional service businesses to achieve client success.

Robert Weis has worked with professional service firms such as legal and accounting plus specialty consulting and staffing companies his entire career. Indeed, he founded and still manages the 2GO Advisory Group of consulting and recruiting. Bob uses his experience and knowledge to resolve complex issues for clients and provide strategic financial and structural planning.

Peter Gray has extensive expertise with IT firms and partner Michaele James leads CIO client work.During the last 20 years, IT has become a central and integral part of every business. To deal with the explosion of IT services for businesses, Peter has transformed clients’ business models from traditional time &materials basis to the much more popular managed services basis which has its foundation in recurring revenues and multi-year client contracts. He also developsand implements business process design and development to leverage rapid response capabilities for his clientswhile Michaele addresses optimal strategic designs to fit professional service company needs.

Seth Tuman identifies and uses resources to satisfy law firm specific processes and business requirements.Developing and implementing strategic business plans, hiring and trainingemployees, and analyzing and implementing software solutions are the key elements on which he focuses.He works with firms encountering varying issues including inflection points due to growth, virtual law firms that operate with little to no real estate, succession planning and law firms in transition.

Other issues that Robert, Peter, Michaele, and Seth deal with on behalf of professional services clients include:

• Proactive service problem solving and implementation of solutions;
• Collaboration with employees and executives within and across functional and external teams;
• Leading and coaching employees and executives through demonstration and execution of client related goals;
• Assisting clients to achieve value through trainings and workshops;
• Resolve complex data and analytic configurations to ensure solutions produce expected results;
• Identify resources to satisfy customer-specific processes and business requirements;
• Collaborate with teams to build deployment plans for clients to understand and document customer expectations; and
• Successful ongoing operations and knowledge transfer

The Ideal Team for You

While we work with a wide array of professional firm organizations, we have deep experience working with specialized service firms such as:

We are proud to work with firms to help them scale and develop high- performance practices.

Client Experience

An example of the challenges created in the professional services sector, and the creative and successful solutions by the 2Go Advisory Group, includes the success story of 100.0m Specialty Consulting.

Challenge

The 100.0m Specialty Consulting Firm with three founding managing partners desired to sell the business to a small group of key employees. The entity structure would not allow the flexibility in ownership and compensation required. In addition, the departing founders managed the firm based on intuition gained from decades of business basing decisions on cash generated during the month, quarter, or year. The new managing partners did not want a similar implementation. Furthermore, profitability would not equal cash flow as cash would be used to pay off the retiring partners. A model did not exist that would demonstrate the profitability, cash flow, and note repayment assumptions that all the partners would agree to. Additionally, their largest client found that the firm’s contracting practices with independent contractors working on the client’s premises constituted a reclassification risk to them(the client).

Solution

At the direction of the 2Go Advisory Group, and with the help of legal counsel, the entity structure was changed to an LLC with several member classes and methods of compensation. The accounting system was reconfigured to provide financial and management reports that enabled the new partners to quickly understand the critical measurements of a successful consulting firm.

A five-year financial model was created that supported the purchase agreement assumptions including payment of an earnout for exiting partners. An annual plan was developed from the five-year plan in which actual results were tracked. Independent contractors become limited partners removing 1099 reclassification risk from the new entity.

Result

The successor entity flourished and grew internationally with structure and reporting that could scale for the new management team.