If I Were Starting a New Firm

Blair interviews David about a recent article he’s been receiving a lot of feedback on, in which he lists all of the things he would try to incorporate into a brand new creative agency, based on what he’s seen and learned from working with thousands of firms over the years.

Links

“If I Started A New Firm, Now” by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, well, you've written a recent post that has struck a nerve with people.

David C. Baker: You act like that's unusual.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: I thought you were going to give me my line back to me.

David C. Baker: That's Tuesday for me. That's what you said.

Blair Enns: Yes, it's Tuesday. [laughs]

David C. Baker: Yes. Before we started recording, I said, "I write something every week, and once a year, something like really unexpectedly pops," and they gets tons of feedback. I never know exactly which ones are. Usually, the ones that are a tad more controversial, I guess. There was a lot of feedback on this one.

Blair Enns: I don't think it's much controversy, but it's what would I do in your shoes? A big, broad question. The question somebody posed to you, if you're starting a professional service from scratch, how would you do it and why? You didn't list the points, but there are 39 pieces of advice, 39 bullet points that you've offered. I saw the post on LinkedIn. Man, you got a lot of feedback. Some people were posting videos of them using this as a diagnostic tool in their own firm. Lots of positive feedback. Any weird stuff?

David C. Baker: Yes, for sure. Stuff that just blows my mind. I can really understand why any individual might push back against some of these things. Some of the pushback just surprises me. Like one person said, "Well, there is no way this would work because we could not orchestrate having two company-wide meetings a year." It's like, "Really? That's your issue?" You think that's what's going to be the obstacle here? One of the points I said, I would absolutely not have a mixed firm, a hybrid firm. It would either be all in person or it would be all remote. No in the middle.

I said, "I'd reluctantly have to be remote." It's not my first choice, but there's no way I could get this many good people unless I allowed remote. If we're going to do remote, then there's going to be a mandatory meeting every six months. Of course, if you've got a family emergency or something, well, then you can't come. I understand that. That was the big thing that she objected to. It's like, "Oh, we could never make that work."

Blair Enns: Was the objection the logistics or the cost?

David C. Baker: The cost.

Blair Enns: I think you've probably made this point before. You should take what used to be your facility's expense and reallocate that to travel for this purpose, right?

David C. Baker: Exactly. 6% of your fee base is anywhere from 4% to 6%. It helps build culture. That's why a lot of firms during the pandemic, when they went to remote, they didn't have much of an adjustment. That's because the people had worked together face-to-face, and so they knew each other. They spoke common languages and so on. I don't mean English. They had a cultural fabric underneath them. It's like, if you don't have that, then you've got to build it somehow. That was my point.

Blair Enns: I want to go through, not point by point. I've highlighted what I think are the most interesting points for us to dive into. You did speak to this issue of not being hybrid, either being all remote or all on-site. It's somewhat related to another point you made. You said in terms of the website and the presence in the world, you would anchor the firm to a location, a city. Why is that?

David C. Baker: Because when I go look at firms' websites, a lot of them, you have no idea where anybody is unless you go to their LinkedIn profile. I just think that, as humans, we like to anchor people that we're going to trust to a location. Even if it's a fully remote firm, I think we ought to give people that hook, that geographic hook. I haven't done any research on it, but I just think, as humans, it's hard for us to trust somebody where we can't picture where they are.

Blair Enns: I smiled when I read that because I have the same feeling. I can't point to any evidence on how this would impact the business. From my own experience, when I'm learning about a firm, whether I want to hire them or they're thinking of hiring us, I want to know where they are.

David C. Baker: Yes, right. You're in Kaslo, right?

Blair Enns: Yes.

David C. Baker: I've been there. [laughs] It's a towering city with massive traffic issues and office towers. Yes, that's Kaslo.

Blair Enns: We have one flashing light, no escalators. All right. Let's get through the list. Starting at the top, the category is ownership and leadership. You said, "I wouldn't mind having partners, but it wouldn't have any equal ones." You want to speak to that? I've already seen people question you on that on LinkedIn. What's your rationale for that?

David C. Baker: It's not like I haven't seen a lot of really healthy firms with equal partners. Usually, it's two equal, sometimes three. I might do three equal partners because then you could break a tie. That's really at the root of why I would not want to have equal partners. Now, if I did have equal partners, I could think of some people that I would partner with. There would be a really strong buy-sell or bylaws ownership agreement that specified how we would handle disputes, and if the firm needed to split, there would be a formula for the valuation, there would be terms over which that would be paid. Everything would be spelled out.

All we have to do is say, "Okay, I'm out." Like, "Okay, we got a call on this agreement that we both agreed to." Partly that comes from the fact that in our M&A practice, I handle all the non-conforming work, so pulling these things apart or putting them together in the right way. I've just seen too many problems with equal partners where they're disagreeing on something.

Blair Enns: I guess your perspective on that would be, let's just call it valid, because of all the situations you've seen and all the difficult ones you've handled. I think that would be reassuring to all parties if all of these things were pre-thought out and covered in the partnership agreement. You also said, from the outset, you would begin with a strong board of advisors from different business backgrounds, and they would be paid. Talk to us a little bit about that, and how much are these people paid?

David C. Baker: Somebody asked me that question when I posted this on LinkedIn, and I said 20,000 a year is about right for four meetings. I would say that very few firms have formal advisory boards. A few of them do. Many of them have informal advisory boards. I think this is something that's missing from our industry. We're a little bit too ingrown. We listen too much to other people in the industry. We ought to be listening to somebody that maybe started a PE firm or somebody that runs a law firm, or an accounting firm, or something.

I just think we should formalize this. It probably isn't necessary when the firm is smaller, and I'm not sure you could carry that expense as a smaller firm, but I think as a larger firm-- How would you answer that, by the way, if I flip this around? All the firms, hundreds and thousands of firms you know, how many have advisory firms, and what's the impact?

Blair Enns: I have no idea, but I know it's a lot higher in the UK than it is in the US. Just anecdotally, it is far more common in the UK than it is in the US. I think that issue of cost, though, and that you said from the outset, so you're adding an extra $100,000 to the overhead right at the outset, so it might not make sense initially, but you would imagine there would be some revenue point at which it does make sense, and your point is, no, do it at the beginning.

David C. Baker: If you can, yes, and it might be free at the beginning, but if you step back and look at this firm, it's clear we are going to make a whole lot of money. 100,000 is nothing to us.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: The confidence of the entrepreneur, planning the business on paper from scratch.

David C. Baker: Start with projections, right.

Blair Enns: One other interesting thing about the leadership team, leadership team would consist of all equity partners and department heads, but not every member would be invited to each meeting. How does that work and why?

David C. Baker: It's so unnecessary. If I could inscribe my own tombstone, it would be like, "Fewer meetings." That was his message in the world. I've been in many of these meetings, like when I'm in a consulting engagement with a firm. There are times when we're talking about moving to a new accounting program or something, why does everybody have to be in that meeting?

Just pick and choose the relevant people for each meeting, and then if somebody really wants to come and they aren't invited, that's probably fine, but I just think we ought to be a lot more intentional instead of the way these meetings are happening, even on the leadership team. It's like, okay, we meet every Thursday at here. It'll be fun. We'll have snacks. We'll talk. We'll gossip, whatever. We don't get a lot done, and some of these people didn't need to be in the meeting, so I just want us to rethink meetings as a whole, including leadership team meetings.

Blair Enns: Intriguing, I think, is the label I would put. I'm wondering how you execute on that, but I like the idea of it. Your next category was positioning and marketing. Obviously, David C. Baker's firm would be well-positioned, but you surprised me a little bit, and you said basically the discipline would be marketing.

David C. Baker: Right.

Blair Enns: It's pretty broad. What would narrow and how?

David C. Baker: It would be marketing broadly described but very narrowly applied. It could be a vertical, or it could be a horizontal. I want it to be a consulting firm that also understands marketing, but I just don't see that as a category that people will understand. This is how somebody would say that. They would say, "We're at the intersection of consulting and marketing." Well, that's what you say when you haven't made a decision. I don't think any of us would be big enough to reinvent a category.

The answer for me would be this is how you would know what kind of firm you are, who hires you. If it's the CMO that's hiring you, you're clearly a marketing firm, but if the president or CEO is involved in that decision, then it could very well be bigger than marketing, and that's the relationship I want. Even though we want to impact how well a firm does, we want the freedom. We want a hunting license to the whole property. We want to be able to speak to staffing, and Ops, and tech, and so on, but in the end, we're going to be measured similarly to how a marketing firm is measured.

Blair Enns: Your specific words here were the category would be marketing, but it would have very little to do with what's called unaccountable spend, where there's a dedicated budget. Is that what you mean?

David C. Baker: What I mean is I don't think our foot in the door would be a million-dollar unaccountable spend. That's what branding is called. That's what people call it. They don't necessarily like it. I'm just acknowledging that phrase. I'm okay doing that sort of work, but I don't want us to be known for that primarily. I want us to be known for a firm that impacts business results in a measurable way. If part of doing that is unaccountable spend branding, I love it, because I really believe in that. I just think that we're going to get lost in the maze of all the other firms if we're known primarily for branding work. I don't want to be known primarily for branding work.

Blair Enns: Got you. Here's something on your list, and you've mentioned this many times before. I don't remember if I've brought up my-- not my objection to it, not objecting to it, but how unique I think this is. "Clients must have worked with a firm like ours before, either here or in another business life." That limits your market, or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's only in my own mind. Then I have some follow-up questions to it, and it's tied to some other things you've said, but what's the rationale for that?

David C. Baker: Somebody who hasn't worked with a firm like this one before, there's two things usually true. They don't realize how long it takes to get results, and they don't have any idea how expensive it is. I'm fine working with a startup, but whoever is our contact at that new company needs to have worked with a firm like ours before. That would be a non-negotiable to me, along with a few other things.

Blair Enns: Then I'm going to marry that to a couple of points you made on references. You said, "Regardless of the source, we would require references from professional services firms they've worked with in the past." Then you say, "If they wanted references from us, we would trade references." That's a pretty ballsy move.

David C. Baker: Pretty cheeky. Yes. I don't see us nailing these theses to the church door and then starting out like this. I would view starting a new firm as a public experiment. I would want to blog about, like, "This is what we thought would work, this is what we tried, here's where it didn't work, here's where we landed instead." All of these things would be subject to learning in the marketplace. This one might not work, but I love the idea of trading references. When you want references, fine, we give you references, but we'd like some as well. I want to flip the whole process around emotionally. I want it to be clear that we are also interviewing you.

There's all these NFL head coaching vacancies right now. It's very clear to me that the teams are interviewing these candidates, but the candidates are interviewing the teams. In fact, three people have withdrawn their name, because, from their standpoint, they didn't think that it was a good situation for them. That's why I think it's great to trade, because I want to signal that we are also interviewing you, but it also limits some of the work, because anything they ask of me, that's fine, but we need to flip that around and ask you as well.

Blair Enns: I can't believe I hadn't thought of that before. I'm going to use that the next time somebody asks for references.

David C. Baker: There are so many things you have not thought of. We do not have the time today.

Blair Enns: Most of them stupid.

[laughter]

David C. Baker: Yes.

Blair Enns: A couple of things I'll just knock off quickly. You would dedicate a minimum of 5% of your revenue and 5% of your labor to getting the word out to prospects, so that's marketing, so you would sufficiently budget to marketing. You would have account managers. Yes, we would have the best account managers in the world, but what I really want to talk to you about was Matilda. Tell us about who Matilda is, and what Matilda would do in this firm of yours.

David C. Baker: Oh, God. I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback on this.

Blair Enns: I love Matilda. Another thing I can't believe I didn't think about. I have to hear this from you.

David C. Baker: This is Matilda, who looks like a sergeant, has a lower voice, puts up with no shit. We were in a conversation with the prospect, and the prospect they make all these promises-- You've taught me this. They make all these promises, and they say, "Okay, we're all set now as a last step." You think there's no last step, we've already done it. As a last step, we're going to formalize all this with RP, and then you say, "Okay, well, Matilda handles that for us. Are you sure you want to do this?"

People are different after they work with Matilda. [laughs] People have less confidence after they've worked with Matilda. She runs our value ops department, or our department of enterprise value engineering, or whatever you want to call it.

Blair Enns: Yes, love it.

David C. Baker: She has read all of your books. She's been through all the training. She's been to the RFP, the procurement conferences, she knows all the tricks of the trade, but she's friendly, she loves people, but she doesn't put up with any shit. It's sort of like that attorney on Landman. I don't know if you've watched that show, but it's like, "Oh God, I love her." Yes, that's what I mean by Matilda.

Blair Enns: A sale is proceeding nicely, and then you hear "RFP," and you go, "Okay." In this firm, I'm imagining it's a policy. If you can't get them to derail the RFP, if it's going to RFP, nobody's allowed to do anything with it other than Matilda. Matilda is allowed no resources.

David C. Baker: Yes, right.

Blair Enns: Matilda's job is to win this with very little cost or make it extremely painful for the person on the other end of the process. Bleed them dry.

David C. Baker: Bleed them dry or call back and say, "Let's skip the RP process. I think we're good."

[laughter]

Blair Enns: Oh, man, I love that idea. Team structure. When you said kind of hybrid or the intersection of marketing and consulting, actually, you had a better phrase for it. What was it? A consulting firm that knows marketing?

David C. Baker: Yes, exactly.

Blair Enns: I imagined a not very highly leveraged firm, meaning you think of the typical pyramid with the leader at the top, a small number of senior people below them, and then as you go down the rungs, you have a larger volume of lesser experienced and less expensive people, but that's not the firm that you would build and run.

David C. Baker: No.

Blair Enns: Talk to us about what the staffing structure looks like.

David C. Baker: There would be account people, for sure, but we wouldn't have a bunch of admins. We wouldn't have AEs. If somebody doesn't want to do it themselves, then let's make sure it needs to be done. Every person would be articulate, could have a conversation. The way I think of it is this, let's say that there's a client who's-- They're not pissed off. They're just a little bit frustrated. The client wants me in the call, and I can't be there, and I turn it over to anybody on the team. I have confidence that they would represent us well. They would think on their feet fast enough. They would know what to say and where to step back. They would not get emotional. Those are the kind of people that I would have on the team.

Even though we would have forward-facing account managers, I wouldn't be worried about anybody interacting with a client. At the end of a meeting, I wouldn't wipe my brow and say, "Thank God that's over. Now shove them back in the door and slide food under the door until the next meeting." I wouldn't have any people like that. All these people would be very articulate, and they could handle client interactions, both leading as well as pushing back on clients.

Blair Enns: These people of yours sound expensive, David. What are the implications on the pricing model?

David C. Baker: Oh, well, I've already told you we're going to be making so much money. This is not going to be an issue. Yes, we're going to have to pay people fairly. There will be some people making ton of money, but that is not why people want to come to this firm and work. They want to come to this firm because this is the place where they learn how to do it right. Some of them stay, and some of them leave.

After a decade, there are 20 firms that have started from alumni of this firm, and I am totally happy with that. Yes, they'll be making decent money, but there's not going to be a career ladder where you can be an owner here. That's not going to happen. There are other ways where you could be treated like an owner with certain distributions and maybe make something if the firm is ever sold one day, but we're going to attract people who want to learn how to do it.

It's like science class in high school. Okay, team, okay, class, we're going to spread up into breaks. Anybody they get paired with, they're going to be happy with. There aren't going to be any losers. It's going to be productive people who love working.

Blair Enns: On the topic of compensation, you said everybody's compensation would be comprised of some incentive developed with them in advance. That implies that the incentive would be different from person to person. Then the kicker, "And publicly known to the group." Everybody's salary is disclosed to everybody else on the team. Am I reading that correctly?

David C. Baker: You are. I would never have said this a few years ago, but I have come around to this position, because I think it's a forcing function. I do think that people are different, and what motivates them is different, and I think we ought to develop this incentive in partnership with each person. It can be different for every person. That's fine, but I want there to be incentives everywhere. I want to attract really driven people that love working and love making a difference.

Blair Enns: Okay.

David C. Baker: What do you think about the public salary thing?

Blair Enns: It scares me. I like it because it scares me. I imagine as you get to certain-- let's say there's 12 people, let's say there's 3 or 4 people in a couple of different roles. I can look to my left, I can look to my right. That person's in the same role as me. That person's in the same role as me. They're making more, their incentives are different, et cetera. I imagine that invites resentment and constant revisiting of the comp plan, although you could probably policy that and say we revisit it once a year. That's the downside as I see it, but as you pointed out, you've seen this before. You've seen this work, have you?

David C. Baker: I have. Not many times work well, but I have seen it work. Yes. We couldn't have votes on salary or anything because people are too good at building coalitions. The leaders would have the final say. If somebody who's paid really well and other people who are doing something similar but not paid as well, that should work itself out. I think part of being a high performer is being comfortable with demonstrating that to other people as well. This would be a case where, if it didn't work, then we would just stop it, and I would put that in the blog. It's like, "We tried this, it didn't work."

Blair Enns: I love the spirit of experimentation around that. I love that it makes me nervous. I wonder if it's trading one set of problems for another, but the trade-off might be worth it. I don't know if I've ever seen it. I don't have any experience with the model. It's one of the many interesting points in this post about things to consider, including the next one. Talk to me about your diversity policy.

David C. Baker: In this one, I really thought I would get a whole lot of feedback on, but I just said diversity is important, but diversity understood a little bit differently. I can't really speak to other industries, but in our industry, I don't think we have the right mix of rural versus urban. That's understandable because most firms are in cities, and so they would attract. Now, you'd think that would be a little bit different because of all the remote people, but it's not yet.

Male and female, I think it's within acceptable bounds right now. That's not a concern for me. Race is interesting. There are some underrepresented, but I wouldn't work super hard at the race thing except as a tiebreaker. I would work very hard at two things, and that would be rural, urban, and then political beliefs. Not so much what that person believed. I wouldn't care too much whether they were more on the right or the left. What I would care about is can this person demonstrate that they have friends from all different areas?

Blair Enns: Oh, that's good.

David C. Baker: That's important to me. I think it's really missing in our industry, and because of it, I think we understand half of the consumer world really well, and the other half of the consumer world, we struggle to understand how they think, how they buy things.

Blair Enns: Yes, that's a great litmus test. I think you and I are probably exceptions on this front in that I don't think, with some obvious exceptions, if you're doing, say, political work, I wouldn't want the firm to have a unified political point of view.

David C. Baker: Right. I wouldn't either.

Blair Enns: You would want people who disagree with each other politically and understand that it's just politics, that their worldview isn't right or wrong. It's just their view.

David C. Baker: I think the best way to assess that is, can you manage having friends? You could even just look at people's families. In your family, do you still get along and have great Thanksgiving dinners with people who have differing points of view? I think you should be able to do that.

Blair Enns: In addition to making the compensation of each individual team member public within the firm, you say you would publish the financials of the firm on the website for public viewing. What the hell, Baker?

David C. Baker: I know. That would be a new one. I've never seen anybody do that.

Blair Enns: The procurement people in your clients' businesses would absolutely love that.

David C. Baker: Oh, Matilda might veto this idea.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: She might.

David C. Baker: There's so many advisors and marketing people out there that are selling their clients a bill of goods about how successful they are, and it's like, "No." For one thing, that's a lie, and for another, should you really be listening to some of these people? Now, there's an argument against what I'm saying. You can be a fantastic referee in a soccer match or American football match and not have played the sport. It's quite possible that you learned everything you did from your own failures. That's okay. This is true for publicly traded companies. We know how successful they are, and it's not true for private. "This is another crazy idea. It may not work, but I think it's worth trying."

Blair Enns: I think Peter Kang at Barrel, they own other firms and other investments, and he routinely publishes the financials from all of his businesses, I think.

David C. Baker: He does. Yes, yes. It's on LinkedIn all the time. I admire that. I think it's fantastic. It takes so much courage, and your level of trust, confidence, just rises when you read something like that. Peter's a good example of that.

Blair Enns: Let's see. There's some things here I'd love to talk about, but we'll skip over. Academic theory of change. Oh, here we go.

David C. Baker: Uh-oh.

Blair Enns: No, no. [laughs]

David C. Baker: When you get excited, I know I'm screwed.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: It's a trap. I'm laying a trap. I'm not at all. I was interested to hear your point of view on customized versus productized services. You said you would have loosely productized services into roughly 16 modules. Talk to us about why and why 16 seems to be the right number for you in terms of things that people can buy from you. You said modules, not products. There's a lot there.

David C. Baker: Modules. I can't speak in anything that is not divisible by 2, so it can't be 15 or 17, so it has to be 16.

Blair Enns: It can't be a prime number.

David C. Baker: Many of these don't come from my own experience. This one does. If you go look at our website, you'll see, I think it's 12 modules or something. I think there probably needs to be more, but they're combined uniquely. This makes it so much easier for a client to buy. It makes it so much easier for you to train new people that come and work at your firm. Here you and I are probably going to differ, but I think there ought to be some performance element in the pricing, but the rest of it ought to be pretty tried and true.

No, this module, if we included in anything, it's 230,000, or maybe it's a range of 180,000 to 350,000. I'm fine with ranges, too. I think we're reinventing the wheel too many times with clients. If you are tightly positioned, it's easier to productize your services, and we're going to be tightly positioned. I don't believe in full productization ever, but I do believe in moving things in that direction. 16 is not scientific. That might not be the right number.

Blair Enns: You would price the modules rather than the hours of the inputs that went into the modules?

David C. Baker: I would look at hours just to get a sense of where it would be, but we would never charge hourly. We'd never have an hourly rate. None of that.

Blair Enns: I think you said there would be a variable component. Some element of performance pay to everything. In your post, you said at least 10 % of every engagement would be variable based on results. Why is that? What's your rationale?

David C. Baker: There's a couple reasons. One is I think it exudes confidence to the prospect. It's like, "We don't want to work for you unless we can really make a difference." The secret thing is something I learned from you, actually. This was years ago when we were talking about offering a money-back guarantee. I just thought that was such a silly idea. You explained at the time that one of the main benefits of a money-back guarantee is that you're a lot pickier with what client you work with.

That's why I've woven that in here. Let's say we're aiming for 25%, 30% profit. We're not going to probably make more than that because we're going to pay people really well. Then if we don't hit that 10%, that's, what, a third of our profits. It's pretty important. That means we're going to be looking very carefully at what clients we're going to work with. It acknowledges that sometimes we might get desperate, and this tamps down that childishly as you call it.

Blair Enns: That makes sense. It makes you more selective. You said there would be no pure projects or longer retainers, but instead a prepaid road mapping exercise to start, then auto-renewing quarterly engagements.

David C. Baker: Yes. I don't like having to revisit this every year. I don't like timeshare-like arrangements that are strong retainers because I think they're lightning rods for client relationships gone bad. I don't want to have to revisit things all the time. I want the client engagement to keep going, but I want the client to be able to engage it without a lot of hassle and without a lot of money on the line. That's why I'm trying to wed those two things.

Blair Enns: The prepaid road mapping engagement, that would be, in my language, selling a diagnostic. Upfront, the process where you do some discovery work and you map out with the client what the next year looks like, and you proceed in quarters, et cetera.

David C. Baker: Yes. Only after that was done could we even approach what the performance component of the engagement would look like after we'd done the diagnostic and figure out what's going on and how to fix it.

Blair Enns: You would limit the firm to about a dozen clients concurrently. You would focus on mid-level companies. You would always have direct access to the CEO, even though you wouldn't work directly with them. A team member, I imagine, would be a requirement. Would have a twice annual meeting with key client decision makers. Those things all wrap up together nicely. What do you want to say about them?

David C. Baker: Just one thing. I think we're taking our long-standing client relationships for granted. I think wonderful things happen when you're face-to-face with a client over dinner, a couple of drinks, walking the halls, meeting other people. I'm trying to fix that essentially. On the dozen clients concurrently, I want to create some sort of limit. It's like, "Okay, we have a thousand of these for sale, and after that, they're gone." It's that sort of interest I want to raise.

If somebody wants to work with us, they can start small. After we do a big project, they could still stay on small, but it needs to be a significant engagement. I don't want to have 30 clients. I think 12 clients is a beautiful number. It allows us to get into a client situation deeply enough to make a difference and to make money. Then if we have other interests, then we just say, "Listen, we don't have an opening right now. We might have one in May. Can we stay in touch?" That kind of thing. I just want there to be a little bit more limited access to what we do.

Blair Enns: We've talked about that before, having your opportunity increase your capacity, even if you are restraining your capacity for that purpose, gives you confidence that allows you to act with more backbone in the sale and in your client engagements.

David C. Baker: Yes.

Blair Enns: Last one. A team member would meet with a client key decision maker twice a year and direct access to the CEO. Our mutual friend, Mark O'Brien, has this great line that I really wish I had written, but I do cite him every time I say it, it's "The prospect's mind is malleable, the client's mind is fixed." If you're in an engagement with a client and you find you're not getting access, the client won't agree to regular meetings, their behavior is already fixed.

Explain in the sale that we have to have access to the CEO. We don't need to work with them on an ongoing basis, but on the rare occasion, when we have questions for them, need to spend time with them, you have to allow that, number one. Number two, you have to agree to these biannual meetings. Most clients in the moment that they're thinking of and are ready to hire you, will readily agree to principles, points of agreement like this, but it's really hard to get them to agree to it after you've started. I think understanding this upfront is really valuable.

David C. Baker: Yes, and I think it could be as simple as, like, "Hey, could you please send me an email and copy the president/CEO on it? I just want to thank him or her for the opportunity we have to work together." It could be something as simple as that. So that you have that person's email, and you can reference it back later. Ideally, this CEO or president wants to meet with you and talk about the shared vision of this thing. Yes, you're right. That's such a great quote.

If you try to make it happen later, it's going to come across as very adversarial. It comes across as you going over somebody's head. Do you want to work at this firm? I'll let you know in advance. You can't be an equal partner, but do you want to work here? I'll make you a minor partner. Are you interested? Is that a no?

Blair Enns: No, I'm at the point in my life, David, where the question, "Would you want to work here?" It doesn't matter where here is. The answer is no. Well, we've gone long on this one. We've talked about a lot, but certainly nowhere near close to everything. Was there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to speak to?

David C. Baker: I was going to ask you about case studies. I don't believe in case studies much, except for in a few cases. I think you like case studies, don't you?

Blair Enns: I don't remember you speaking to case studies in this.

David C. Baker: I said we would not offer case studies. They're all pretty much made-up nonsense anyway, though, we would jump at any opportunity to walk through how we solve challenges, assuring them that we can likely find success for them, too, if we are allowed to work in a prescribed, not a proven way.

Blair Enns: I think case study is like a great sales tool. I don't know why you would pass on the opportunity to create them.

David C. Baker: Well, I just wouldn't create them and have them publicly available for anybody to download. Because has anybody ever written a case study that makes them look bad? Maybe that's what I should do. I like to do things differently.

Blair Enns: I think both of those things can be true at the same time. I'll think about that one a little bit more.

David C. Baker: You're not going to work for me, so we don't have to resolve this. I think we're okay.

Blair Enns: You and I, we both agree we spend enough time, just the perfect amount of time with each other. All right, David, this is a fantastic post. It's still getting a lot of traction, a lot of discussion out there in the world. If you haven't downloaded it, the title of the post is called If I Were Starting a New Firm by David C. Baker at Punctuation.com. Thanks, David.

David C. Baker: Thanks, Blair.