Okay. Um, folks will continue to stream in, but we can go ahead and get started. Thanks again everybody for being here. I'm really excited to do this. We do have a lot of material to cover. The goal of this is to present our most comprehensive point of view on the right way to go about growing a boutique professional services firm front to back. Let's get into it. So, just real quick about me. I run Madison previously. I was partner at Manifold, which was an innovation consulting firm here in Chicago. We had about 70 folks when I left in 2022. I spent nine years teaching marketing at Kellogg in the innovation and entrepreneurship initiative. And Madison is a firm that helps boutique professional services firms grow. And we do that by helping you get clear on who you're trying to serve, helping you show up consistently and helpfully with your best thinking, and then designing respectful ways for people to raise their hands when they're ready. And pretty much everything that we do rolls up to that. I would like to think that we're pretty good at it, but I think we really enjoy it. And there is nobility in services work and we get a lot of gratification out helping our clients be successful. So enough about that. What are we trying to do? Our core thesis that animates all of this is that clients do not buy professional services the way that they buy really anything else. And I learned this the hard way. I came from startup land. And when we started our innovation consulting firm, I tried to apply the principles of B2B SAS companies and that kind of thing to growing our firm. And that did not go great. And later on, I tried to apply the principles of what I would call larger or enterprise professional services firms and similarly learned the hard way that that didn't work very well either. And a lot of the lessons we're going to talk about today are pretty hard earned. I've made most of the mistakes that one could make in route to arriving in all of this. But everything that we're going to talk about came out of those experiences and then it's been refined over the last 2 years as we've worked with clients. We're up at we're up to 29 clients now. And so the pattern recognition and seeing what works and what doesn't work. I think we've evolved and learned a lot over the last few years as well. But when I described the traditional B2B SAS process, it's this idea of a funnel of we're going to build this big old lead list. Well, now you have tools like Clay and things like that to enrich that lead list. We're going to build these like campaigns and we're going to do a lot of cold prospecting and hit you up seven times in 21 days and just run a bunch of paid ads and all that kind of stuff. And I learned that didn't work and I wasted a lot of money doing that. And really the conclusion was that professional services is inherently a trustbased sale. They have to know me. They have to like me in order to buy. And that's why referral is for most firms their primary source of new revenue. It's because they're effectively borrowing from the trust that the referee has already granted them. And how do you replicate that or approximate that through your marketing activities? A lot of what we talk about. So what you're going to see here is principles and beliefs and a worldview that in many ways runs counter to the dominating world views that you will see and I see them show up in my email all the time. People trying to microwave a relationship with me. You see a lot of posts on LinkedIn these days about people and how they're automating and identifying their way toward some sort of successful kind of business outcome. And a lot of the I think the common thread around a lot of these is that they're trying to treat relationships as transactions. They're trying to microwave relationship. They're trying to fake trust. And we just don't believe that's the way to show up for the kinds of businesses that we're trying to build here. And so our our point of view on it is taking a longer term view. assuming that you're going to be in business for a while, assuming that your career and the business that you're trying to create are pretty are grafted pretty tightly together. And so we want our marketing and business development work to all be taking that long-term view, not doing things that will feel cringe or feel like you're taking shortcuts or feel desperate, but have everything be about showing up with consistency and generosity and like I said, creating easy ways for people to raise hands when they're ready. So that you you're going to see everything that we do rolls up to that. Doesn't mean that you're not aggressive at all. And you'll talk a little bit about how we try to thread that needle, but that is kind of what we talk about when we talk about requiring a different playbook. And David Meister, who is the the godfather in some ways of professional services, he wrote the trusted adviser book, coined that phrase, says that the trick of earning trust is that there are no tricks. And I think that's just another way of saying that you cannot microwave trust. Trust is built over time by making little deposits with consistency and being very generous over a period of time and treating kind of their business as if it's more important even than your own in some ways. So this is the Madison model and everything that we're everything that we do rolls up to this kind of framework. This model has evolved over time. I think we're on version four version five now. If we do this in a year, this will probably look a little bit different again. But in a nutshell, we try to get clear on who we are trying to serve and why we do it and why we're different. And we'll walk through this framework which itself we've done several iterations on shortly. But we get try to get laser focused on who it is that we're trying to serve. We try to show up consistently and generously with our best thinking. So making lots and lots of little trust deposits with consistency and trusting the aggregate rather than trying to have lightning strike or having a silver bullet. We believe it's the accumulation of trust deposits over time. All of which are trying to lead to someone raising their hand and how I want to have a first conversation with us but is in professional services especially if it's a more expensive price point or if it's a committeeled sale or if it's a enterprise based sale that first conversation is just the beginning of that relationship which leads to what we call authentic business development. So we want to create respectful ways for people to raise hands when they're ready. But then after that, we also want to have respectful ways of staying top of mind with them in ways that do not feel desperate, do not feel cringey, and are all focused on serving. And so we the key the catchphrase we use internally is don't sell, love, and serve people. And that kind of animates the ways in which we show up and the ways in which we try to help our clients show up. And so we believe that if you do this with consistency and again if you take a long-term view you will get that first engagement which leads to that last bit delivery excellence which is earning the right to earn more work earning the right to referral having that one engagement turn into five engagements inside of an individual organization and having those folks kind of refer you out to other people. And so that's the model in a nutshell. With our time today, we're going to cover mainly the first three elements of that delivery excellence. So much of it is a function of the specific work that you do, but we may do another webinar on this at some point on how you go about doing that. But for the focuses of today, we're going to really talk about these first three elements. So point of view, how do you do this and why? So if we are honest with ourselves, professional services are largely commodities and we don't like to hear that. But if you are a CPA or if you do commercial due diligence or if you are an attorney, there is a pretty safe bet that you have competitors that if you were to compete on what your services are, they are largely very similar. And so we believe that the way that you stand out is by having a clear and differentiated point of view instead. What do we mean by that? We do not mean these and you see a lot of this when we we sit down with a client for the first time and try to articulate this. You'll see a lot of these kinds of phrases bandied about and these are not differentiators. Every single one of your competitors probably says some version of the same thing, right? And so one of the litmus tests we like to use is if I were to replace your logo with a competitor's logo, does this still make sense? And if the answer is yes, then maybe we have a little bit of work to do. And I know that can be hard to try to articulate. But the point is that talking about how you're a full-ervice firm and how you have great people and how you have a lot of industry expertise just candidly are not differentiators the way that people do, they are insufficient. They are table stakes. Right? So what does this actually look like? And we created a version of you've probably seen a version of this. It's called the messaging house. We've tailored it for professional services. At the bottom is your foundation. So this is what you do. These are your menu of offerings. You the next is why you do it. So the reason your firm exists, the dent that you're seeking to make in the universe. You could call this your values as well. And then why should I believe you? So proof points, case studies, your experience, your credentials, all of that kind of thing. You need all three of these things. And I think that most firms are probably pretty good on what you do. They're probably a little less good at least in terms of capturing the why I should believe you. And I think this one is the one that's highly underrated around why you do it. Above that are who you are trying to serve. So the personas, right? And you may have more than one depending on if you have multiple service lines, but what do they care about? What are their hopes and fears? What are their the demographics, psychoraphics, all of those firmographics, all of those kinds of things. And above that, we have what we call our unified theory. And this is where we spend the bulk of our time with our clients. And the way that we try to what we try to get to is a organizing set of principles that explain a consistent set of problems that your clients face, your diagnosis, your unique diagnosis about why those problems happen, and then your solution. And the reason why we do that is if you jump directly to a solution, you presume that they agree one with the problem, but then two with your diagnosis. And so the diagnosis is the sneaky bit because we found that if they if they intellectually agree with your diagnosis about why this problem is happening to them, then they are very much primed for your solution and then your solutions are now differentiated because they should descend directly from your diagnosis. And so the things that you are going to recommend to them are not necess are not just a laundry list of stuff that that firms like yours say. Instead, they are laser focused and handpicked because they are addressing the problem that you've identified and the reason why it's happening. And so that's where we try to get to. And we know that we've done it well when three things are true. One, it is relevant to your client, right? If it's not relevant, who cares? Two, believable, which kind of gets to that why should I believe you and the proof points bit. And then three is differentiated again, which is like hard for competitors to also argue. And so that's where we try to get which can take some work but and then underneath that that animates a lot of what your marketing is. You have what we content pillars which is language that's probably familiar to anybody that's done marketing for any period of time. But your these are recurring arguments about your worldview right and ideally most of your content kind of rolls up to these three to five pillars which themselves roll up to your unified theory. And what we have found is that there are hund potentially hundreds of kind of subtopics within each one of those pillars and it's a little bit like a prism that you could just rotate over time and look at it from different perspectives. But this is what we're trying to get to in terms of an articulated point of view which this might feel a little bit abstract. So just to kind of make it concrete for you just a couple of quick examples. Let me jump there real quick actually. So this is ours right. Most many professional services firms struggle to grow. We believe this is you can't market it the way that you market other things. And we believe you do this by becoming a trusted adviser. You heard this up at the top. And that we believe that the best way to do that is by getting laser focused on who you serve, showing up consistently and helpfully with your best thinking, and then creating respectful ways for people to raise hands when they're ready. That's our unified theory. So all of our marketing rolls up to these ideas in some way. Right? To look at my previous firm, Manifold, it was an innovation consulting firm. We said something along the lines of that the reason why most innovation efforts fail is because enterprise organizations are designed to exploit known business models rather than identify new novel business models and everything about their incentives, their governance structures, etc. set up to make it harder to do innovation work. And so we said the solution is to learn from the best innovators in the world which is Silicon Valley. And so that meant from a governance standpoint operating like a VC. So having a portfolio, spreading your bets, using stagegate theory, having them earn the right to additional resources, failing fast, etc. And then at the micro level within any individual opportunity operating like a startup, so using lean startup press practices, design thinking, all that kind of stuff. This was our unified theory and it was relatively unique. It was relevant to the client and it was differentiated against firms that we were running into like the Deote Digitals of the world and things like that because we were all startup guys. And so we we ran a venture fund. We had all come from a startup background. We had built startups and had several exits in the construct of our fund. And so we had built in credibility from this. And that was something that would be hard for a traditional strategy firm to say. And so that's where we try to get to. And then from these you have lots and lots of opportunities to talk about the various aspects of it. You can talk about the problem. You can talk about your diagnosis. You can talk about the solution. You can talk about what it means to have a clear thesis or spreading multiple bets or using stage. Like all of those things become fodder for your marketing, but they all roll up to a unified theory. Real quick, just dialing back into drilling into a couple of these things. What you do, the menu of offerings, a lot of firms that we've worked with, we've encountered that they stumbled into it. It's almost I don't know if you've ever read the E-Myth. It's a book that came out in the 80s, but they it was called the entrepreneurial myth and it was basically like the premise was because I know how to do the work of a business, I know how to do the business that does that work. And the idea was that the accountant opens the accountancy, the own the lawyer starts the law firm or whatever. The idea here is that these a lot of firms sell basically their skills. Oh, we do web design, we do WordPress, we do bookkeeping. And what we advocate is that you should try to move upstream and position it in the form of solutions. So what is the outcome that you are trying to deliver for that client or outcomes and organize it into a menu of offerings and ideal state those of offerings span the client life cycle. So when you think about what is the problem set, so not what are all of the skills that you have, but what is the set of interrelated problems that your clients have and from mapping it from beginning to end. And then what is the potential solution that you could offer that kind of injects into each of those? And ideally at least one or more of them are what we call wedge engagements, which means something that's really easy to buy, really easy to wrap your head around, doesn't necessarily have to go through an RFP process or procurement, but gets you in the door, allows you to earn trust, that kind of thing. So, as much as possible, we try to elevate up and move from skills into solutions when we're designing our menu of offerings for either for ourselves or for our clients. I mentioned values, too. I think values are sneaky underrated because I think they for one thing, I think that people like to buy from people that they like. And a way to signal alignment is through values. And you don't overtly necessarily have to say that, hey, these are our values, but you can signal them. And ideal state, if you were to talk to a client who's been working with you for a year or two and say, hey, these are are I just wanted to show you I don't know if I've ever showed this before for before you, but these are our values. What do you think? Think and have them immediately be like, oh yeah, I totally see how these things are relevant. That's ideal. And you'll notice here we try these are our values. Just for context, we try to push for words that have a little bit of kick-ass to them. So, we try to I believe language I had a mentor early in my career that said words are like sledgehammers. And I think that you have the ability to stir the heart and the soul of your potential clients, of your current clients, of your internal team by the words that you use. And rather than saying something like integrity, which is a blanket phrase that everybody says, what do you mean when you say that? And try to use the most pointed language you can. So instead of integrity, it might be we are impeccable with our word. Instead of saying client service, you might say we hug our customers or we love our customers. Instead of excellence, you might say that like we have we are like relentless in our pursuit of perfection. Something like that. But try to use language that is powerful. And you'll find that this stuff can animate your marketing in terms of how you show up. So I would like to think at least in terms of for those of you who have interacted with us in some way or have interacted with either the stuff that I've been putting out there or that Paul has been putting out there, my hope would be that some of these values shine through in those messages. Even if we've never explicitly said it, I would encourage you to at least as a thought exercise, define your values if you haven't before. If you have them, hold them up and say, "We don't necessarily have to change these." For one thing, you might not that might not be something that you have the authority to do, but just as a thought exercise. How can we make these a little bit more pointed? And then the last bit is we try to articulate, and I didn't include these on here, but we have a series of these are the things that we do and these are the things that we don't do because we have this value. And so we have those listed for every single one of these that we use internally as a litmus test because we believe ultimately the actions that you take every day are the clearest manifestation of whether or not you actually have that value. So encourage you to give some thought to this and try to use the most powerful language you can. And then the last bit, I mentioned this already, this is blocking and tackling stuff, but I will say we've interacted with a fair number of clients who've never actually done the work of defining this or they have, but it's too vague. And there is an aversion that I think a lot of firms have to niche down. And if you are KPMG, it's one thing. You're trying to serve a pretty broad swath of the market and have many service lines. So it can be difficult, a lot more difficult to narrow that down. But for most of the people that are on here, you're running a boutique. The world is a big place. And what I have personally found, and I learned this the hard way with Manifold, too, was the degree to which you can get more specific, it just increases the impact of everything that you're putting out there in the world. Everything that we say is speaking specifically to boutique firms. It allows us to make sure that our marketing is our thought leadership is a lot more specific, our marketing is a lot more specific, that they feel seen when they read what we're talking about. Hopefully, they're be they think to themselves something along the lines of that that really makes sense or I was just dealing with that problem. And so, I would encourage you again, especially if you're struggling to grow a little bit, maybe look at either your current client base or past clients, look at who you what you know the most about. And again, you don't have to do it, but at least as a thought exercise, try to lock yourselves in a conference room and say, if we were just to get a little bit more specific here, where would we go? Where would we focus? And I think what you would find is that there will still be plenty of prospective clients out there, even if you do niche down a little bit or focus a little bit. And it'll make your marketing a lot more pointed. But it I get why people push back on it often. It feels like you're taking things off the table. I guess the last note I would say on that is this is what you were talking about visibly. If somebody comes in to you and say and they're not they don't fit that ICP super super perfectly it's still up to you whether you decide to take that work you can take that work on. So mostly what we're talking about here is terms of how you show up in the world. But we have found that firms that put a stake in the ground and say this is who we serve. This is what we do. This is what we don't do. We're not for everybody. were for this specific person will make that specific person more inclined to want to raise their hand and I also think will allow you to charge more or protect your margins better or whatever which in the world of robots is super important specificity I think can be at least a a potential tool in your toolkit to fend off the robots for a while and then we talked about this sufficiently I think we'll jump we'll move forward so that's point of view next is authority marketing so showing up consistently and generously with your best thinking this is probably what you at in your inbox. This is literally my inbox and our like our LinkedIn page is it is not called Madison. It's called Madison with a little pipe and it says we American professional service firms. It's an immediate tell that they went on Clay and build a lead list and then they're they're spamming me. But if anything, there are more and more people that are trying to do this every day because the tools have gotten so good. It's so easy to build a lead list of people and enrich that lead list and then create Mad Lib spam that everybody's trying to do this. But I just don't believe that this is the way to show up. And I we learned this the hard way, too. We hired two of these firms at Manifold. And we got what you would think that you would get from it. And it makes sense in hindsight. Like the chief innovation officer at Xerox does not want to talk to a 22-year-old BDR rep that is just spamming a bunch of people with undifferiated slop. And this is not how our clients want to show up. And yet, they're on the hook for revenue targets. They know that they need to have more awareness. They know they need to get people raising their hands. And so we believe authority marketing is the best way to do that. And the reason is this is from an Edelman study that found that 87% of decision makers said thought leadership increases trust, enhances their perception of the firm's brand. 58% of decision makers said that they chose to do business with the firm based on their thought leadership and are willing to pay more again for a firm that can articulate a clear vision. And so that kind of gets to that having a clear and specific point of view for a clear and specific person, right? We also believe thought leadership matters because according to LinkedIn only 5% of your audience is in market at any given time and 80% of those buyers when they do become in market go to the brand that comes to mind first. And so that tells me that my job is to show up with consistency, with generosity, with my best thinking, and to make again little trust deposits in people's minds where they see my LinkedIn post or they see my article or they join my webinar or whatever. And if that happens over enough time, I'm not great at manufacturing buying windows. My goal is to be when that buying window emerges, I'm the first person you think of. And so my hope is that eventually they're like, you know what, we should have a conversation with those Madison guys. That's what we're trying to optimize for. And that's what we try to help our clients optimize for as well. The other reason why I think authority marketing matters is because in professional services, I tend to think that people buy from people, not companies. And there is that saying that nobody gets fired for hiring Deote or IBM or McKenzie or whatever. But again, for boutique firms especially, respectfully, you are not Mckenzie. I think that your personal brand is at least as important as the organization's brand. And for that reason, we advocate our belief is that every revenue generating professional in your firm should have a communication cadence about their respective area of expertise that's infused with both their personality and the personality of the brand published with consistency. And we've tried to design a business that for the firms that are too busy to do that to to help them do it. But however you get this done, whether you have an internal team that helps you do it, whether you make sure that the team, your partners or managing directors have goals that are associated with putting out bot leadership, if you just even if it's a scheduling thing and we make sure that every Friday morning, we let our team spend an hour and your goal is to write or draft one or two LinkedIn posts. I don't care how you do it, but I think every single revenue generating professional in your firm should have a cadence like this. What do when I say generous? We talk about this idea of giving away all of our secrets. And so again, if you've followed me for any period of time, my hope at least is that you will find that I try to be very transparent about what we do and show you treat people like clients before they're clients and give away our best ideas. And the reason why is I feel like we get push back on this sometimes because what we are selling is effectively our brains in professional services. And so the idea is that if I give away all of my best thinking, there's going to be a letdown when they actually hire me. And I don't think that's true. It certainly hasn't been my experience. I think a couple of things. One, people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. And so the likelihood that they're going to remember all of the secrets that you gave in the first place is pretty low. Two, if you are stingy with your best thinking and you put out if you put out kind of slop, right? People are going to assume that what you're going to put out when you work together is slop. And so we want to show up with our best thinking, our sharpest thinking, not our weakest thinking, and not gatekeep. And the question of will they just take this and do it themselves? One, um, you might run into competitors that do it. Occasionally we have people who come in and you can just see that they're crawling all over our site and they look like a competitive firm. That happens occasionally, but as it relates to like prospective clients, like one, they're probably too busy doing all of the things that they're doing with their own practice to do this. And then two, even if they do try, they will probably pretty quickly learn that there's an awful lot of nuance that comes that only you have picked up through 10 years or 20 years or whatever it is of pattern recognition. And so they'll come back to you realizing how hard it is and say, "Hey, can you we tried it and it didn't work with us. Can you help us do it for you?" And we just believe this is the best way to show up. And so you'll find that both with us and with our clients, we try to just show people like this is exactly what we would do if we worked together. And it seems to work. And why do I think authority marketing works relative to other tools. When you try to do cold outbound or cold prospecting, you're playing on hard mode, right? Because you have to try to get somebody from not even being aware necessarily that they have a problem to being aware about why that problem's happening to being aware about your point of view about the solution and why you might be a good fit. And that's a really hard bridge to cross and you're interrupting them and they're busy and all that kind of thing. That is why organic search, if you can show up in search results for things, works better than cold outbound. That's why referral works better than organic search. The reason why we think authority marketing works so well is because once someone's in your orbit, if they follow you and you have a good track record of showing up with generosity and with really interesting thoughts, they're like, "Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. That's interesting." By the time they raise their hand and book time to have a call with you, you've already mostly converted them. Like they've drunk your Kool-Aid and your job is really just to not fumble the ball at the 5 yard line. It allows you in a pass relatively passive way to navigate that whole journey. And getting back to that point from Bane, 81% choose the firm that's already top of mind for them. We believe this is the way you kind of become top of mind. So when we post, we don't care about metrics much. Like we do pay attention to certain things like on LinkedIn for example, we know that reposts matter more than likes. We know that those matter more than impressions. An impression could just mean somebody showed up in your feed. What we ultimately care about though is that people raise their hands. And we have enough evidence at this point where I feel a lot stronger about this than even when we started. So many times people put time on our calendar and we hop on a call with them and say, "Hey, what caused you to reach out?" And they're like, "Oh, we I followed you on LinkedIn for 6 months or 9 months or whatever it is." And they've never once commented or liked on anything that we've posted. They're lurkers. I cannot use liking as a proxy for the likelihood that they're going to potentially become a customer. Yes. likes and comments and reposts have a benefit in terms of tuning the algorithm. So, it makes it more likely that they see your stuff in again. It also has an impact in terms of increasing your reach because when they like something, some percentage of their audience also sees it. So, it's not that we don't care at all. It's just that we don't care much. And we've also found that a lot of the posts that are like client getter posts tend to be really specific and talk about really specific problems and say again they they read it and they're like, I was just dealing with that problem. this guy totally understands my world. That by definition is not going to be the viral selfie post where you're trying to be a thought leader or an influencer or whatever. And we it's not that we don't care at all, it's just that we don't care much. And what we mostly care about is consistency. And so, do you show up every week with your best thinking over time? And so we it's we talk about it almost I was just in Italy. We saw a bunch of cathedrals. Like it's like building a cathedral. like each day you show up and put your brick down and you're building something really great but it it takes time and we believe in the aggregate. So one note about the robots. So this is totally new since we started this right. I am sure you have used the robots. We use the robots for our work all day long. What we do not do and this is a weird maybe counterintuitive is like we don't use the robot to write the posts for us. And the reason is we believe people can tell. And I think that you have picked up on these patterns whether you're conscious of it or not. Everybody is obviously familiar with the Mdash, but it's also not because the blank, but because of the blank. And there are just these things. I was having a conversation with a partner at a law firm, Eric Fox, here in Chicago, and he was saying like when I am scrolling through my feed, and I the second I see any of those tells, I immediately stop reading it. I just keep scrolling because I know it's not you. It's not really and I now have to question, is this even your thinking or did you use GPT or whatever to actually create the idea, too? And so we're just of the belief that that this is worth doing the right way. I think that marketing is that you are building a story with your career and a story with your business and a story with your life and that the work is a meaningful part of that and that marketing is ultimately how you tell that story to the world. And so it's a really and maybe you argue that this is Don Coyote and it's me tilting at windmills and I'm fighting a losing battle here, but everybody has to put a stake in the ground about where they stand on this stuff. And so we have found that it's a tremendously helpful strategic thinking partner. It's tremendously helpful for automating for example like when clients prove content scheduling it in platforms and things like that. But I would just encourage you whether you're working with us or whether you're working with anybody else you are selling your brain. You are not selling B2B SAS software. You are selling your thoughts. And so if your thoughts are not your thoughts you might be able to trick people for a little while but they will figure it out. And so that's my little robot rant. So take from that what you will. Audience shaping. So I mentioned these tools that allow you to build lead lists. We are not the build a lead list of 10,000 people and spam them all a bunch. But there there is utility in it. And so one of the things that we do is what we call audience shaping. We will build a lead list of people who fit your ICP and then we will help send kind of connection requests on your behalf. We don't add a note. We don't try to slide into their DMs and schedule time right away. It's really just about increasing the percentage of your network that fits your ICP that's being exposed to your content. It's about inviting them to the cocktail party. But that is a useful tool for some or a useful use case for some of these things. A lot of clients ask what's the role of long form. We do believe in long form and we've done it both ways where we'll actually do long form and then break it into short form. We've also done it where we do short form and write a series of LinkedIn posts and that becomes a crappy first draft of a long form article. We've done it both ways, but they both have a place. Some percentage of people who are consuming your content on LinkedIn will click through to your website. They'll explore. They might want to do a deeper dive. LinkedIn obviously has a 3,000 character limit. We believe that every firm should have an evergreen content library on their site. We believe that they should again be from the person. We believe that you should have each article map ideally to something in your menu of offerings. And then when possible, you should have a content upgrade or a lead magnet of some kind to earn the right to get their email and to start to build a relationship that you can nurture with them over time. We do believe that there is a role for long form. We also believe in webinars. Obviously, you're here for one. We try not to do too many of them because then you're having to constantly show webinars, but when we do webinars, we try to one have it directly mapped to a pain point of your ICP so that you can tee up a solution and have a soft kind of cell at the end. We also believe in what we call overwhelming them with value. Like I think a good webinar is one where they walk away being like, "Wow, that was fantastic and it I was struggling to keep up and take notes and all of that kind of thing, but highly valuable, really great use of my time." and then also like maybe a little bit overwhelming about hey I don't know where exactly where to start here such that they want to raise their hand right we're big fans of producing webinars we're also increasingly fans of going outside so I think another implication for me at least of the robots is in real life I think is going to matter more than ever and so I think we're a couple of years removed from co wrote a post about it actually this morning that I think we've all become a little bit inert and there's a lot more inertia than maybe there used to be around getting on that plane and going to the conference or going to see the prospective client or whatever. But I think that trust, if there was a secret to microwaving quote unquote trust, it is getting across from somebody in person and doing it. And we would encourage you to make a list of every conference in your space and create a speaker kit. Try to submit proposals if you can and get an opportunity to be on stage. Obviously, like that is huge for trust building. If you do, make sure you record it because that's an asset that you can repurpose and use for other things. But even for ones that you're not speaking on, we encourage you to go anyway and design a strategy for how to maximize the value that you get out of that conference. But we just think that this is going to be a lot more important in the coming years, especially when it's it's not unreasonable to assume it's going to be really hard to tell within a year or two of what's real even on video and what's not. But it's hard to fake being physically in person. We get a lot of questions about the role of your website. We think of your website primarily as a conversion tool rather than an awareness tool. And it is not that we don't believe in SEO. We do. It's just really hard and especially for boutique firms. What we have often found is one, there is not enough search volume to to justify the amount of time and energy that it takes. Two, it's a long-term investment. And so hopefully you will get some organic search benefit just by virtue of being consistent with thought leadership and long form on your website. But we tend to think that most of the people for most of our clients the people that are visiting their site for the most part are people who already know them. And so we try to have it be more of a credibility reinforcing tool rather than an awareness generating tool. So and then newsletters. We're huge fans of newsletters. I we argue we wrote an article about this recently around how your email list is arguably your most valuable asset. The downside to LinkedIn obviously is that they could change their government at some point and make it irrelevant. As of 2026, we still believe it's probably the fastest, cheapest way to be in front of your audience, but you want to have a mechanism to capture email addresses and you want to be able to show up with those people with generosity over time. We also argue or advocate not just having a company newsletter, but in in some cases having a personal newsletter. So, we have clients where there'll be a company newsletter that goes out to your their house list, but then there's an individual newsletter that goes out to the contacts for which an individual MD or partner are responsible for. And that lends itself to a curation strategy more of, hey, here's a bunch of interesting content, some of which maybe we created, but some of it people other people created, but just talks about our domain and it's another way to add value for people. And then lastly, it's not that we don't believe in prospecting like we do prospecting and in fact I allocate a couple hours a week to do cold outreach. The difference is we don't do Mad Lip spin. We do we try very hard to have every single touch be highly personalized, highly relevant and trust building and not come across and not be relegated into kind of the salesperson sandbox. And as a result, like we have routinely found that spending an hour and researching two companies and sending three touches, a response rate will be one out of three or two out of three versus sending a 100 touches of Mad Lab spam and getting a bunch of unsubscribes and spam reports and maybe you'll get the one. When a lot of people talk about how it's a numbers game, I just think about the person that's raising their hand doesn't mean that they trust you. It just means that they're willing to give you a little bit of time, but they're coming into that skeptical. And for the 95 that didn't reply to you, what do they think of your brand? And this is just and this is just how we think it's better to show up this way. It's how I want to show up as a person. If I'm going to if I'm going to be doing cold prospecting, I want to do it in a way that does not feel gross. And but we do believe that there's a role for it. And it's the ultimate manifestation of taking control of your destiny, right? And everything that we're talked about here all goes toward getting people to raise hands. And so we're trying in our case, we try to push people to a strategy call. It's the same thing that we often advocate for our clients is try to get people to a strategy call. And all of these things reinforce each other. It can be repackaged in different ways. Which gets to the point of like when they do raise their hand, you should have a really tightly scripted strategy call. I learned this the hard way. Back in manifold, a lot of our first our calls would be like we had this 50 slide deck. We would just walk you through our whole story the whole time. We have I learned the hard way that is a really bad way to do this. A much better way to do it is to spend the bulk of the time asking questions and learning about their business. And so if you have a 30-minute call, ideally 20 minutes of that time is them talking. And then when you do your kind of big reveal, you have in maybe an 8 to 12 slide deck. Again, it goes through your this should say problem diagnosis solution, but problem point of view solution and hopefully feels like you read their mind because they just were talking about their problems and you've done this enough that you're like, "Hey, this is that sounds an awful lot like what we hear and then they're like, "Wow, this person really understands my world and understands my business." And then have a clear next step. What you want to avoid is if you can is like, "Hey, great conversation. No idea what to do next." You at least want to have a direction that you're leading them to, which is why those that menu of offerings is so important and especially that wedge engagement is so important. You want to have a clear on-ramp for people that are interested. That said, again, I mentioned if it's a complex sale, if it's a hyper strategic sale, if you're trying to if the work that you do involves board level work or seuite level work, in a lot of cases, what's going to happen is you're going to have a great first call and they're going to say, "Hey, it's been really great to get to know you. No, no urgent opportunity, but let's keep the conversation going. Which begs the question of what in the world do I say? How do I nurture a relationship effectively over 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, that kind of thing? And this is I mentioned this before, but this is how we choose to do this. Don't do business development, love and serve people. And so every touch should add value, serve them, delight them in some way. What does not work is, hey, just checking in. Hey, you ready to buy something from me yet? That does not work. And so we try to do instead is a whole bunch of things. One, we believe that authority marketing should be your foundation here. Again, these little trust deposits keep you top of mind after you had that first conversation so that they're reminded of you and they show up once a week or twice a week in their feed. Some of them are relevant to them, some of them are not, but they still see your little face and your little headline that reminds them of, oh yeah, those are the change management guys. Like, I I just need to be reminded of that. And so when a buying window opens, you're the first person they think of. So, we believe that this accomplishes that in a way that isn't pushy, that doesn't feel salesy, that's always about adding value, and that reinforces the trust that you earned by getting them to raise their hand in the first place. But we do believe in structuring potential touches over time. And so, it can look like a whole bunch of different things. It can be, it's multi-channel, but again, the consistency is always around adding value and reinforcing trust. And so, a couple of real concrete things that you can do. we just made a thing for you. This is in a world of AI like this is a fantastic use the and I learned this in innovation consulting days. I used to have fights with my design director at the time because I wanted he was fantastic. He was the best designer I've ever worked with and I wanted to give away mock-ups of things and he thought that that cheapened it and I said I want to give it away because I think it's the most valuable thing that we do and by showing them the quality of our work relative to a deote digital or something like that they learn that our output is going to be superior to theirs and so that was why we did it and I think now in a world of AI you can create prototypes of various types and I use the word prototype loosely think about how that might map to your domain, a diagnostic or whatever so quickly that the whole thing about it takes too much time or too much money to do, I think is no longer true. And so showing them that we created something just for you with their brand on it, tailored explicitly to them, I think is really valuable. The downside to some of the authority marketing stuff, at least like LinkedIn, is that it's ephemeral, right? Like it's unlikely someone's going to go to my profile and scroll back six months ago to see what I wrote. And then your website is useful, but can sometimes be a little bit of a labyrinth. And so what we want to have is a way for people that are in market that are having business development conversations with current or prospective clients to really quickly be able to get access to the great thinking that you took the time to write. And this is an example of one of our versions. It's a notion document, but it's it maps to all of our ideas around our unified theory. And you can see all these little links of more on this here. Those all link either to articles that we've written or to LinkedIn posts that Paul or Jonathan or myself have written over the last two years so that we don't have to go and hunt for it and it's ready and available to them. And it increases the useful life and is a really useful way to turn your authority marketing content into content that is useful in the context of business development conversations. Don't send swag, send stuff, but do send stuffs. People want to rep their company, not yours. And so what we try to do is send thoughtful gifts. So we send books twice a year when clients have things to celebrate. The celebration is it's not on our list of values, but it is a value of ours. So we have a a glass of champagne whenever we land a new client as a team and we will sometimes send champagne to client other clients as well. We've sent clients champagne sabers as a wedding gift. We when clients have had to cancel a call because they were sick. We had Uber Eatats send them chicken soup. We try to show them that we see them as people and do surprise and delight. And it's like the Seth Goden talks about the free prize inside of the cracker jack box. This is not why they hired us. It has nothing to do with our deliverables, but I do think it stands out and it's a way to add to add to the relationship and to be a lot more memorable. We talk a lot about what we call the three-hour dinner. My colleague Paul has a gift for hospitality, is very good at this, but the idea is basically like you bring six to eight people together. You tell them, "Hey, this is why I invited you specifically." You maybe introduce a topic if you want to guide it, but otherwise you get out of the way and let them hit it off. And then they remember that amazing dinner they had at that amazing place. Or even if it's at your house, if you have a a gift for hosting and you're great at cooking or whatever, they remember when they met. So, and then they think of you and you're the key kind of connecting point in all of that. Equip your champion. A lot of the sale is going to happen, especially in an enterprise or committee based context when you're not in the room. And so you want to have sales enablement tools that you can give your champion to help you help sell you internally when you're not there. And so that can look like one pagers, that can look like emails that you queue up. It can look like strategy documents. We're big believers in strategy document where it's like literally, hey, this is exactly what we would do if we were running your firm. Then but just arm them with stuff and material so that they can sell you internally when you're not in in the conference room or on the Zoom meeting. And again, all of this is in support of just being top of- mind when buying Windows Emerge. We have documents, notion documents for other vendors and including personal and professional that we can refer people to. We have a document called ways to love people. So like gifts that we can send when people move or get a promotion or whatever. Just ways to again show people that we see them and stay top of mind. We actually believe in this so much that we built our own CRM to do it. We tried to use Adio and we tried to use HubSpot to do this. We were frustrated that we couldn't wrangle it to do exactly we wanted to do. So, we built our own. It's a serum that we use internally. We have a couple clients that are starting to use it and we're slowly rolling it out to other people as well. A couple of you actually, I think, have at least seen the demo of it. But, it's a way again for us to authentically show up for people in a way that is somewhat scalable, but not certainly not Mad Lab spam. And it's informed by everything that the the thing knows about your company, that knows about you personally, that knows about them, or at least everything you're willing to tell them. And it allows you to bake in thoughtful touches. Hey Katie, I saw Michigan's in the final four. Hey, I saw you just raised fund. You raised money. Congrats. Like all that kind of stuff. If you want to talk about that, you can DM me and we can find a time to kind of show you the demo. But I'm actually really proud of what we put together there. But the whole point is that we just believe that this is the way to build relationship from a business development standpoint in professional services. And then just have a library of sales enablement materials. So you want one pagers for every item in your menu of offerings. You maybe probably want a quick intro deck for each of the service offerings that you have in your menu of offerings. You want to have case studies at the ready, ideally mapped by industry or service line if you have it. You want to have objection handlers. We also talk sometimes about having a story library that you can equip BD folks with not just the case study about how amazing the project was, but what did we learn? Because we found that that can be really helpful when increasing trust is when someone raises an objection. You don't just answer the objection, you tell a story and you say, "Hey, that's a great question. It reminds me of when we were working on such and such client. This is what happened and this is how we dealt with it and what we learned from that process. Does that answer that for you?" and they learn one that you got to work on cool credentializing client but two you answer the question and overcome the objection in a way that's more winsome and authoritative I think than just a the way a salesperson might address an objection so that's it at a high level get clear on your point of view show up consistently and help with your best thinking create respectful ways for people to raise hands when they're ready and then again knock their socks off with delivery and create more raving fans couple ways to work with us if you're interested a lot of the work that we do is implementation focus focused. A lot of firms need help not just with like big ideas, but actually getting our hands dirty and getting in the weeds. And so we write content for partners and managing directors so they can show up on LinkedIn or long form. We will help you execute and stay accountable for developing those relationships over time and we even operate in some cases in a full service capacity where we're creating producing the webinars. My colleague Jonathan is on his way to Columbus, Ohio today actually to help produce a TED event for a client along with our another parley Margaret. creating one pages, creating decks, writing long form, that kind of thing, but really being an extension of your team. And then increasingly, we now do strategic advisory work as well. And that that really is me just learning my lesson and having clients that are like, "Hey, I we have a marketing team or a marketing person at least. What I really need help with is the strategy stuff." And I think I think I tend to associate too much of my identity with making pretty stuff. I've learned the hard way or maybe not the hard way but a lot of our clients what they really value is honestly the time with us and just to be able to riff on ideas especially if you're a founder practice it's really lonely and so having somebody else who's been there and who's I know what it's like to go from 2 million to 20 million and all the hard things you're going to run into in each one of those phases and let let's riff and let's talk. So those are a couple ways that we can help but like I said we got two minutes left. We covered a lot of ground. If you want to just put time on our calendar as well, you can just again send me an email and we can find a time to chat and riff on your business and what you're dealing with. And so it won't be a a sales conversation per se. It'll be a conversation and my hope is that we're good enough at what we do that you'll say, "Hey, we should talk." But again, like I said, email me at seanhiremadison.com or DM me on LinkedIn. Happy to chat whenever and riff on ideas and look into your business and see if there's anything we can do to potentially support you. really appreciate you taking the time. I know an hour is a long time. It is not lost on me. So really appreciate it. Always humbled a little bit that people would find anything that we have to say interesting. Thanks again and we will see you next time.