Establishing a growth mindset pilot program for selected locations and industry practices can be helpful as you set and launch your overall industry strategy.
A pilot program will help you establish best practices and build out a repeatable model that can be replicated in other locations and across all industry teams. The pilot should help your firm achieve sustainable and meaningful organic growth at a rate above its competitors.
A strategic focus for creating industry teams
Regional managing partners, market leaders, or office managing partners should approve the creation of industry teams. Setting your industry teams up for success requires the right tone at the top. Leadership should select and endorse the high-priority growth industries. Your industry team selections need to align with your firm strategy, but it should not be a “one-size fits all” approach. Each of your region or office markets probably has distinct financial and economic conditions that will drive your determinations of which industries present the highest growth opportunities.
Teams can be organized according to industry and sector. Generally speaking, an industry is a broader grouping of clients that naturally share a common industry umbrella, such as financial services. Many firms will find there is a critical mass of clients at a deeper sector level, such as the banking sector, which falls underneath the financial services umbrella.
From the client’s perspective, the sector level is always more relevant, because business clients view their world as comprised of companies that are their direct competitors, or their own customer target market. At your firm, however, it may not be possible to go so narrow with deep expertise in every sector. Achieving the balance of expertise at the industry level, and even deeper expertise at the sector level, will look different for every firm. Balance the number of teams in each region or office based on their relative strengths/resources and market opportunity. In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew!
