Exploring Options for the Future of Your Firm – Confidently

Chris Pierce-Cooke

Periodically, every professional services firm founder and leader should proactively explore and gage their firm’s current strength, challenges, potential, and opportunity to grow.

It’s always useful also to have a sense of the relative value of your business in the market under different scenarios.

Even when things were apparently “normal”, the economy, the market, the competition did not typically move in a fully predictable, linear fashion. 2020 and a global pandemic put the exclamation point to that. So – where is your business now, and where could it be in the future? Intuition is interesting – insight is actionable.

Having an informed sense of that reality gives you the ability to better identify and embrace opportunity, anticipate, and plan for challenges. You’re then able to lead and act strategically rather than just manage and react tactically. To put it another way, you can view the future with confidence and not just with curiosity.

That said, confidentiality matters!

This is not an exercise that should ever be conducted out in the open. Being unexpectedly on the defensive with a key client who “heard in the market” that the firm was understood to be exploring its options, is seldom comfortable, and prospectively prejudicial. Your competitors will love telling prospects and clients they have heard a rumor that it may not be time to do business with you. And the talent you rely on to drive your business may start to respond (without you even knowing) when a recruiter calls.

The key is to do the work on your own terms and with sound, experienced advice. It’s essential that your consultant team have the range and depth of knowledge and experience to undertake that exploration with you, and “under the tent”.

It is key to success that you and your advisors together become very clear at the outset as to the specific purpose and scope of the review – what are your personal and professional goals, and business objectives? Test the scope, refine the scope, and decide who else to involve, remembering that every ownership group/leadership team typically has progressives and conservatives within it.

Is your objective to:

  • determine how best to grow the business to the next level, and beyond? 
  • assess what it would take to expand the firm’s range of solutions/products, client roster, talent team, geographic footprint, or brand impact? 
  • identify and potentially attract outside investment, or seek additional finance to fund specific initiatives? 
  • calibrate the current or future salability of the firm – within what valuation range and on what prospective terms?  

Then do the work!

Or, more specifically have us do the work – with you – confidentially, to provide you a grounded awareness of what is possible, what is probable, what will be challenging, all guided by your own definition of success.

The Indigo Advisors Team brings expertise, experience, ideas, insight, and ultimately the ability to execute on every element of the scope above so you can truly Explore Your Options – Confidently.

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