Professional Services Firms: Improve Profitability By Making Your People More Productive

The work that your firm performs for your clients is complex, nuanced, and tremendously valuable – but the underlying business model for most professional services firms is usually quite simple.  

Essentially, your “product” is the work that your team produces for your clients. You’re not selling hardware, or widgets, or equipment – you’re selling the labor of your highly-skilled team.  

Which means that the productivity of your workforce plays a major role in determining your overall profitability.  

If your team is highly efficient, you can produce an excellent work product while maximizing your profit margins. If they’re inefficient, the work product may still be excellent, but it takes longer to produce, which increases your costs and hurts the bottom line.  

Productivity and efficiency = profitability.  

Which brings us to an important question: Is your IT company actively working to support and improve the productivity of your people?  

As I’ve written before, some IT companies don’t understand the business model of the clients that they’re supporting. And as a result, they don’t prioritize productivity, which means they end up hurting their clients’ bottom line.  

A classic example is their process for handling software updates. Every IT vendor understands the importance of keeping software up to date – and many of them address this need by enabling “automatic” updates to their clients’ computers and operating systems. Unfortunately, this can result in a computer re-booting itself to install an update in the middle of the workday, which can easily cost a key employee 30 minutes of time that could have been productive, but is now wasted. 

A much better solution is to schedule those updates to occur only outside of regular working hours – nights and weekends, for example.  

At Proactive IT, we understand that your professional services firm is most profitable when your people are most productive. And we are committed to keeping our clients safe and secure – without compromising productivity.  

Does your IT provider understand your business model? Are their solutions, processes, and workflows designed to support the productivity of your team? 

You deserve to work with an IT partner that understands your business model and creates solutions that support your operations, your growth, and your profitability.    

If you’d like to have a conversation about your business IT strategy, please reach out to us via email at info@weareproactive.com or 704-464-3075 extension 3.     

Dedicated to IT security and productivity,   

– Steve