We are still in our relative infancy at Coppett Hill. Dave, our founder, set up Coppett Hill ~14 months ago - we imagine that the way the describe the age of our business will mirror that of the way that someone would describe the age of a small child. Months, up until the 2-year mark, at which point you pivot from months to years. What an occasion for celebration that will be.
We've been privileged to work with some really exciting businesses across multiple different sectors, both B2B and B2C. We like to think that our work with management teams and investors has had a terrific impact - one piece of evidence for this has been the scaling of the team, from 2 when I myself joined in early December, to 6 of us today, soon to be 7. I write this article on the way to my first day at our new, larger, dog-friendly office - it's been an exciting time, and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Oliver, Dave’s dog, being a good boy at our new office.
The next phase of growth for Coppett Hill presents an entirely new set of challenges for the team. We're focused on putting processes in place which allow us to scale sustainably, and deliver even better work for existing clients, as well as great work for new ones too.
The senior team at Coppett Hill all have the benefit of many years of experience across professional services. At our recent strategy day, we discussed common pitfalls of companies looking to scale in a similar fashion to ourselves, and more generally speaking, issues faced by advisory firms in our area of the market. One theme in particular caught my attention - the trap of businesses which offer advice, failing to apply that same advice to their own internal operations. Or, in a more article title-friendly phrasing, taking your own medicine.
Who are the Cobbler's Children:
Before writing this article, I had no concept of the 'cobbler's children problem', or in all honesty, what a cobbler was at all. I'll delegate to friend of Coppett Hill Growth Advisory, ChatGPT, to explain.
The cobbler's children problem is a metaphor for the phenomenon where professionals often neglect to apply their expertise to their own situations, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. For example, a cobbler may make excellent shoes for customers but leave their own children barefoot.
Readers of the articles which I contribute to the Coppett Hill website will be no stranger to my love of ChatGPT generated images.
Fitting examples of this in a professional context include:
Strategy consultancies making fundamentally unstrategic decisions
Accountancy firms keeping messy internal accounts
Marketing agencies doing a poor job of their own marketing
Why does this happen?
Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In this spirit, the first reason we would identify for professional services firms filling the role of the cobbler in our previous analogy would be that they are genuinely incapable of applying their professional skills to their own business. The reasons for this, as we see it, are twofold.
In some instances, it is legitimate to say that advising on something can be different to putting it into practise, especially when that advice in question is broadly categorised. For example, suppose that a boutique strategy consultancy has an immense wealth of experience advising healthcare businesses – this may not translate to an aptitude for internal, professional services strategy & operations, despite them both being ‘strategy work’.
More cynically, sometimes the veneer of what people sell is exactly that - you aren't going to successfully apply your service to your own business if you aren't really capable of applying it for your clients.
Another, marginally more complex explanation concerns prioritisation. It's easy to argue that immediately delivering value for clients should take precedence over internal, more operations-type projects, especially when an advisory firm has limited resources. This point becomes especially impactful when considering the mindset commonly employed by professional services firms to do with staffing - if an employee isn't utilised through working on a client project, then they aren't generating revenue.
Perhaps an issue not to trouble Coppett Hill for the immediate future, but one worth mentioning, is professional services firms becoming victims of their own success. Some of the largest professional services firms have tens of thousands of employees, and thousands of partners, all effectively running their own book of business - considering this, it isn't surprising that keeping a consistent strategy/set of internal processes can rapidly become very challenging indeed. The near-constant renaming/reshaping of departments/service offerings, familiar to many of us at Coppett Hill from our time at larger consultancies, serves as a fitting example of this.
How do we take our own medicine at Coppett Hill?
At Coppett Hill, we help our clients with their go-to-market (GTM) strategy. So, how do we make sure we keep on top of our own GTM strategy and ensure that we maintain a baseline level of credibility in the process?
The first, and most obvious way we ensure that we take our own medicine, is by structurally ensuring that it remains a focus for everyone. As well as our biannual strategy days, we schedule a company-wide call every week, where make a point of discussing the success of our own GTM strategy – this involves discussing our own pipeline openly with the entire team. We think that this spirit of radical transparency encourages everyone to take agency over the success of our own marketing/sales efforts.
Yes, we are always this enthusiastic to discuss our pipeline.
As a professional services firm, we understand that our route to market is very much relationship and credibility focused. This means that occasionally we need to adopt a slightly more abstract, long-term approach to ROI – for example, the article which you are reading right now might not have much short-term ROI in terms of lead generation, but we think that investing time in creating content such as this will help to build our credibility over the longer term, helping us to win new customers in the future.
Building on the relationship point, we firmly believe that the best form of marketing for us is by delivering great work for our clients – we encourage the entire team to consider even the most seemingly isolated/simple tasks through this lens. To this end, we’ve been dedicating a couple of hours a week to ‘Coppett Hill Academy’, to help upskill the team and increase the quality of what we deliver for our customers.
Where feasible, we look to focus internally on technical areas we work on with our customers. It's not uncommon for technical elements of our projects to involve some aspect of SEO, as part of a wider focus on marketing attribution. Whilst paid search in particular might not be a sensible route to market for a business like ours, we ensure to stay on top of our organic search rankings by monitoring our performance with our Searchscope tool.
As part of the strategy for our next phase of growth, we’re taking our own medicine by carefully reviewing the success of our own go-to-market (GTM) strategy and iterating it accordingly. If you would like to discuss how we could help you do the same, please Contact Us.
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