3 Common Problems I Solved That You Can Solve for Your Clients Too

Fighting the trademark office, losing a major client, and striving to stay relevant in a crowded market. What if I told you this is just the tip of the iceberg of what your clients struggle with at their software service firm?

It's true, running a service firm isn't always rainbows and sunshine. I know first-hand because I built Systems in Motion/Nexient from under $35 million to over $130 million in revenue and faced all these challenges and more. Now that it's all said and done, I've started to put pen to paper and share my experience of how I overcame some of these big challenges.

My hope is that by reading these articles, you'll gain expert insight into the experiences of your consulting clients and how to help them conquer these common challenges.

Below, I share three of these challenges and how I overcame them. Be sure to click through to read the full articles on our blog after each segment.

Challenge #1: Balancing revenue and talent costs

"Cancel the engineering manager's offer letter." The statement came out so quickly and matter-of-factly that I almost didn't stop the meeting to ask what was happening.

In 2014, I was in my first few weeks as CEO of what was then called Systems in Motion. I was in a weekly meeting that most of the company's leadership would join to go over our new projects and staffing assignments. As a newcomer, it was a chaotic meeting but was clearly central to how the company ran.

I had the curiosity/presence to stop the meeting and ask what that statement meant. Had we offered someone full-time employment? Yes. Had they already quit their current job based on our offer? Yes. So I interjected, "Don't cancel the offer." There was a shocked silence in the room. I had clearly just done something that broke from the norms here.

It took me a while to really appreciate the two conflicting objectives that would challenge me for the next seven years as I ran a product development consultancy… read more.

Challenge #2: Managing client relationships

"Our client just gave us notice that they will be rolling off more than 50 people immediately. Also, they believe we've mishandled the engagement so badly that we should pay them $700k."

This update from one of my client partners is the kind you feel in your stomach. It is pretty much the worst possible news you can hear when you're running a business.

At the time, Nexient had around 250 employees on billable work. For 50+ of them to roll off was catastrophic. They'd most likely move to our bench, which typically ran at around 5-7% of our revenue.

This development would increase it to 15-20% and finding new billable work for them all could take months. Our model was built to have 5-7% invested to support our bench, and a large increase would mean the firm would start to lose money. Also, this was our second-largest client at that time, and it was showing all the signs of going away for good.

We had a huge problem… read more.

Challenge #3: Standing out from the competition

At heart, I'm a product manager. I love taking ideas and trying to figure out how to package them up to be a complete product offering. One of the first things I always focus on is what differentiates the product or service offering.

Not long after I joined Nexient, I tried to figure out how we would differentiate ourselves. At the time, there were more than 10,000 software development consultancies globally and I wanted us to have a unique place in the market.

So I started by looking at our home page (see the image below). We were a firm of just over 200 people, but our website claimed to do almost anything an enterprise could need. I failed to see how we could be great at all of these things, and when I looked at our competitors' websites, it seemed like they were also making these claims… read more.

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