SUCCESS STORY

How a strategic challenge approach in a Big 4 tax group transformed their business development

Strategic challenge for a group that had tried, and failed, to focus on a clear agreed strategy and stick to it.

INDUSTRY: Professional Services

Our client is one of the big 4 professional services firms selling a unique range of compliance and consulting services in a highly competitive market. We were asked to help their transfer pricing business unit.

Like all tax departments, our client’s best people have very high-level technical skills. Indeed, some of them are recognised as world leaders in their fields.

The challenge

This was a group with three partners, four directors and a few director-level economists. They had typically focussed on ‘farming’ work from existing firm’s clients. A lot of that work was tied into annual audits and their own colleagues, and the market, put these under a lot of price pressure. The team had some unique skills and were particularly skilled at complex transfer pricing situations.

What happened?

Working with a small team of JA Consulting’s most experienced consultants we set up a series of reviews to define what an ideal client would be. That was then compared with the work they were actually doing.

It was very clear very quickly that around 60% of the work they were doing was low skilled and highly commoditised with the margin on that work under considerable pressure.

There was huge pressure from other parts of the Firm who needed the annual transfer pricing audits. The initial thinking was their unit could continue to do those, but further analysis showed that the skills balance (and costs) did not work. And there was serious risk that work would distract from the consulting side.

Therefore, a separate unit, with one of the partners leading it, was set up. They recruited a new set of staff who we were more used to routine compliance work.

The now “new” transfer pricing unit focused on large corporates.

Initially that started with existing clients of the firm and that was highly successful. To spread risk we identified other (non-Firm) targets and built a pursuit strategy for those.

The work quickly expanded into non-client targets and the team won the biggest ever project with one of the world’s leading industrial companies.

Part of the strategy was to keep a strong focus on margins and keep fee rates up.

The final negotiation with procurement for that massive job was challenging, but because the case for using the Firm and their almost unique expertise was so strong, that fee pressure was resisted.

How the client benefitted

For a number of years the group had tried, and failed, to focus on a clear agreed strategy and stick to it! The approach JA brought to the table enabled the team to answer some difficult questions they had probably been avoiding.

We started by getting the senior team to do a deep dive on their position, who their ideal clients were and how well their current projects fitted that ideal.

The results

Here’s what our client had to say about the this:

“We had tried a number of times to resolve this amongst the partner group. In practice we were not challenging enough on ourselves, too often taking an easy path. What JA did was made us really think and work through how we needed to organise ourselves.

“As well as a massive jump in revenues (+70% in two years) we saw margins nearly doubling.

“Perhaps of greatest satisfaction was how some of our younger ‘stars’ got much more interesting work and we found retention was much easier.

“We knew this was going to be really challenging. It was difficult to split off the compliance business, in effect giving up regular work for consulting opportunities., We had a few wobbles along the way but JA’s coaching helped us through those.”

What the client says:

"What JA did was made us really think and work through how we needed to organise ourselves."

"As well as a massive jump in revenues (+70% in two years) we saw margins nearly doubling."

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