How important is an award to your business? We interviewed Stewart Johns or Prederi, a management consultancy, who has recently won an industry award which is proving transformational for his new management consultancy.
Stewart is a Cornishman, a region in the south west of England, so his choice of ‘prederi’, a Cornish word for ‘think again’ is inspired for a management consultancy, don’t you think?
Asked about setting up a consultancy, he advises
- Start with the right people – recruit well using head, heart and gut!
- Can they bring work with them?
- Get out into your industry and get to know people
- Use LinkedIn to build and nurture your network.
Prederi was awarded “Best New Consultancy” at The MCA Awards (Management Consultancies Association) in 2016.
- Stewart could not stress enough how important it is for your business to promote itself.
- He received new business enquiries as a result of the awards
- He had more contact in the week following the Award win than in four years on LinkedIn.
- 10% of the contacts generated on LinkedIn from the award were from new clients
So how did he win the award?
- He got connected.
- He went to the MCA events, contributed to their Think Tanks.
- He made himself known to the MCA. His trade association.
- He knew the criteria, and knew that he also needed to enter another category to enable Prederi to win the Best New Consultancy.
- He advises the judging panel preferred a ‘journalistic style’ to a 500-word submission.
- He took his time with the submission.
Stewart also advised his approach in new client meetings:
- The importance of getting a “credible” meeting.
- Never try to sell.
- Give an anecdote, refer their issue to something you have previous experience with, but do not sell.
- Be genuinely interested in the client.
- Listen to them.
- Ideally link their issue to something being worked on by a partner now or in the past.
- Therefore, he needed to know what projects were being covered by partners to do this.
Stewart highlighted some of the key questions he uses to determine whether his management consultancy should bid for a project. His BID list criteria are:
- Do you know the client?
- Have you worked together before?
- Have you done a project covering the requirement before?
- Can the project be done for the budget or funding on offer?
- Is the scope of the project clearly defined?
- Do we think we can win it?
He typically wins between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 bids.
A LinkedIn tip:
- Blog post ONLY to your followers on LinkedIn.
- Some blogs can generate 20% of his followers to respond to his blog posts.
4 things you can do when deciding to bid.
- Have a Bid List Criteria like those questions above.
- Know who your competition are.
- Don’t worry if the project is for a small amount of work. They can lead to future large pieces of work.
- Live forward and complete feasibility studies and other potentially risky work up front to gain visibility and awareness of new clients.
Discover more about Prederi:
