When developed strategically and with intention, your POV functions as the growth lever for your entire firm. It’s the backbone of firm culture, business plans, marketing activities, business development tactics, and employee engagement.
For nearly two decades, I’ve been in the business of helping professional services firms drive organic growth. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the most successful firms tend to operate with a single, distinct, unambiguous Point of View (POV).
What do I mean by POV? Since the phrase can mean different things to different people depending on the context, let me describe my POV on POVs: In the main, a POV is a specific set of beliefs that you share with the communities you serve. These viewpoints could be backed by substantive research or years of hard-earned experience. Foundationally, a POV represents your unique way of looking at the world—done right, it captures and presents a view that is vastly more effective than conventional wisdom.
Don’t Mix POV and Purpose
To be clear, a POV is not your firm’s purpose. Your purpose describes why your firm needs to exist in the first place. A POV, in contrast, is a way for your firm to describe how it perceives the world outside itself. It’s the foundation of your value proposition, because it’s what attracts great clients to you (while delicately nudging away the wrong ones).
When it comes to developing POVs, however, companies tend to be rushed and unfocused. They operate under false assumptions about what a POV is and what a POV does. Leaders try to “boil the ocean” and develop perspectives on everything. Or they toil away in departmental silos, a habit that hampers their ability to create a singular, memorable, and impactful perspective that can drive the entire organization and business forward.
Based on my experience working with high-performance firms, I have seen five unassailable truths about POVs. Here they are:
1. Your POV should tell the world how you see the world
A point of view should address how to solve a specific pressing challenge faced by a majority of your clients.
Example from Rattleback client, HT Engineering: the greenhouse gas emissions generated by food production.
The firm addressed the problem with a detailed, practical, and experience-driven solution: capture all that biogas and sell it. Through HT’s research, the firm found that farm-produced biogas is considered a renewable resource, and at the time could be sold at about three times the price of standard natural gas. The firm’s POV on this issue was to create a transmission pipeline system—which, although subject to federal, state and other regulations, can solve the problem and create new revenue growth for farming operations.
2. Your POV should attract new clients
A compelling POV is important because it sets the foundation for landing successful client relationships. That’s because it works to not just attract the type of client whom you can best help and whom you most want to work with, but also works to repel the prospects who do not align with how you think and act.
Imagine you’re sitting on a panel at a conference with 2-3 of your competitors. Though you each might operate a little differently, the reality is your expertise lies in the same domain and you’ll likely agree on 90% of what’s being discussed. However, there will be 10% where you philosophically disagree. You see things differently than they do. It’s this 10% that is the basis for compelling debate. It’s this 10% that forms your POV.
3. Your POV should be intentionally imprecise but decidedly unambiguous
Your POV needs to strike a tricky balance: It can’t be so specific and reflective of current market conditions that it quickly becomes outdated, and it can’t be so vague or abstract that clients and employees are left scratching their heads and assigning their own meanings to it.
POVs are best when they are simple and straightforward yet malleable enough to apply to the myriad challenges and opportunities confronting your client base, employees, and stakeholders.
An example of this is Rattleback client, operations consulting firm TBM Consulting. The company messages under the umbrella statement “Speed Wins Every Time.” On its face, speed is a painfully simple, even innocuous, concept. Yet the simplicity and imprecision of a POV built on being faster allows for hyper-specific execution in practice.
For example, TBM Consulting creates speed in operations by taking a bottom-up approach, driving down to the point-of-impact, identifying break points, and implementing continuous improvement initiatives. Collectively, this approach rapidly delivers bottom-line results.
4. Your POV should be differentiated
The whole reason to develop a firm-wide POV is to distinguish your firm from its peers. It gives clients a philosophical reason to hire you beyond your stated experience or known reputation.
Your POV answers one of the single most pressing questions clients ask themselves when looking to choose between firms — how do they think? Depending on the context, clients will re-frame that question a variety of ways. What do you see as the most pressing issues they face as a business? How would you help them overcome those issues? How are other leaders similar to them solving that problem now?
All these questions are answered by your POV.
There was a time, not too long ago, when a firm could separate largely on its experience. When we first started working in the A/E sector in the early 2000’s we often pointed to Sargent & Lundy as an example of a well-positioned, highly differentiated firm. At the time, the firm could simply claim it had designed 40-some percent of the world’s power plants. That was enough to separate them in the minds of most clients. Today, the firm touts both its experience designing nearly 1000 power plants and its repository of insights on where the energy industry is headed.
These days, clients want to know not only what you’ve DONE in the past, but also what you think they should be DOING in the future.
5. Your POV should cascade down through the entire organization
It functions as the litmus test for everything you do. Consulting firm Jump Associates’ POV carries an explicit, straightforward, unambiguous message: “Future-focused strategy.”
Critically, future-forward strategy captures both the firm’s view on the world and the “service” it provides. Here is the clear way the company makes that value proposition clear:
“We work with the world’s most admired companies to solve their most pressing growth challenges. Over the last twenty-five years, Jump has partnered with companies like Google, Nike, Samsung, Target and Virgin. In a world that’s mired in yesterday’s data, we use a future focused approach to help these organizations grow in times of dramatic change.”
The rallying-cry message of being future-focused is the lever for everything the organization does. All of Jump’s thought leadership flows from and feeds into this POV.
“Future-forward” guides the tone and voice of every piece of content. Consider this recent article by Jump CEO Dev Patnaik, “Is It Time to Rethink Your Innovation Strategy?” In it, future-forward messaging reigns:
“While most large companies have an established approach to innovation, very few have one that really works. And simply dusting off the old innovation playbook is unlikely to yield results. Innovation success in the coming years will demand a more fundamental rethink of the strategies they employ.”
Get started by thinking about two questions
Developing a POV is hard. Begin by seeking answers to these two sets of questions:
- Where does your firm create uncommon value? For example, when you’re successful at delivering whatever it is you deliver, what’s the real end result?
- Is there a fundamental mistake clients in your space make over and over again? What do the clients that get it right do differently?
