9
O P I N I O N
Forgotten fundamentals
“Sometimes I think it is good to reflect back on all the lessons I have learned over the years. Here are a few that stand out to me.”
I was being interviewed by a student the other day for another class he is in. He had to interview someone who had a business that was at least 15 years old. He asked me about Zweig Group and how I learned all I know about the A/E business. I told him I have spent 40 years working in one industry in a wide variety of roles and that I have interacted with literally thousands of companies over that time – and if you do that, you are bound to pick up a lot of information that not everyone else has.
Mark Zweig
2)Pricing will make you or break you. You can sell time, or you can sell the real value of what you do. The choice is yours. Of course, if you want to sell the value of what you do, you will have to do a lot more marketing and selling than you will if you just want to sell hours, because you will run into clients who are not willing to pay you for the value of your expertise. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. She is at the top of a large, international management consulting firm. They never sell time. They sell everything they do in huge fixed-fee contracts. Some of them are $5 million or more. Her mandate, by the way, is to sell at least $12 million a year in fee. They are very successful and at the top of their field because they value themselves and are not willing to give away what they do. They
Sometimes I think it is good to reflect back on all the lessons I have learned over that time. Here are a few that stand out to me as I write this: 1)This is a people business. You have to constantly upgrade your team. But more on that later. Here I want to talk about the collective morale. If your people feel good about what they are doing, and feel good about the company, you as the owner(s) can do well. If they don’t feel good, you won’t do so well. So do the things that help them feel good, and don’t do the things that make them feel bad. Pretty simple, eh? But way too many people forget this simple idea. They don’t worry about things they say or do that could be demotivating and harmful to morale, and act as if everyone is replaceable. As a result, they never achieve what could have been possible business-wise.
See MARK ZWEIG, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 28, 2020, ISSUE 1361
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