David A. Fields Consulting Group New Year’s is a common time to establish new habits.
The calendar demarcation is great psychological trigger to adopt healthy new behaviors like working out every day, avoiding email until afternoon, and waiting until after breakfast for the first cookie of the day.
Two keys to making new habits stick:
- Limit the number of new habits you’re going to take on. One new habit that sticks is far better than three or four you abandon.
- Track your compliance and, if possible, gamify it so you are rewarded for not “breaking the chain.”
Of course, being the smart, chocolate-loving consulting firm leader that you are, you want to step beyond new, personal habits.
You want new, firm-wide habits.
Fortunately, you can easily select one or two habits to implement at your firm, then use a tracking tool available to your entire team.
For tracking, my team uses a Miro board. Our clients use a similar device or a shared document, Google sheet, custom dashboard or even Slack channels to track their new habit compliance streak.
At the personal level, daily habits are particularly effective. For consulting firms, though, we’ve found that weekly habits make more sense.
So, here’s the big question for you to answer:
What one, weekly habit will you adopt at your consulting firm to improve your fortunes in the year ahead?
Our 4-part consulting firm model is a handy framework for categorizing new habits, and I’ve used it to list some thought starters for you below.
Strategy
- Review and update your firm’s strategic initiatives dashboard every week.
- Conduct at least one interview each week that is purely research (no selling) to understand your market better.
- Identify one non-strategic activity, initiative, relationship or commitment each week to prune.
Win Engagements
- Make X outreaches to new contacts in your Network Core every week.
- Every week, ask for at least X introductions to new contacts.
- Meaningfully advance at least one piece of Thought Leadership each week.
- Appear on at least one podcast (your own, or a collaborator’s podcast).
Profitably Create Value
- Track and display your firm’s weekly productivity (i.e., dollars of revenue delivered).
- Conduct at least one feedback survey with a client each week to gather information about your firm’s client experience.
- Highlight a firm-wide delivery framework or template each week for the team to learn and use.
Infrastructure (People, Processes, Systems) Habits
- Start your weekly, team meetings with a positive statement.
- Note your consulting firm’s achievements every week.
- Recognize a key contributor at your consulting firm every week.
The baker’s dozen of ideas above barely scratch the surface of new, weekly habits your consulting firm could adopt.
You’ve probably thought of one or two others that fit your firm’s situation.
So, what ONE habit will you implement at your consulting firm in the coming year?
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Automate repetitive manual processes to prevent errors and increase productivity.
That sounds like a good intention, Jay. It may be difficult to track as a habit, though, because it’s pretty general. Is there a more concrete, trackable habit you could build from that intention?
It’s pretty easy to track the number of manual processes automated per month. I’d say at least one a month would be good.
For example, I just tweaked the website code to more easily send reviews.io requests to both customers and end users based on our shopping cart orders. No more manual entries. Sweet!
Perfect, Jay. So your new habit will be, perhaps, on the first Monday of each month choose one manual process to automate.
check the budget and forecast every week. Make the forecast at least 5% higher than the budget.
Find root causes for not reaching the largest weekly goal
Those are a couple of outstanding habits, Juan. Forecasting tends to be a somewhat futile exercise for most small consultancies; however, it definitely helps to keep tight tabs on your cash flow, your minimum viable practice (a.k.a. MVP), your signed revenue and your pipeline. Those four, taken together, quickly put you on sound financial footing.
I love the habit of finding out why you’re not achieving goals. That will definitely accelerate your progress.
Thanks for sharing your ideas, Juan!
“New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.” – Atomic Habits
Thanks, Dave. My team and I are huge fans of James Clear and Atomic Habits. We’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas into our own work and the work we do with small firms. I appreciate your adding his POV to this conversation.
Nice one Dave. My new habit for my team: Give feedback at least weekly to clients on their requests or orders in progress, even if it means saying the status is the same. This is a check in with them, to show you are on it. Do unto others as you would like done to you.
Excellent habit, Kumaran. We’ve found a one-page project update form, issued weekly and discussed with the project sponsor monthly, works very well.
I appreciate your sharing your new habit!