Differentiate Yourself by Taking a Stand Against Something in Our Industry

Take Up an Informed Contrarian View to Disrupt the Business Valuation Profession

What frustrates you about our industry? Do you think your prospects, clients, and referral sources might feel the same way? What if you took a stand? What if you stood out by promising something different than the standard operating procedures your competitors follow?

What frustrates you about our industry? There must be something you don’t like about why or how we do what we do. Do you think your prospects, clients, and referral sources might feel the same way? What if you took a stand? What if you stood out by promising something different than the standard operating procedures your competitors follow?

I got this idea from Forbes contributor Pia Silva and her book, Badass Your Brand. Then, while I was reading the book, a coaching client developed a list of 10 issues he sees in our industry, but few talk about. And fewer still take a stand against.

I edited that list and suggest a way you can turn each problem into an opportunity to differentiate yourself. These are all things we would want if we were paying for an expensive valuation project. Why not make some of them your differentiators?

10 Things I Don’t Like About You

1. We are not part of the trusted advisor team, and between the client and us stands a middleman who decides whether our work should be “good enough” or the best it can possibly be.

How to differentiate yourself: Stop marketing to attorneys and CPAs and start marketing to business owners in your industry niche. Originate your own relationships with clients so that you are able to make referrals, not rely on them.

2. We run away from specialization. We mislead clients when we try to tell them being a specialist doesn’t matter. And then we complain about the ensuing fee compression.

How to differentiate yourself: If you are not an expert, you are a service provider just like everyone else. When you search for someone to solve your problem, you search for someone who has solved that problem multiple times, successfully, and willingly pay for that expertise. So, stop being a generalist. Be an expert in your practice area or industry niche.

3. Our reports are standards friendly, stilted, and often inscrutable. It’s almost as if we don’t want the client to read our reports.

How to differentiate yourself: Design a report that is client facing. Make it easier to follow and understand. Use charts, tables, and bullets to summarize key points. Consider adopting PowerPoint-style reports and find a way to still make them comply with professional standards.

4. We design our reports to play defense. We add so many limiting conditions to explain what we didn’t do or are not responsible for that our valuation work product loses value.

How to differentiate yourself: Stop throwing in the kitchen sink from someone’s illustrative list of assumptions and limiting conditions, and only use the ones that apply. Re-word the ones you use so they can be understood by your client.

5. While the report is in process, we don’t communicate with our client frequently enough to let them know what’s going on.

How to differentiate yourself: Given the size of your fee, you should be happy to take the time to impress your client with weekly status updates; here’s what happened this week and here’s what’s expected to happen next week.

6. We take too long to deliver our reports. Years ago, we saw four to six weeks as the standard time quoted to complete a draft report. Despite tools that make us more efficient and effective today, four to six weeks is still the norm.

How to differentiate yourself: In today’s day and age, there’s not too many things anyone is willing to wait four to six weeks for. Once you have the information you need, promise to deliver a working number within two weeks, followed by the report in another one to two weeks.

7. We miss or ignore opportunities to strategically educate the client. Many reports consist of simply restating what is in the schedules, with minimal to no analysis. Economic and industry information is often presented by just attaching the downloads as an appendix.

How to differentiate yourself: Each industry has its own nuances. Know what information is important to your clients. Draw their attention to key economic and industry data and trends they can use to make better business decisions.

8. We should, ipso facto, be experts on transacting businesses and intangible assets, yet that is the work we most frequently shy away from.

How to differentiate yourself: Transaction work and intellectual property seems to be a growing pie. Offer value added consulting work to compete with the brokers who give the valuation away for free.

9. We bristle at being asked to provide a portfolio of our work, or even a sample work product.

How to differentiate yourself: You’re asking someone to write a pretty big check without seeing an example of what they are getting. Be bold. Put some of your sanitized reports (for a concentrated practice area or industry niche) on your website.

10. We don’t understand or embrace value pricing. Fixed fee pricing is not value pricing. And hourly rates almost never coincide with transparency or the value we deliver.

How to differentiate yourself: Abandon the billable hour model. Start pricing with certainty. Offer your clients a protective put on fees. If you’ve done something enough times, you should have a pretty good idea what it’s going to cost at each stage.

So What!

These are some ideas. What other things drive you crazy about the way we do what we do? How can you stand out by being the anti-that-thing?

Being different requires guts because you won’t please everyone. You will stand against something the industry does as much as you will stand for something you do. But in exchange, you will gain the kind of loyal clients and referral sources that can’t be “acquired,” only earned.

And look again at the ideas I presented. What do you have to lose by trying?

In Real Life

I am talking about disrupting negative aspects of the BV profession. Maybe you think that is too grand a vision for you (individually or as part of a group) to accomplish.

Well, you don’t need to disrupt the entire profession … just your competition.

Reading That Can Help

It’s much more fun to be a game changer than a game player. So take a look at this short article from Forbes.com: Disruption: Innovation By Any Other Name. Here are some key quotes (emphasis added):

• “True disruption comes when you fundamentally change a market, a business model, or a way of doing things and, ideally, make a significant impact on humanity.”
• “Others define disruption as the sum of many innovations that, once combined, provide a credible alternative to an existing way of doing things that creates a disruption in the market.”
• “If you look at companies that are widely accepted as being highly disruptive, Uber and Airbnb, for example, they focused on making everyday actions more convenient and, in so doing, have ultimately disrupted the status quo irreversibly.”

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I help BVFLS professionals turn the practices they have into the practices they want by focusing on strategies and tactics to help them better market, sell, and deliver their services; with an assist from AI. If you want some help with that, e-mail me at rod@rodburkert.com.