Professional Firms | Not-for-Profits | Information Companies | e-Commerce
Industries Served
Second Stage Consulting focuses on helping new and established businesses prosper from change. Our clients may have only a handful of employees, or a hundred. What they all have in common is the challenge of creatively and profitably responding to change. This might require rethinking strategy, developing new products or services, or finding new markets. It might require more internal changes, such as clarifying roles and responsibilities, defining reporting relationships, streamlining internal processes, or improving financial controls.
Here are some of the industries with which Second Stage has experience.
Professional Firms
Architectural, legal, engineering, accounting and marketing firms face a unique set of challenges. Typically, these are started by an individual or a couple of partners. They bring focused, fresh valuable professional skills to the market place. Within a year or so they have often built up a client list, and always seem to have more prospects in the pipeline.
An office manager is hired, then an assistant to help with partner schedules and client logistics. An up-and-coming professional in training, right out of school, may be hired to take on the more routine professional tasks.
And now one of two things could happen: the business seems to hit a wall, and growth slows, maybe even stops. Or the firm takes on more and more work, and everyone scrambles to keep up with it.
The partners face a decision. How big do they want the firm to be? If stalled, do they want to get the firm back on track and grow it? If they are getting more work than they can handle, do the want to pull back or do they want to ride the tiger?
The partners find themselves spending more time on management issues, people issues and all the nuts and bolts of keeping the ship together and on the right course. This is where Second Stage Consulting can help. At startup, with just the partners and maybe one assistant, the problem was to find prospects, turn them into clients, and do the professional work.
Now, there are staff conflicts to resolve, a benefits package to find, computer headaches to deal with, marketing materials to redesign, financial reporting to improve, etc., etc. etc. Putting the right infrastructure in place is critical to handling these business challenges efficiently without impacting productivity or revenue growth.
Professional firms that don't want to reinvent the wheel call Second Stage Consulting. When it comes to putting your operations on a firm footing, professionalizing how employees are managed, aligning the organization's structure with business needs, we've "been there, done that."
