The starting point

I was brough on to work with a specialist coaching firm working with law firms and financial services businesses on executive and parental coaching. They’re genuinely good at what they do, and the proof was in their client list. Founding clients came through personal introductions and stayed.

That’s a lovely problem to have. It’s also a fragile one.

Every piece of growth had come from word of mouth. There was no structured marketing, no business development rhythm, and no way of knowing which activity was actually working. The co-founders were doing the BD themselves, alongside delivering the coaching, and it was happening in the gaps between everything else.

As one of the co-founders put it when we first talked about what success would look like, they wanted to be “in a swimming pool with swim lanes, rather than just kind of getting to the other side eventually.”

That became the whole brief.

What we did first

I didn’t start with tactics. When a firm has been running on instinct and relationships, the first job is working out what you’ve actually got.

I ran a full discovery session, then I produced two pieces of analysis:

A competitor review looking at how the other specialist coaching providers in this space position themselves, what they lead with, and where the gaps were. This surfaced something important. Their business had structural differentiators, including their client relationship model and their proprietary diagnostic, that barely appeared anywhere in their marketing. They were competing on trust when they could also have been competing on substance.

A mini digital audit covering the website, the founders’ LinkedIn profiles, and the case for a proper content programme. The website was well designed and did its job as a brochure. What it didn’t do was generate anything. They were blogging six times a year, which isn’t enough to build search visibility or feed a social and email programme.

Both documents split every recommendation into quick wins they could act on within three months and longer-term opportunities. Senior people don’t need a wish list, they need to know what to do on Monday.

The legal sector plan

Legal was the mature market, so that’s where we started.

I built a full marketing and business development plan covering the whole mix. Existing client account management, reactivating lapsed relationships, building a referrer network, new client targeting, content, LinkedIn, events, awards and PR.

The bit that made it usable was the structure. Every single activity got broken down the same way: what it is, how it helps, the action steps to make it happen, the budget, who’s resourcing it, and a RAG rating. That last part matters more than it sounds. It gave the co-founders a way to look at twelve possible activities and make a fast, confident decision about which three to do this quarter.

Alongside the plan I built the things that make a plan survive contact with a busy week:

• An account plan template for their key relationships
• A BD tracker covering existing clients, lapsed clients, targets and referrers
• A twelve month blog content calendar
• A research briefing on sector events and membership bodies
• An event preparation checklist
• A budget template

The asset management plan

Once legal was working, we turned to asset management. This needed a completely different approach and I was direct with them about why.

In legal they were established. In traditional asset management they were close to a standing start, with a small number of clients and some strong adjacent credibility in private equity and alternatives. Writing them a plan that assumed a mature market would have set them up to fail.

So the asset management plan was built as a deliberate market entry over eighteen to twenty four months. Relationship-led, credibility first, with realistic expectations about how long it takes senior financial services buyers to move. The positioning section did the heavy lifting here, because the real question wasn’t what activity to run, it was what to say and which service to lead with.

That plan came with its own toolkit: a market mapping template so they could see the sector properly, a twelve month content calendar, and a researched guide to the industry bodies and memberships worth their time and money.

What changed

My client went from doing marketing and BD in the gaps to having a documented, costed, prioritised programme across two sectors, with the templates and trackers to run it week to week.

They know which relationships matter most and who owns them. They know what they’re publishing and when. They know which activities they’ve deliberately chosen not to do, which is just as valuable.

And the differentiators that were hiding in plain sight are now doing proper work in how the firm talks about itself.

Could this work for your firm?

If you’re growing on word of mouth and wondering what happens when the introductions slow down, you’re in exactly the position my client was in. It isn’t a problem with your service. It’s a problem with structure, and structure is fixable.

Get in touch and let’s talk about what your swim lanes look like.