Ali: Welcome to the Passle CMO series podcast, where we discuss all things marketing and business development in the world of professional services. So today, I'm going to open up with a little bit of a quote from our guest. And that quote is, “when I want to find out their real strategy for growth, I follow the money.” That's a quote from Tim Mullane, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Wilson Elser. And to be honest, I think it says it all. Today, we're lucky to be joined by Tim to discuss how firms often have misalignment between their strategy and what is actually getting resources in the budget.

Charlie: The CMO Series podcast is brought to you by Passle. Passle makes thought leadership simple, scalable and effective, so professional services firms can stay front of mind with their clients and prospects when it matters most. Find out more and request a demo at Passle.net. Now back to the podcast.

Ali: Tim, welcome. 

Tim: Yeah, Ali, nice to be here. 

Ali: Yeah, really pleased to have you. And this is take two for us. For those of you listening, we had a couple of technical issues last time.

Tim: You're being kind. I had the technical issues.

Ali: You always blame the technology, Tim. Anyway, very much looking forward to this. And as an opener, I wanted to ask you, what is happening within law firm budgets? And this might also seem obvious, but why should this be something CMOs put on their to-do list? 

Tim: Well, the first one is what's happening in law firm budgets. I think there's a couple approaches that I've seen in the firms that I've worked with. It's either a kind of use it or lose it. So they parcel out the money. And if you've spent your budget, next year, you're going to get a little more. And if you haven't spent your budget, you're going to get a little less. And that's going to drive definitely misalignment. It's probably not the best way to do it. But I think the other thing I see is a squeaky wheel. And I think we all know at law firms, lawyers can be squeaky. And that just means that the people that scream the loudest get the most.  The third one I see is it's just opaque. So I guess I don't see it, right? You don't know where the money goes. You know, they allocate money, but it doesn't seem to. You just don't know where it goes. And then as you talked about, it's about if you want to be strategic. And strategic to me means you're allocating the money in some sort of rational and real way. I think one of the first law firms I was at, I took a look at the budget and by any measure, revenue, number of attorneys, revenue per attorney, you looked at the allocation in labor and employment was disproportionately high. I presented to the executive committee. I said, well, I'm surprised that labor employment is your most strategic practice. And they're like, well, no, it's not. And I'm like, well, it's the one you're investing the most in. And they were kind of surprised by that. And they looked around that. And so I think that you look at initiatives at law firms. I would say probably not as much anymore, but years ago there was big key client initiatives, well, are the key clients funded? I see a lot of misalignment. You see where the money goes and it's not necessarily aligned with what the firm wants to do. And so I think that's one reason why you should care, right? The money, the investment should be going towards the needles that you want to move. I think the other reasons CMOs should care are a rule of thumb, In B2B marketing, 2% to 5% of revenue is invested in marketing. That doesn't count people in the marketing. Law firms, I think it's 2.5% to 3.5%. So you think about it. In AMLAW 50 firms, that's $25, $35 million because they're a billion. You want to say you're a half billion, it's 12.5% to 18, 17.5 million. That's a lot of money. So I think you should care. I think we all know that at every law firm I've been to, and the CFO always has a seat at the table. Why? Well, they care about the money. And I have found that when you care about the money, you care about how it's spent, and then you measure the needles that you're moving, you're going to get a better seat at the table. It's a discussion that the leaders that I've dealt with want to have but they don't have and and it's not an easy thing  to take to undertake right I mean so you're moving people's money and you're taking money from some adding it to others so yeah  it's not an easy thing to do but it's an important thing to do.

Ali: Of course it really blows my mind that you know when you speak about those three different ways that you say you know the use it or lose it the squeaky wheel the opaque they are far too common compared to someone turning around going you know what I know that I have that one million budget and I know exactly what I can put it towards and as you touched upon there you know the CFO always has that seat at the table because people care about the money, so again feeding into that just blows my mind that these law firms wouldn't share openly what the budget is when they care so much about you know the finances but anyway kind of moving on from that I guess actually very much kind of on the same tangent actually in some ways is why do budgets get so out of line at law firms in particular and have you got any examples of what that looks like when it comes to a firm getting it wrong? 

Tim: Well I think they get out of line because they were kind of never aligned in the first place. Yeah you know I think  if you got to use it or lose it or squeaky wheel or opaque I mean it's just not aligned. So that's one reason. I think two, as I mentioned, it's hard to do this. You're fighting personalities, you're fighting culture, you're dealing with powerful leaders when you do it. If it is to use it or lose it, or if it is the squeaky wheel, invariably, that's going to be wrong. Money is going to move from one to someone else, and you're dealing with powerful people. In a previous life, I lived in Europe and it was with a consulting company and we were moving the marketing spend from a country-based spend in the United States that an industry-based approach was better. We were growing at 30% a year in the US and Europe was flat. And Europe is even more important because if you think about it, Europe, there's one or two oil and gas companies per country. Well, mostly one, there's one or two pharmaceuticals. So when you think about the major industries, there's one company per country. And so when you're consulting those people, they care what's happening in their industry more so than what's happening in their country. And I think that's commonplace now, but that was two decades ago, I'll say closer to three. And so, you know, trying to convince, you know, the person running the country, i.e. a Frenchman and, you know, an American trying to convince a Frenchman that, you know, take the marketing money and you're going to move it. And then eventually you're going to move to P&L. You know, those are hard. Those are hard discussions. So you've got to have the backbone and you got to have the, you know, unsellable logic behind it. And so, you know, it's just, it's hard for, it's, you know, some people may think it's not worth it. I actually think it's worth it because when you do align the budgets and when you align the spend. A lot of good things happen. You can measure it better. Candidly, you create more accountability. If people, if partners know the rules about how budgets are allocated, there's much more accountability for that spend, for that money. They feel more personally involved and they feel more accountable to the community. So it gets out of line. I think the big reason it's out of alignment is that it's hard, but like I said, good things are often hard, right?

Ali: Yeah, of course, of course. And picking up on that story that you're sharing there around shifting that, how the budgeting was from country to industry focus and, you know, profit and loss there. Obviously, you're in the world of professional services, you're in consulting at the time. How did you find that conversation? I mean, I know you touched upon a little bit there, you've got to have a bit of backbone logic, you know, use data. Was that something that, have you got any takeaways from that conversation that you used moving forward?

Tim: Yeah. I mean, I think the most important thing is, and we'll probably go on to it later. I mean, that was a little different in that we had the US that had already moved in that direction. Obviously, the US is one country, so it's a little easier, but we had the US move in that direction and we were growing, as I said, 22% a year, which that's phenomenal growth. I mean, I mean, you can't really argue with that. So that's point one. Point two is you have to have the leadership buy-in, right? I mean, those country leaders reported to someone, and those were the people that I worked with to work through the strategy, to work through the conversation.So you know there's going to be backdoor chatter. That happens in the law firm as well. As long as the leadership is on board and the leadership is aligned, they send you out there. Obviously, if you're not strong and you don't have a good argument, you may not win, but if you got a good argument, that leadership is already bought into that back channel that's going to go up to them. The idea is going to be protected. You're going to be protected and you're going to have to move it all. How you do it, how you make those things happen, like in a law firm, it's a little different, right? We're not taking the money brought from one group and giving it to another. We're just kind of moving money around and shifting money. And that's a little easier, frankly, but you got to do it in the right way. The final point is simply, you got to have leadership alignment. They've got to be on board. You got to be convincing in your communication and you got to be fair in how it's done and you know that was different because we were moving money from one group to another in a law firm you're shifting money and that's really important to be fair.

Ali: Sure and that's really interesting I think probably teases up nicely for the question I was about to ask and you probably covered off some of that there Tim but how would you recommend marketers go about aligning their budgets to the strategy? I mean there's clearly say you talk about getting the buy-in and having you know the firm leadership understanding what that budget's going towards why it's a strategy but tips and tricks here would be really appreciated.

Tim: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing you've got to do is you've got to understand the current state better than anybody. You know, what is the current state? It's how the money is currently spent. And if you're in an opaque organization, that's going to be pretty hard. And you've got to understand that. The business strategy. What is it they are trying to do? I worked with a firm. They had a very high-level consulting firm come in, one of the top consulting firms in the world, to find their business strategy. And as you would expect, there was a people component. There was a market component. Those are the two big ones. I think there was a tech component too. But there was a people and a marketing component. Of the market component, there were five very, very specific initiatives that the firm was going to undertake. And one of the initiatives was focused on a certain industry. And one of the initiatives was focused on M&A. And I went through the budget and I'm like, well, and this is three years into it, two years into it, two and a half. I'm like, you know, you have no money put aside for this. I mean, I'm not saying you got to have hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if you want to try and grow an industry or you want to try and attack M&A, don't you think you got to throw a little money so you can establish your presence? You can write about it. You can visit the industry things. You can work with the clients that you've got in that industry. I mean, you have to invest in that in order to move that needle. And sure enough, that was enough to convince them to say, wow, you're right. We don't have that. So, you know, very, very important to understand what the firm is trying to do, where the leverage points are in the firm in terms of the needles they're trying to move, the things that are most important. And it may not be, they may not have a formal strategy, but they certainly have things that they said are important. So, you know, I think that's understanding how the current spend is operating and understanding what the firm is trying to do, I think, is the table stakes to kind of get started. I think the second thing is you got to realize kind of how the business is organized. They think that in the priorities within that, right. I think it's fair to say that most law firms have key clients, strategic clients, client service teams, however, anchor clients, whatever the terminology is, strategic accounts, I think outside of the law firm. So you got the key clients, right? And I think most law firms have practice teams. I think they all have offices and they all have marketing departments. And so, you know, you got to look at that and you got to understand the relative importance. And as I mentioned in the other one, there are strategic initiatives as well, right? So you got to understand the relevance, importance of each of those. And just as an example, I'm not saying this for one of my law firms, the most important thing is the key clients, right? Key clients represent high growth, a lot of revenue, anywhere from, I've seen it as being anywhere from 40% to 60% of the clients I've worked with. So this is reoccurring revenue, very important stuff. You got to fund them at the right level. Practice teams are about the brand. For me, that was the second most important thing. The third is kind of the strategic initiatives. And then the fourth to me was regional offices. I don't really think, I don't know many firms that there's one or two I know that really focus on because we're located here, these are the people we work with. But most of the firms I work with are national and I have found regional spend is not very good, not very productive. So I put that fourth. And then the last thing I find is kind of the things that marketing does, whether that's content marketing, CRM, websites, SWAG, events, sponsorship, the sponsorships that we do at the corporate level, charitable contributions. There's a lot of things that happen to keep the lights on the things that we do. But for me,I always thought the money was better spent in the lawyer's hands. So that was my prioritization. And I candidly have never really had an issue selling it. Obviously, the client service teams, practice teams, and strategic, you could switch between those three from my perspective. But that was the allocation. And then I think the other thing you got to realize is a math problem. That's all it is. It's a mathematical problem, right? There's a fixed number, whether you are going to operate at that 3%. And that's a number that both places that we really got into doing this right, it was a 3% number. So it was $15 million. So it's a math problem. And the math problem says, given the allocation, I want to allocate about 90% of it. So what percent goes to the key clients and then of how many key clients you got and what is the percent you want to allocate. I typically did it as a percent of revenue. So if you think about it, key clients, anywhere from 40% to 60% of revenue. So there's the math problem, right? I have 40% to 60% of my revenue. I've got 3% firm revenue to spend on this. What of that 3% should I allocate? So you go down through that allocation process. There's a certain logic to that. What I used as the allocation was a percent of revenue that those entities, whether it was a key client, whether it was a practice team, whether it was a regional office, I did a percent of revenue and the percent was higher. Based upon how important it was. So clients got the highest, clients got the highest, regions got the next highest. It wasn't against a math problem. So you got to figure out that allocation. The other thing that I did, because most things are out of whack, right? Once you pick, say you want to give 0.25% of revenue to key clients, you're going to find they're all out of whack. Very few of them are going to be at that allocation. So then the question is, how do you get it aligned? And this is where the fairness comes in. And this is where those discussions come in.  So you have to go to the client service teams or the leaders, which are very powerful people and say, well, look, your budget is, you're a little bit out of whack. You're a little high. Your budget is going to be reduced and they're going to scream and complain because, oh, well, you're investing less than me. Well, yes, we are going to invest less than you, but realize we've been over-investing in you all this time. So you should feel good about that. And your partners have been over-adventuring you, right? And you should feel good about that. And so the rule of thumb is we didn't want to take anybody down too fast, so we reduced them by 5%. And if you were really low, we didn't want to take you up too fast because you don't want to have anybody feel too much pain. But you also don't want to have the drunken sailor gets all this money and goes out and spends it. So that allocation, if you're taking down folks by 10 and folks up by five, you're really going to end up in a net positive place with more money from that total allocation pool because you're taking big numbers down and small numbers up less. So there's that math problem that you're going to have a little extra money to allocate later on. And you'll get to what you want to be or where you want to be over a couple of years. And that's fair. You're not trying to make it too painful on anybody. We had an investment in an office. They had a box, which is not uncommon, right? But it was a third-largest office for us. And it was a box for hockey and basketball. And by any stretch of the imagination, it was way too expensive. But we gave them, we reduced them. And each year, they figured out how to fund the box. They figured it out. But now they couldn't. And then they realized, well, you know what? But they got really innovative. They said, hey, why don't we just go get a partner and split the box? Well, yeah, that's a good idea. You aren't using all the damn tickets anyway. So they found a solution that fit their budget and it was the right thing for the firm. It was the right thing for that office. They got there. But did we make them get there in a year? No, they actually got there in about three years. But at the end of the three-year time frame, we were much more aligned with how we were spending and what we were trying to do. There's so much more accountability to the spend. Right now, just that office, there was more accountability. How are we going to do this? What are we going to think? And where are we going to spend that money? So you're just getting more people involved. The other thing we found is that there are things that cross categories, right? Whether it crosses a, an interesting side effect is that you're going to find that investments in marketing can oftentimes cross practice teams, can oftentimes cross practice teams or regions, can oftentimes cross practice teams or clients or all three of those. And so as a marketer, one of the things that we have to do in this model is facilitate collaboration across budgets. And when you think about when you're facilitating collaboration across practice teams or across a practice team in a region or across a client team, a practice team in a region or across the client team in a region, there's nothing but positive that's going to happen from that. You're getting people to work together across boundaries that they might not have and oftentimes would not have worked together before. So, you know, as well as creating that accountability and the ownership and the visibility, creating that collaboration just takes, you know, the firm to a better place. So I think there's a, you know, really interesting, besides being strategic, right? Besides saying, hey, this is where we want to spend our money, creating that accountability, that ownership and improving collaboration that's kind of a good win.

Ali: Yeah, it's really smart because that's something that people look for in so many different ways is with that whole cross-selling element and how do you get everybody to collaborate internally and if you're doing that through the budgets and the marketing element then it all kind of starts to sync well together. And a point that you made earlier on that I felt almost ran throughout all of that answer there was, you know, finding those leverage points. And I think that for me really sticks out is actually digging into the weeds, I suppose, working out where you can, what's being leveraged for the firm in terms of what matters, then how you can use that ultimately to your advantage. And then again, as you say, if you've got to start shifting this budget and moving it around, it's not about doing it all at once to make sure that it's fitting to the priorities. It's just doing the little here and there, small percents up, small percents down. And I  love the way that you're sharing there that story off the back of by doing that you found that office, I think you said it was Chicago, that then started to find collaborative waves of, no, even collaborative creative, should I say, creative ways of using the budget and by dueling up with somebody else to have the box, all of a sudden they're probably saving money and actually getting more out of it, which I just think is so interesting. So thank you very much for sharing that all with us too. 

Tim: You know, one of the other things is that we had a client team, right? And one of the practice team wasn't, it was not, it was a practice the client didn't use. And, you know, we work with that practice team and that client team, the practice team said, well, let me invest money from my budget in your client, see if we can do that. And, you know, they're going to say, sure, go ahead. You want to do that? You want to sponsor something with us and them and you want to, you want to take them golfing or whatever the case may be, but you want to invest to grow that client. That's the kind of collaboration you want. And it's just a better way to operate in my opinion. 

Ali: Well, I would agree. I agree. It gets people thinking smartly. You suddenly go, rather than say the usual drunken sailor approach, where you have money and spend it just for the sake of it, you start thinking, "What are we trying to achieve?" Now, we have money being spent on this key client, but as a practice, we'd also like to invest there. So, it makes complete sense.

Tim: Another thing we found is that when we discussed with the offices, we said, "You're going down 5% or 10% a year, but if you grow your business enough, you can afford it." These discussions help people understand the accountability. We knew they were going to grow their office significantly within three or four years, and they did grow the office and had more money. So, there's an understanding that this is based on something real, knowable, and measurable. Attorneys are logical people; they understand that.

Ali: Of course, throughout all of this, how did you manage to pushback, especially within professional services? Because inevitably there will be pushback.  And as you mentioned earlier there's often a squeaky wheel element to some budgets, and I'm sure there were partners who weren’t too pleased. How did you manage that pushback in the past?

Tim: One thing is that I never did it without authorization from the right folks. Whatever the formal or informal leadership structure is, you need to have them on board. That's critical. Two, you need to know your audience, who they are, and how hard you can push them. Three, as I mentioned, you have to be fair. It's fair to reduce people to get them in line, but not all in one year. You can't make up anything in one fell swoop. You also give them an opportunity to grow their business to earn that. Once you share the math behind what you're trying to do, and if it's a strategic practice area that we want to grow, they should probably get 110% or 120% of whatever that allocation is because they're strategic. If you have a baseline, then you can adjust up or down. For instance, a cash cow that doesn't need much investment might get by with 90% or 80%. These discussions help ease some tension. The argument that "we're cutting" can be countered with “no, we've been over-investing in you.”

Ali: We spoke earlier about calling out those strategic areas of focus.Success with prioritizing budget towards picking winners. Could you expand a bit more on that? How do you go about identifying those winners?

Tim: In my view, right by definition if it's a large practice or if you've got you know “rainmakers” you know who they are but it's also going to be reflected by revenue so you know I want to put money on the winners and I think one way to measure winners are the people that are generating the most money get it. And if you're doing an allocation by revenue, well, that seems to put the money in the hands of the people that are doing the most. So I think that's point one. If you have an allocation, whether that's the person with the biggest team, the person with the biggest book. If you have a big team, yeah, probably got a lot of revenue. So I think one is you're intuitively picking that. I think two is sometimes it's not going to be the biggest, but it is the most important. And we saw some law firms talking about they want to get – I just read it the other day. They want to get into M&A of buying and selling of sports teams, which that's cool. I would like to get into that. 

Ali: You and me both. 

Tim: Yeah, that's cool, right? Right. And they said, you know, it's a typical transaction. It's only like 20 percent. It's different. And so they want to allocate that. And so I think the other important thing is when you make a statement like that, you're going to make an investment like that. I have kind of a three year rule. It's where do you want this to be in three years? Right. How big is it? Describe to me where you want it to be in three years. And then we want to invest in that. We want to look at. And I think after three years, if you haven't made progress towards that, I would argue if you haven't reached, but how about this? If you haven't made progress, stop spending the money. And I think that, you know, I remember we had this event, and it was the 25th year of the event. And it was just terrible. The people that were attending it had the level of the people that had fallen. And it was just, I'm like, why are we still doing this? And they said, well, it's the 25th year. I'm like, what? That's your reason? Yeah, we've been doing it for 25 years. So you're going to keep doing it, even though it stinks? And I said, okay, let's do it this year for the 25th year. Let's call it the last one. And we did. We reframed and everything. 

But it's amazing how you get into these cycles where you just spend. I think we've seen, what, a decade ago maybe all the law firms investing in China and moving to China. And now they're starting to pull out. I mean, I think you really need to – you're not always going to know winners and losers. But as you have what it should look like in three years, that's a reasonable amount of time to expect to see some wins. It may not be winners, but to see some wins. Don't get me wrong. There are some bad ideas, right? I mean, somebody wanted to invest in bird flu. I'm like, no, this is stupid. I mean, maybe it wasn't. I have the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, that was not a good investment. So you know some dogs out of the gate and there's ways to handle that you just make them go write the plan and you know they're not going to come back with it so you're safe but and whatever they come back with won't be won't be worthwhile but I think it is important to think about it in terms of okay this is a this is something we're trying to do. We're going to put some money, we're going to put people, time, money behind it. And let's let those people define what success, with the help of me, obviously, what is it going to look like in three years? Because it's got to be, you know, tan to subjective and objective measures and, and let's revisit that every year. So they know, and you know, to me, those are discussions that are incredibly valuable that happen all the time outside of legal, but not as often in the legal industry. 

Ali: Yeah. Very interesting points. Just picking up on, you mentioned a little bit of a timeframe around that. If you're looking at investing into doing something, maybe saying it's three years that you've got, if we can make some success of it, then of course the money keeps coming. If there's no success, then you probably stop it. What kind of timeframe, what windows do you think firms should be thinking of when it comes to their budgets? Both when it comes to setting them, but also assessing whether a particular strategy is working. I suppose with that, your thoughts are three years but yeah is it a year on year thing quarterly monthly I mean what are your thoughts around that?

Tim: Yeah I mean, the budgets are typically annual so you know we set them depending on the firm you know if you know the timeliness of this we're in what July you should be thinking about it now kind of what you know if i had to sell this internally. I would be doing my understanding of the current state better than anybody else's activity right now and start shopping it around in the August, September timeframe and seeing if we can get people on board. But budgets are typically annualized. And the interesting part about this too is what I have found is we end up spending less. Just it's just the way it works because you get the people that have always spent, spent ,spent. They're they're more conscious and it's all it is it's just more conscious that there is there is a limit there is a there is a they're accountable now to a number and that number is known and that number is based on performance and the people that haven't necessarily spent money that you're giving a little bit more to they're probably not going to spend it or they're not going to go as high and you're going to have to help them but typically when you put this kind of focus behind it, you get better results and you actually end up spending a little less. 

Ali: Oh, interesting. With all of this, I suppose we've been able to go through it and debunk the mystery of aligning it. We've spoken around this timing a little bit. I'm very interested to round this conversation off with what your one takeaway for marketers is when it comes to considering whether their budget or strategy are aligned. I think it would just be fascinating to hear your take on it because I think, sadly, so many people fit into it. I think the use-it-and-lose-it one, at least you know what you have, but so many people fit into that sort of squeaky wheel, far more fit into opaque than probably should do. Yeah, as I said, Tim, it would be really interesting just to hear what that one takeaway is when people are considering whether their budget and strategy are aligned.

Tim: I think that there are kind of two parts to that question. One is I think it's an important thing for the marketer to understand and do because you're spending 3% of your revenue whether that's 30 or whether that's 15 million, that's a decent amount of money unless it doesn't count your people, so I do think that it brings something, it brings a perspective to leadership that they typically don't hear from their marketing person. Marketing people in general like to spend money, right? And it brings that. It brings a return on investment mindset. And I think that that will differentiate you. So that's why I think that they should care, you know, understanding the alignment that's going to be, you know, honestly, a very specific thing. I mean, the one example was you just kind of went through and you said, wow, this is your most important practice, right? And they're like, no, it's not. And then you prioritize all their practices and all their clients based upon that. And they're like, wow, we can do better, right? I think the other extent is, you said you spent a million dollars hiring a consultant to come in and tell you what to do. You've got these nine things. Well, at least the ones you have in marketing, the markets one, there's nothing behind that. You haven't changed a thing. And the organizational one, they merged a bunch of regional firms, and they became a national firm. And they still had their budgets by the region. And one of their goals was to be national. I'm like, well, that's not ever going to get you there. That's never going to get you there. So that was easy because you spent a million bucks, and you're not putting your money behind anything you said you want to do to take yourselves into the future. So it's going to be very situation specific in terms of kind of how you go about selling it or finding it or finding out it's out of alignment. But I think if you know your firm, you should be able to figure out. It could be something as simple as, you know, we have key clients, and there's no money behind them. We're a national firm, but we budget regionally. That doesn't make any sense, right? That just doesn't make any sense. If you're a national firm and that's what you're claiming to be, yet the majority of your spend is allocated by office, wow, that doesn't seem like, it sounds like you're building the wrong silos, right? Because it's a silo, right? So I think you really got to look at what the firm is trying to do and see how that is, and see how, that's why I say follow the money, right? We'll wrap it up with all the money. You tell me you want to be a national firm, but you're budgeting 70% of your money at the office level. Well, how is that ever going to facilitate a national firm? You say your key clients are the most important thing to growth, but you don't give them any money. Well, like that. You say you want to be the leader in M&A, but you don't have any plans, and you don't have any money behind that. I mean, so I think you can find these disconnects just because they probably, they've never looked at it that way. It's easy to say you want to do something different, but if you've been doing something the same your whole life with how you spend your money, well, you know, that's going to be, that doesn't change as quickly because you're dealing with powerful people and you're trying to change behavior, which we all know is hard. 

Ali: Yeah, of course. Behavioral change can be the most tough thing. But as you say, I think the takeaways there from that answer, obviously, as with so much of this, there's been so much to pick up on. To your words, follow the money and know your firm. By doing both of those things, it will allow you to be far more strategic and give that new perspective. And as you said, that ROI mindset. So Tim, thank you ever so much for this highly informative, super interesting conversation. I know there's plenty to unpack there, lots to pick up on. I have no doubt that our listeners will have thoroughly enjoyed that, so thank you so much. 

Tim: My pleasure.

Ali: We finish additionally here with our quickfire questions. Have you got a moment for me to run through those with you? 

Tim: Sure. 

Ali: Perfect. So what are you reading or listening to at the moment? 

Tim: Boy, it's an interesting question. You know, I read periodicals. I read the Wall Street Journal every day. I probably spend too much time on X, but the news typically comes out of there quicker. So yeah, I tend to not read long form things. I try to stay abreast on what's happening in the world at large. And I do that through primarily the Wall Street Journal and X. And as I say, I probably spend too much time on X. Because you get sucked into it.

Ali: Hey, you get sucked in. You find those echo chambers at times. But yeah, I thought it was a total echo chamber. It's a whole different conversation. We'll get into that if we stay on that. What's the one thing that you couldn't live without in your working life? 

Tim: My team. I have a great and loyal team. Now it's probably the smallest team that I've ever had for an organization, but they are small but mighty. So for me, it's having a team with clear, which will come as no surprise to you, their roles and responsibilities and expectations about what they want to do and the support they need to get it done. And for me, that's the one thing that I couldn't live without in my working life, whether or not that was the question you asked, but that's the answer. 

Ali: No, no, it is. I love it. Are there any habits that you think have helped you, particularly in your career? Anything that you built into it that's been worthwhile? 

Tim: You know, I have strong opinions, but they typically are based on fact. So I think that was important. I am persistent, which I think is, you know, if I... A dog with a bone, you know, if I really think it's good, I'm probably not going to let it go. And, you know, my first job out of school was cold calling CEOs. And so I learned at a very young age to talk about things that were relevant to CEOs. So there's a certain ability that I have to kind of analyze the situation pretty quickly and understand kind of what some of those challenges are, which you see CEOs are going to ask you that really quickly. And if you're talking to a CEO, they're going to be able to see through you pretty quick. And I was raised, I think, to find a lot of the ways I think about things.

Ali: Very, very interesting. All characteristics that I have no doubt fare very, very well in the world of professional services. And finally, what's your favorite way to unwind?

Tim: Family, friends and cocktails, I guess.

Ali: Love it. 

Tim: I like a good soccer game too, as you know. The Euro is great. Sorry to your England.  

Ali: You know, as I say, I'm a pathetic fallacy with the weather here in the UK right now where I'm back home for a bit and it's just been raining, which is fairly miserable given we're in July. Anyway, Tim, thank you so much. Been absolutely wonderful. Thoroughly enjoyed all of this and really do appreciate your time. 

Tim: Pleasure was mine and good chatting with you.