Rebuild · Twelve to sixteen weeks
Rebuild business development once, properly, and hand it to the firm.
Every partner agrees it needs an owner. Nothing is anyone's job. The Rebuild designs the function, stands it up with your people in it, and leaves on a date. You decide at week six. A manual the next person inherits.
What gets built
A function that runs on fewer people, because someone designed it to.
Firms are cutting business services and citing AI. Most cut the function without redesigning it. The work goes back to the partners. The Rebuild redesigns it first.
Which tasks AI does, which it does not, and who signs off on each, in writing. A pitch a tool drafted still carries a partner's name. A client list a tool enriched still falls under the PDPA. Those are ownership decisions. The Rebuild makes them before a client or regulator asks.
A Rebuild may contain no marketing at all. If the problem is that referrals have no owner, I design a business development function, and the word marketing may not appear in it.
What changes
Referrals are followed up by someone whose job it is. Partners bill instead of chase. The firm has an answer when a client asks how it uses AI. The next hire walks into a role, not a blank sheet.
The shape
Design. Decide. Stand it up. Hand it over.
Stages 3 to 5 of the method. It follows a Review, and the Review's confidentiality terms carry over. If the firm has done that work itself, we start at design.
Weeks 1 to 6
Design
- The function on one page: who owns growth, who owns each source of work, who answers to the management committee.
- Who reviews what, weekly, monthly and quarterly, and against what.
- Which tasks AI does, which it does not, and who signs off on each.
- The rules: confidentiality, personal data, publicity, written for a regulator to read.
- The hiring brief, if the design needs a person the firm does not have.
Week 6
You decide
- The management committee reads the design and decides: stand it up, change it, or stop here.
- Everything produced is the firm’s, whichever it decides.
Weeks 7 to 14
Stand it up
- The reviews run for real. I am in the room for the first cycles, out for the last.
- Owners doing the job, with what they need and nothing they do not.
- The first quarter’s numbers, reviewed the way the design says.
- Execution stays with the firm. I do not run campaigns.
Weeks 15 to 16
Hand over
- The operating manual: the function, the reviews, the rules, what AI does. Written for the next person.
- A handover meeting with the management committee, and a date I stop attending.
Who runs it after I leave
The design says.
In a firm of eight lawyers there may be nobody to hand it to. The design names the owner. If the firm does not employ that person, the hiring brief is a deliverable: a role that exists, not a title that sounds right. Whoever takes it gets a Leadership Circle Profile and a one-to-one debrief at handover. It is a leadership role, and the design treats it as one.
The person may not be a marketer. In most partnerships the first person to own it is a business development role with marketing underneath, not the other way round.
What I do not do
Four lines I do not cross.
- No execution. No campaigns, no content, no media. Your people run it. The grant draws the same line.
- No partnership governance. Ownership, partner compensation, practice portfolio, mergers. A different adviser.
- No tool selection as the deliverable. I say what the function needs. The owner chooses and configures it.
- No junior team. I lead it myself. Nothing white-labelled, nothing delegated to a bench you have not met.
Read first, decide later
The thinking behind this offer.
Long-form essays. No sign-up, no email capture. Read it before you book the call.
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Marketing a Professional Services Firm: Who Should Own It?
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MarTech Audit Framework for Professional Services Firms (Singapore)
Half of what the firm pays for marketing software goes to tools nobody uses. A five-step audit one person runs in a week.
A function the firm owns, on a date I stop attending.
The Rebuild follows a Review. If you have not done one, start there. It is smaller, and it may say you do not need this.