A Place Employees Are Proud to Call Home

I just returned from a week-long program hosted by Harvard Business School, Leading Professional Service Firms, and to state it bluntly, my professional outlook may never be the same.

My purpose for taking this program in dank, cold Boston was to pick up some new strategies and techniques to help me grow my company, Hanson McClain Advisors, an RIA in Sacramento, CA, that has about $2 billion of assets under advisement.

While I certainly learned some of those things, I came away with so much more than that.

The schedule for each day started with a meeting of our study group at 8 a.m. followed by classes that ran from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The schedule itself wasn't particularly demanding, but there was an extraordinary amount of reading to be done prior to each class. I quickly fell into a pattern of falling asleep reading a case study, only to wake up early in the morning to continue my reading.

We had four instructors for the week: three men and a woman. Each had a different background as well as a different perspective, and I came to value and appreciate those differences. Three of my four teachers had, per se, real-world experience: a Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz lawyer, a Morgan Stanley executive and a McKinsey consultant. The fourth, Jay W. Lorsch, 82, is the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School.

The first couple of days dealt with a lot of business issues such as aligning business strategies with compensation. But as the week progressed, we seemed to become more focused on interpersonal skills. (Admittedly, a couple of our classes felt more like psychology workshops—or perhaps even a session of therapy—than business school.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end of the week, I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. The course finished at midday on Saturday, and I was grateful to be on the seven-hour flight home within a couple of hours.

Without going into too much detail, it was the motivational and environmental topics, the ins and outs of building a company that associates will want to call home, that actually had the greatest impact on me.

I enrolled in the Leading Professional Service Firms course thinking I would return with an arsenal of new leadership tools that I could perhaps monetize. While, yes, I did get those tools, what I really returned with was a new and fresh way of looking at our firm.

My business partner, Pat McClain, and I have been fortunate. We had early success with our advisory practice, and some years ago we also founded a separate company that was eventually sold to Genworth Financial Inc.

Frankly, I've accumulated enough money to take care of my personal needs.

But for some reason, I've still been highly driven and focused on growing our firm for enterprise value. My focus has been on things such as increasing our assets under management, profits, and share price.

As our firm grows, it would be great to increase all of these things, but that is no longer my only motivation. I have to hand it to Harvard Business School's program. I now envision a future of bringing great value to the marketplace and providing a great place where our staff can thrive. While it would be nice if the economics are such that it's a big financial win someday, that's not what it's about anymore. It's about creating a great firm, not only where people have the opportunity to make a career, but a place they will be proud to call home.

Ready to take your professional service firm management skills to the next level? Check out the LPSF program here.