As an independent management consultant, Marvin Karges has mainly relied on the standard marketing strategy of most professionals to win new business -- waiting for personal referrals to come knocking.
But a few years ago, the Cambridge, Ont., accountant and sole employee of Karges Management Consulting started to supplement that passive approach by flaunting his skills via e-mail. Trolling websites for company names, he started beaming out personalized notes, just a brief two or three paragraphs each, to chief financial officers describing his specialized cost-accounting skills and financial executive gun-for-hire services.
The gambit worked. Mr. Karges won several new pieces of business, including a four-month stint as interim comptroller for a Guelph, Ont.-based auto parts company.
"I e-mail the person with a short message, two or three paragraphs, introducing them to my website," he says, noting that by going direct, he's able to avoid premiums charged by temporary placement agencies. "I think there's value to what I do. The hard part is getting the message out there."
Mr. Karges is one of many small-firm professionals breaking out of the passive marketing mould of the past. While the days of word-of-mouth recommendations and boldface entries in the Yellow Pages are alive and well, small and medium-size consulting companies, accounting and law firms are increasingly taking the direct approach, harnessing everything from targeted e-mail-marketing to seminar and charitable-event sponsorships to newspaper advertising to step out from the shadows of their big-name rivals.
At Perley-Robertson Hill & McDougall LLP, an Ottawa law firm with 50 lawyers, the emphasis on marketing has taken on a new urgency because of the company's drive to win a bigger chunk of the fast-growing work in cross-border corporate legal services.
"We have to be able to stand on our own. We have to go and be able to get work from south of the border and get our name above the fog, or the smog, of Toronto," says Michael Gerrior, head of the firm's business law group.
Mr. Gerrior says his marketing budget is growing about 5 to 7 per cent a year. "I think the biggest expenses we have are rent, salaries and advertising."
Perley-Robertson also increasingly relies on http://www.lawyers.com, a website operated by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, a major legal matchmaker, for foreign referrals. Thanks to that listing, he says, the firm just acted for a U.S. forest products company to buy a cattle research facility in Gananoque, Ont. That turned into more business, Mr. Gerrior says, because the U.S. company also controls timber rights in Northern Ontario and has asked Perley-Robertson for help.
Chris Ward, a senior associate at OEB International, a public relations, marketing and branding firm based in Toronto, says the active sales imperative is trickling down slowly from the big national law firms, most of which have seen the wisdom of employing full-time marketing and public relations professionals. It's a sea change from just 15 years ago, he says, when virtually all firms, both large and small, believed that "business should walk through the door."
Some smaller law practices have begun to borrow a page directly from the big-firm marketing playbook, hiring their own marketing professionals -- albeit on a contract rather than permanent basis -- to co-ordinate advertising and sponsorship placement.
One such firm, a 25-lawyer litigation boutique in Toronto, two months ago hired Susan Elliot, an independent marketing professional and former national marketing director at 700-lawyer behemoth Gowlings LLP, to co-ordinate advertising campaigns and media buys. It also contracted Marcee Ruby, a creative director, to do design work.
The objective, says Ms. Elliot, is to expand the firm's visibility beyond the corporate legal community. "They are quite well known in the legal community, quite well respected," Ms. Elliot says of her client, which she says did not want its name used in connection with this story. "But if you're a business lawyer, you want to talk to the business community rather than to other lawyers."
© The Globe and Mail
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