The Growth Engine

Walt Shill

• 28 augustus 2025
• 9781394277872

Samenvatting:

SCALE YOUR GROWTH FUNCTION TO A WORLD-CLASS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MACHINE

There comes a point where firms must move beyond the immediate connections of the founding partners to build a predictable and scalable growth function—The Growth Engine: A Guide to Building a World-Class Business Development Function in Professional Services illustrates how to do just that.

This book reveals a clear business development maturation path over time, outlining best practices for what to do first and how to make the “jump” from a one-person shop operating out of a guest bedroom, to a 700,000-person business development machine like Accenture. Readers will learn about every step in the process, from identifying buyers and niching services, to creating brand awareness and strengthening market position, to developing new services and aligning sales with marketing.

This book is founded on extensive interviews with rainmakers in professional services firms including marketing, law, consulting, financial advisory, and IT advisory. Interviewees include senior executives at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, IBM, AWS, KPMG, Deloitte, ZS, and Omnicom, as well as a number of Am Law 100 firms.

The Growth Engine earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all professional services founders and executives ready to grow their practice or their firm.

“The Growth Engine looks beyond The Trusted Advisor to offer a powerful, organization-wide perspective where trust-based principles don’t just survive—they thrive. It brings fresh, practical insights to building client development capability in professional services firms, without losing sight of what matters most to clients—trust, credibility, and human connection. I couldn’t be more excited to see this next chapter unfold.”
—CHARLIE GREEN, Author of The Trusted Advisor

Your guide to business development maturation in the professional services sector

The Growth Engine describes the main challenge professional services firms face as they grow and shows how to develop a scalable business development effort, covering everything from CRM systems and metrics around utilization, to service development and expansion, to account planning and cross-selling, to winning new clients, to team structure and roles, and to performance management.

This book is supported by extensive interviews with rainmakers in professional services firms including marketing, law, consulting, financial advisory, and IT advisory companies. Interviewees include senior executives at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, IBM, AWS, KPMG, Deloitte, Publicis, and Omnicom, as well as a number of Am Law 100 firms. Some of the concepts covered in this book include:

• Identifying buyers, niching services to create awareness and strengthen brand, and using talent to leverage consultants' time and amplify their reach
• Developing new services, aligning sales with marketing, and using tools, processes, and metrics to drive accountability and growth
• Training talent, measuring and managing business development performance, and incentivizing and compensating key roles

The Growth Engine is an essential read for all founders, executives, chief growth officers, marketing leaders and rainmakers in professional services seeking proven strategies to grow, steadily, sustainably and profitably.