Professional Services Advisor
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Professional Services Advisor is provided by Dr. Cherry Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
Personal Profile
Prior to his advisory, academic and training career, Dr. Cherry had significant senior management experience, at general manager and managing director level, across manufacturing and service industries. His strong commercial acumen and strategic thinking, coupled with formal business and technical tertiary qualifications, have allowed him to achieve significant revenue and profitability growth through his senior career. Dr Cherry has worked in senior management, executive director, and non-executive director roles across multinationals, listed and private companies as well as not-for-profits. A strong strategic mind-set, coupled with an ability to lead senior and middle management teams have been the keys to Dr Cherry’s commercial success in business, across a range of industries. Throughout his career, Dr Cherry has demonstrated his capability to affect change, turnaround, re-engineer and grow businesses both organically and via acquisition. He has leveraged this corporate experience and success into his professional services career and provides strategic advisory and training services at senior management and board level to clients globally. Outside his professional career, Dr Cherry was a founding director of the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, established to fund advances in brain tumour treatment and research. He also lectures and supervises at undergraduate and postgraduate levels across several Australian and Irish universities and business schools.
Dr Cherry holds an honours degree in Chemical Engineering, a Master of Commerce degree with a marketing major and a Doctor of Business Administration degree where he researched trust in the professional services context.
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(CLP) Programs
Appleton Greene corporate training programs are all process-driven. They are used as vehicles to implement tangible business processes within clients’ organizations, together with training, support and facilitation during the use of these processes. Corporate training programs are therefore implemented over a sustainable period of time, that is to say, between 1 year (incorporating 12 monthly workshops), and 4 years (incorporating 48 monthly workshops). Your program information guide will specify how long each program takes to complete. Each monthly workshop takes 6 hours to implement and can be undertaken either on the client’s premises, an Appleton Greene serviced office, or online via the internet. This enables clients to implement each part of their business process, before moving onto the next stage of the program and enables employees to plan their study time around their current work commitments. The result is far greater program benefit, over a more sustainable period of time and a significantly improved return on investment.
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. All (CLP) programs are implemented over a sustainable period of time, usually between 1-4 years, incorporating 12-48 monthly workshops and professional support is consistently provided during this time by qualified learning providers and where appropriate, by Accredited Consultants.
Executive Summary
Professional Services Advisor
Trusted Advice for the Trusted Professional Services Advisor
The Professional Services Advisor program has been developed after working with professional services firms for more than twenty years, as referral partners or as clients, understanding their challenges and those of their clients. It is also informed by doctoral research into trust in the professional services context.
Professional services encompass industries providing specialised professional, scientific, and technical activities, primarily to other businesses or organisations. The Professional Services Advisor program has been developed for and specifically targeted to organisations providing engineering consulting services, management consulting services, legal services, accounting services, scientific and environmental research services, architectural and surveying services, advertising and market research services and other professional services.
According to recent research, key professional services challenges include predicting resource requirements, maintaining profitability, and the retention of employees and clients. As a result, professional services firms need to be on the lookout for some of the following telltale signs: complex operations, bureaucracy, leadership gaps, poor client retention, poor talent retention, inability to predict project resourcing needs, limited data and visibility, outdated legacy systems, ineffective change management and decreasing profitability. This program provides professional services leaders (both aspiring and incumbent) with comprehensive practical skills and tools to effectively face these challenges, covering trust and communication, leadership, services marketing and client development and retention.
The professional services sector consistently highlights staff retention and development as major and growing challenges. Indeed, Deloitte Digital (2023) confirms that, “research demonstrates that fostering trust, opportunities for growth, and employee well-being are the keys to increased workforce retention and satisfaction.” The business expertise of staff is a major source of competitive advantage and needs to be nurtured, developed and retained. The Professional Services Advisor program addresses this need across in a very targeted manner, via the Effective Communication, Becoming Persuasive, Effective Leadership, People Development and Managing Change modules (Modules 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6).
Another regularly cited professional services pain point relates to client retention and business development in increasingly saturated and competitive markets. IBM (2024) highlights that, “Customer retention must be a top priority for leaders of any company wanting to remain competitive.” All services organisations understand the intangible nature of their offerings. This intangibility means that trust is a vital component of the relationship between providers and their clients. What is less understood is how trust is defined and indeed developed. So important is trust, being a determinant of loyalty and commitment, it features as Module 1 in this program, Services Trust. Services Trust, along with the modules covering Becoming Persuasive, Advisory Services, Market Targeting. Market Positioning, Your Brand, Business Development and Client Management (Modules 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 & 12) all provide refined guidance on strengthening client relationships and retention.
Another important issue facing professional services providers centres on how and when to expand their high-value advisory services. Firms may seek to diversify revenue streams or benefit from high growth areas, regionally or indeed globally. Only practices with laser-like clarity on their Advisory Services, Market Targeting, Market Positioning, Brand and Business Development (Modules 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11) can expect to have ongoing success in the refinement and development of their offers to targeted clients. Dentons, the global law firm, has consistently shown the benefits of identification of key sectors, with Boyajian (2023) commenting that their, “global platform and breadth has positioned us well for strong growth despite market challenges.”
Increasingly, technology developments represent both a challenge and an opportunity for professional services firms. Leveraging the opportunity relies on firms making informed decisions on how to ensure they add value in their advisory services, as viewed by the client, the customer. The Economic Times (2023) recently reported that, “Top high-value consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and Bain, along with tech majors such as Accenture and IBM, as well as professional services firms like Deloitte, EY and PwC, are investing tens of millions of dollars and actively forming partnerships with IT companies and startups while creating internal teams to develop solutions for clients and internal needs.” Decisions in areas of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and data analytics (to name a few) require application of the same skills highlighted above, as firms seek to expand their high-value advisory services, viz, Advisory Services, Market Targeting, Market Positioning, Brand and Business Development (Modules 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11).
This program seeks to provide professional services practitioners with refined exposure to the skills and tools necessary to build a successful career and practice, whilst addressing their micro and macroenvironmental challenges. To do so, it addresses the major needs areas of trust and communication (Modules 1, 2 & 3), leadership (Modules 4, 5 & 6), marketing in the very specific professional services context (Modules 7, 8, 9 & 10) and acquiring and keeping clients (Modules 11 & 12).