Advancing on the Retreat
Does Your Retreat Advance Your Firm?
By Bruce W. Marcus
We're at the beginning of the retreat season. This Spring, accountants, lawyers, and consultants will assemble, dressed informally, at fine resorts throughout the nation, to explore the futures of their firms and what can be done to sustain their firms’ present status or to alter their futures.
A retreat can be a good time to relax, rest, and become reacquainted with your partners, even as it addresses the firm’s mundane housecleaning efforts. It can be a better time, and a great opportunity, particularly in this era of economic turmoil and technological change, for real accomplishment by recognizing new realities of the marketplace and professional environment, and calculating what must be done now to make the firm viable in the future.
INCLUDING: The Top 10 Issues You Can't Afford to Ignore.
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One-Line Bio
...author, consultant, and pundit for professional services marketing
Biography
Bruce W. Marcus
Bruce W. Marcus is a consultant and strategic market planner to law, accounting, consulting and other professional services firms. He is the editor of the award-winning The Marcus Letter on Professional Services Marketing, read internationally by more than 20,000 lawyers, accountants, and the marketers who serve them.
He is a partner and Of Counsel to The Bay Street Group LLC, a leading think tank and consulting group serving the professions as strategic business development advisors. A pioneer in professional services marketing he has served a diversified clientele that includes most of the Big Four accounting firms and their predecessors, and many major law firms, as well as smaller and solo practices. His consulting firm clients have included Booz Allen Hamilton, Andersen Consulting, Towers Perrin, and Emerson Consultants, as well as many smaller firms. He was a member of the marketing committee and responsible for external communications, marketing strategy, public relations, advertising, and marketing programs for both Arthur Young and Company and Coopers & Lybrand. He had been a senior executive in the corporate relations department of Mobil Corporation and of the international public relations firm, Ruder & Finn, Inc., and president of his own successful consulting firm, serving both a national and international clientele.
He is the author of fifteen books, including CLIENT AT THE CORE [with August Aquila] (Wiley, 2005) COMPETING FOR CLIENTS -- THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES (Probus, 1986, Rev. 1991); NEW DIMENSIONS IN INVESTOR RELATIONS (Wiley, 1997); COMPETING IN THE NEW CAPITAL MARKETS (Harper Business, 1991); and COMPETING FOR CAPITAL (Wiley, 2005), as well as numerous articles, studies, and position papers on marketing, business, and finance. His writing has appeared in major business, professional, and financial publications, and has been a regular columnist for several Microsoft industry pages.
He has been a speechwriter for many of the Fortune 500 companies, and major national political figures, including Robert Kennedy and Senator Jacob Javits, and was the author of a major report for President Carter. He has been on the advisory boards of Accounting Today, Partner-to-Partner, and Practice Development for Solo & Small Firms and writes regularly for these and other publications.
A frequent guest speaker and panelist on marketing and investor relations before professional organizations of consultants, accountants, lawyers and others, including both the American and Canadian Bar Associations and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, both in the United States and abroad, he has also consulted with the American Bar Association on advertising policy, and was a member of the communications advisory committee of the New York City Bar Association. He has addressed retreats for both law and accounting firms. He has produced and written innumerable brochures and successful direct response campaigns, as well as corporate annual reports, for which he has won number of awards.
He has been awarded the Silver Anvil of the Public Relations Society of America for the outstanding program in national and international public relations, and served as an adjunct professor at Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration, where he taught the first course on professional services marketing ever taught in the United States in an M.B.A. program. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of AAM -- The Association of Accounting Marketing, and a member of LMA, The Law Marketing Association.
As a specialist in investor relations, investment banking, and financial marketing, he has been consultant to Goldman Sachs; Lehman Brothers; Blyth Eastman Dillon; Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; CitiCorp and Chemical Bank. He has also been an economic and marketing consultant to the governments of Turkey and Puerto Rico, and is a past President of the New York Association of Business Economists.
