TRP 316: High Impact Strategic Planning with Ivy Slater

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love. Scott Love Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Thanks for joining me on the show. I'm excited about some of the lessons that you're going to learn from our guest expert today. Our guest is Ivy Slater. She's been a guest on the show before. Our topic title is High Impact

[00:00:39] Strategic Planning. She and I recorded this show several months ago, and I thought, you know, this would certainly be appropriate for a show that's almost at the mid-year point of 2026. Most of my episodes, they're all evergreen. You can listen to them two or three years from now and you'll still get really good content. But I think if you're in any sort of leadership role in an organization where you're involved in strategy, this is a show that's going to help you get some great ideas. Let me tell you about Ivy. She is the CEO of Slater Success,

[00:01:09] a consulting, coaching, and training company that helps professionals and business owners and their teams develop and implement strategic growth plans, scale with purpose, and build succession strategies for long-term legacy. A few announcements. I'll be speaking at the Law Firm Leadership Lab, May 14th and 15th in New York City, put on by SharePoint. The Law Firm Leadership Lab is a collaborative two-day in-person workshop designed exclusively for managing partners,

[00:01:39] executive directors, and anybody else in a leadership role in a law firm. Several of the guests are quite impressive. I met them several times from some of our Zoom sessions with SharePoint and I've got to know them and this is an event that you don't want to miss if you're in any sort of leadership role in a law firm. Just go to the show notes of this podcast and you'll be able to get more information and register directly. Also, on June 3rd and 4th, I'll be facilitating sessions at Rain Dance put on

[00:02:07] by the Legal Sales and Service Organization. Also, check that information out in the show notes. And then finally, this podcast is sponsored by SharePoint Legal Insights, formerly known as Leopard Solutions, turning legal intelligence into opportunity. And the show is also sponsored by the Rainmaking Magazine. Don't lose business to the competition. Read this publication and keep business development top of mind. Visit therainmakingmagazine.com today to chart your course

[00:02:37] to greater rainmaking success. Thanks for listening and I hope you get some great ideas from my conversation with Ivy Slater today. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking Podcast. Our special guest today is a repeat guest, Ivy Slater. And our topic title today is High Impact Strategic Planning for 2026. Ivy, thanks for joining me on the show again. Thanks, Scott. I'm thrilled to be here with you again. It's always fun to talk. It is. And it's good to run into you in Manhattan. It's always nice to see

[00:03:05] you and I really appreciate your level of expertise that you're going to share with us today. So let's just dig right into it with strategic planning. How can we make sense of this for those people that are this down into components? You know, I'd say the first thing to do is, is no, block out some time, right? This is not, you don't do strategic planning in between a bunch of meetings, right? Take a step

[00:03:32] out of your firm to have clarity. Bring a group of trusted advisors, whether it's your leadership team, your other partners in the firm, bring in some people that we are really looking at the whole firm and where we're looking to be in the next one, three and five years. Okay, good. Create a big vision here. Right. And so this is usually an offsite retreat that firms go to?

[00:03:59] Yeah, I love it offsite. I think we have the greatest impact offsite. I've been, you know, on the road a lot in Q4, that going to clients and running various offsites. But even if you keep it in your office, block the day. You know, it's not about being in and out of your office. It's not about, oh, let me just grab this call. It's really about being focused. If you do it on a Friday, if you pull it together on a, whatever you need to do,

[00:04:26] and then look at that big vision, right? Where do we actually want to be in 2030, 2031? Oh, really? Wow. So let me talk more about this day, because I think this is something that people could get help on. Who should they bring in? Their accounting team, management consultants, executive coaches like you, other advisors? Who are the people that you've seen usually attend these sessions? So I'm going to say you want your leaders. So if you have equity partners or partners,

[00:04:55] they should be in the meeting, unless it's 20 people, right? Then we want to hand select. You want a finance person. You want whoever's leading your marketing, driving who has conversations, your biggest rainmakers, Scott? Because they matter. What they're producing matters, who their relationships are, what's driving the company and the firm and the business. If you have an HR person, they should be in this meeting. I love having an outside consultant of

[00:05:24] some sort, whether you call it an executive coach, whether you call it a management consultant, whatever the term is, doesn't matter what the term is, but somebody who can actually move this meeting forward and keep it on track without having the spirals in conversations. So staying focused is important. Pulling all these people is a huge financial commitment, right? Pulling them out of their desks, out of their offices is an investment for this firm. So we want somebody who's maximizing

[00:05:53] and making sure the time we spend together is really moving this forward and they're walking away with clear, actionable plans. That's great. And so this consultant that's facilitating this, I wouldn't call it the master ceremonies, but this is someone that's really bringing the meeting to order, making sure there's no talking between two people in a room of 10, making sure that they stick to deadlines and other things. Is that a general sense of what this person has said?

[00:06:20] And making sure people are heard. Yeah. Okay. So sometimes when we have a group of people, especially people who work together every day, we go off into tangents. We just do the conversation kind of like we ended up talking, well, no, you know, well, remember that this person said at that holiday event and it was so blah, blah, blah, blah, but hold on. Is that relevant to this conversation? Like where we're going in our plans, right? So it's truly keeping a focus on this table,

[00:06:50] especially when people work together and sometimes work together so long, you end up with habits. If somebody is newer in the group, they might not be speaking up and you want their insight heard. They're bringing in past experience if they're fairly new with an organization, like under a year or two, right? They have past experience that could be valuable of how they've seen things. So you want

[00:07:14] somebody who's kind of keyed into this to manage the conversation and also push, right? Invite people to see a little bigger. Well, that's an interesting idea. How can we go a little deeper into it? What has anybody heard? Give me another firm that you have an idea that might have done this. What did it look like? So really cultivate the conversation that creates new ideas, new opportunities, new strategies.

[00:07:44] That's great. I never really thought about how this meeting would be facilitated. What's usually the agenda? Do they start off with a specific vision, like maybe the chairman might have? Where do you think they really have these conversations? I love starting off with a vision. I think a vision is so important. And I think everybody has to weigh in on their vision. And then once you start playing with the vision, then you're going to get into some of like the nuts and bolts. And I use an idea or a

[00:08:12] vision of a great car. Okay. Whatever your car is, I'm not a great car person. So whether it be that Ferrari or Lamborghini or Aston Martin, like just think like a badass car, whatever your Porsche, I don't care, right? Whatever your go-to is. And that car is going down the road on four wheels, right? Those wheels are your components of a great strategic plan. So you're going to look at your

[00:08:40] financial plan here. That's one wheel. Your marketing plan is another wheel. Your sales plan is another wheel. And your team people are another wheel. And that person who's driving that car is the mindset of steering this company forward. That's your managing partner or the leader of the firm. And we all know if

[00:09:04] you're driving that Porsche down the road and your one tire is losing air, your drive is off. You get a flat, you get a blowout, you're not moving. That's the key. If we want these wheels balanced and moving forward together and getting that great traction, that is your growth potential. So let's say that a chairman or managing partner of a professional services firm is listening to this and he or she

[00:09:32] is thinking about, okay, we're going to have our strategic planning retreats in a couple of weeks. How are they going to really tackle all these things? Where do you really start with that? The person might say, this is our vision over the next three to four years. And where do you think they kind of dig in with these four wheels on the car? So I'm going to give you exactly what I do. Okay. We start with the vision. Then we go into a SWOT analysis. So and I spell SWOT a little

[00:09:58] differently. It's S-W-O-T-T. Okay. Okay. So it's strengths. What are the strengths in the firm? What has helped us get to where we are today? What has held us back? What are those weaknesses? Do we have turnover in a particular area? Like what's going on, right? Oh, we did this. This hasn't worked. Where are our weaknesses? We're not known well in this market, but we want to be. It's a weakness,

[00:10:23] right? Where are our weaknesses? Where are opportunities? Oh, we're doing great in this particular area of law. How do we expand it? We have a great opportunity. We brought in a new attorney. Like what's going on? Where are our opportunities? You know, so that's S-W-O. T usually stands for threats. Where's our biggest competition? What would hold us back, right? What are the

[00:10:48] threats? But then my second T is what are your trends? So really simple. This is not news to anybody who's listening. One of your key trends in this world today is AI, right? What are the trends? Why are we using trends? What do we need to know about it? So we work with the firm that way, right? Take it through a SWOT with two Ts. Then I ask a really simple question. What's working in your

[00:11:17] firm? What's not working? And we look at each area, right? Of that, of those four wheels. Finance, marketing, marketing, sales, and people. What's working in this area? What's not working? And from spending time and doing all this pre-work, we then say, gee, 2030, 2031, we want to be here. Where do we

[00:11:45] want to be in 2027? And so what are we going to do in 2026 to get us there? And you delineate really specific actions. And then you assign people to those actions at this table. Who is responsible? We set up quarterly meetings of this group. So they are responsible to actually implementing. And that's how these things grow. You want to grow a garden? You got to start planting the seeds.

[00:12:15] You got to start nurturing these seeds. That's a pretty simple concept. Right? It's building a firm as, to me, as you build a garden. I like the fact that you've given us real structure and how the organization needs to focus about itself. And then also with this particular meeting. What do you think are some of the pitfalls that managing partners really need to watch out for when they're facilitating these meetings? When managing partners are facilitating these meetings, here are some of the key things to

[00:12:44] watch out for. Side talk. I have an expression that says there's one conversation going on at the table. You have to come with respect. You have to show up with respect. I just have a really one conversation at the table. There's no, oh, let me just tell you, you know, this and I have a pad in front of every person. You have an idea. You have something that you're afraid you're going to lose.

[00:13:06] Just jot it down. Right? One conversation. No, you have to be aware of deviation of falling down that spiral path. Right? That just goes into, you know, I use an example of a pinball machine. Remember good old-fashioned pinball machine? Too many people don't know pinball. But it's that ball and it's going all over and people are just hitting flippers. Right? And the

[00:13:33] ball is going all over and there's no direction. There's no strategy. And that is when you have a group of people together for a period of time, it's easy for the conversation to be that pinball going all over the place. Keep it structured. Keep it on track. And that is the key for the managing

[00:13:57] partner, whoever is leading this meeting. So let me ask you this within the structure and the context of that. Should they say we're going to talk about this part of our strategic plan from 930 to 1030? Is there an end date? And they know at the end of 1030, when 1030 comes, we're not talking about that. We're taking a break. We're moving to something else. Or is it a little bit more fluid? What have you seen, Ivy? Depending upon the group. Right? So I like to make sure I know. If I'm running

[00:14:26] something like this, I would have had intake sessions with everybody at the table prior to getting. So I kind of have a feel for the people. If the managing partner, you should have a feel for your people. I always said, well, we want to accomplish the swap from here to here. So we know, we know like, okay, we're giving this an hour and 15 minutes. We have 75 minutes. We want to be able to go through this capture notes. Somebody is scribing usually on a bigger board so you can keep

[00:14:55] your notes around. With that, when we do that, then it's like, okay, even if we get to that 75 minutes, well, we have one more thing to do. How is everybody feeling? Do you have another 10 minutes to finish this? Or do we want a break? And then we're going to come back and we're going to accomplish this. We want to be giving those timeframes. We want to keep things on track because if not, again, we are looking at derailment. Just looking at that car that falls off the track and it's going nowhere.

[00:15:24] How do we hold people accountable when we have these quarterly meetings? What do you think happens or how should managing partners, if there's a key initiative and we're the first quarter after our strategic planning meeting and things haven't gotten done that we thought should have been done, how do you think that managing partner should address that? Before we get there, what I'm going to do is this, is say, let's try to have that not happen. So the managing partner then is meeting with the key

[00:15:53] stakeholders who are moving on initiatives before that quarterly meeting, right? How are you doing? What is working so far? If you hit any roadblocks, any obstacles, right? What are you seeing? What are some problems? Do we need to put a little mini like hour session together to maybe we could work this through? Like, right? Is it a problem with a person? Is it a problem with an initiative that, right? Don't wait for that quarter to know that nothing's happening, right? You are the managing

[00:16:23] partner. Be in touch with your key people who are leading these initiatives on a regular basis to touch base with them. If they're hitting something that's not working, what do they need? Is it you? Is it some support? Is it there are a few other people? Pull it together. Help them pull it together so they don't fail or they don't let anybody down or they feel that they're letting anybody down

[00:16:48] by that quarterly meeting. That makes sense. I like that. There's no surprises with this. So, Scott, I will tell you, I'm a person who doesn't like surprises. I don't like surprise parties. I had a surprise party years ago. My husband gave me thought he was so excited to give me this great surprise party. I was pissed. I am an anal planner myself. I didn't end up doing this for a living. Like, oh, I have to like, this is who I am. This is like, it's come down for me from generations.

[00:17:17] It's who my family is. So I don't do surprises. So I don't want to be surprised when something didn't happen. I want to know in the cadence of what's going on. You know, whether people are like, I'm checking in with them or we're doing like a 10 minute touch base. Like, what is your leadership cadence in your firm to begin with? And what structure and strategy do you have in place there? That's great. Those are really good questions to help people.

[00:17:44] Let me ask you this in terms of surprises. What's something that surprised you the most when you facilitated this and there was a huge realization about something related to the firm? Maybe they were going to the wrong direction. What was something that really surprised you in facilitating these meetings, Ivy? A few years ago, I was still in meeting for a national firm. And I had the, when we went to a different state, you know,

[00:18:10] we went away on a retreat and offsite, et cetera, et cetera. And it was about half to three quarters of the way through day one. We were meeting for two and a half days and it was about halfway through day one. And I just, like, it just came to me. I had every equity partner, I said, please write down, look through your calendar. I want, like, your day-to-day responsibilities. We're going to take a 15-minute break. And I came back and I was like, you're the most overpaid administration team,

[00:18:40] admin team I've ever seen. I was like, what are you doing? And they're like, I said, and we just took the time together and we repositioned. We created strategy in hiring. We created growth strategy that now the equity partners are really engaged in the growth of the firm. And they all had specific actions to do to grow it. And I will say, I check in with them consistently because it's what I do.

[00:19:07] I build relationships. They're growing. You know, it's working. But they got, they were two in the weeds, Scott. They were just two in the weeds. And they needed to get out of that weedy day-to-day into the growth strategy and implementation around the growth strategy and get a lot of that weedy stuff off their plate. And because over the years, you just take on more and you take on more

[00:19:32] and you take on more, it's not unusual when this happens. But I didn't expect, I mean, I didn't expect it the way it came down at all. And I couldn't, like the words that they were coming out of my mouth. I'm like, oh my God, I hope this isn't disrespect. I don't mean this disrespectfully at all, but like, do you see this? I was like, you're an admin team. You're not a leadership team. And like

[00:19:56] mouths dropped. I think wine was called in. But that allowed, like that, that hard moment allowed for massive strategy and growth and implementation and realigning what really, what they did and how they grew that firm. And that was, that was massive. That's a good story. I love them.

[00:20:20] Yeah. Yeah. Let me take it to this level. Let's go to the managing partner. He or she, they're writing out their goal. They're working with their consultant to their coach. They have to prepare for this. They're reaching out to the people that are the stakeholders. What other areas of preparation should that person be working on as they get ready for this meeting? So I'm going to say numbers tell a story and the storybook is not read often enough. Okay. There

[00:20:48] is a story, not just in your finances, right? So any good managing partner is in their P&L, right? Right. And looking at it consistently, you should be looking at your AR consistently. So be in that piece of the number story, but then be in your marketing numbers, right? And not just what your SEO and your Google reviews, but your, where are your people networking? What is working? What is not

[00:21:13] there? Got it? You know, the same thing. How often is the phone ringing? Who is creating business and how is that business being created in your sales? And then the numbers in your team. What type of turnover do you have? Who is overwhelmed, right? What departments have an opportunity for growth based on

[00:21:35] your people? All those numbers is your storybook and it's how they intersect, right? It's taking that CARF analogy and putting it into this storybook and looking at the story, I was like, oh, when I look at it this way with this and this and this, oh, look what Cinderella did. It blossomed, right? So know your

[00:22:04] number story. Know the numbers. The managing partner should always be reading that number book. That's very good advice. And I like the fact that you give some structure to have quarterly meetings to go over this plan. So it's not something that gets forgotten. Please don't put it in the round file. Right, right. And so as we bring this to a close, if you could summarize three action steps that a leader of a professional services organization

[00:22:30] can take to really get started preparing for this meeting, what would those three action steps be, Ivy? If you have not created time to do a strategic plan, create that time. Number one, I don't care where in the year you are. Not every firm, not every business has a January through December to begin with. Okay? So doesn't matter where we are in the year, just do it. Okay? Block out

[00:22:55] that time, number one. Read your number stories. Read your number stories. Number three, when you create your strategic plan, create your accountability for the implementation. Don't waste a day two or more of your time and your people's time and then don't implement. That is just, you know, go throw a

[00:23:19] party and it's better spent. Right? Because all this time is a lot of money. It's not about what, where you're going or what you're doing for your strategic planning, but the time and the dedication of your people stepping out of their day-to-day to focus on this is an investment. Make sure the follow-through and the accountability is there. This is great, Ivy. There's some real substance here that you've shared with us today. And tell us about your offerings. What do you do? What do you have that

[00:23:47] you'd like people to know about? And we'll certainly put those links on the show notes. So I do work with clients, myself and my team work with clients on growth strategies, implementation, as well as succession planning. We have a tool, I wrote up a toolkit about a year ago on succession planning. I will, we didn't even cover this today, but I believe succession is about part of legacy. It's not about retirement of leaders. So you always want to be capturing that knowledge and that

[00:24:16] legacy. So offerings, I will truly, I get, I will always offer a phone call. Talk about what you're looking for if you're from, where you're looking to grow, what resources we have that could be supportive. And if, even if it's just resources within my network, that is what I do. I believe a strong believer of building relationship. We customize a lot of our work truly to the firms we work with.

[00:24:43] So it's truly directed at what they're looking to achieve and what they're looking to accomplish. Every so often, I pull a small group of people together for, or leaders together for a strategic planning day. And we're doing what we did one in January. We'll be, might be doing another one. So if that is something that is interesting, I always start with a true phone call and getting to know what's best for you and your firm. That's terrific, Ivy. Thank you for that. We're going to put,

[00:25:10] like I said, all of your contact info on the show notes. So everybody listening to this, check that out and you can connect with Ivy directly. And thanks for being on the show again. I'd love to have you back on the future, Ivy. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. Scott, thank you for having me. Love to join you again. Thank you for listening to the Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services

[00:25:34] for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.