Increase Your Value to Your Clients With This Unexpected Strategy
October 05, 2016 | By Wayne O'Neill
We talk about Stewardship to Equity a lot with our coaching clients and in our workshops – but I haven’t talked about it nearly enough here in the blog.
I’m going to rectify that right now, because Stewardship to Equity is such an important concept and connection strategy.
In fact, it’s a cornerstone strategy in how we help our clients grow their revenue.
Our official definition of Stewardship to Equity is:
Leveraging good stewardship of funds to become more operationally effective and extract cash out of the budget to grow business and fund capital projects.
In practice, this means looking for opportunities hiding in plain sight to find working capital. Every business and organization has untapped sources of funds. Stewardship to Equity is our unique strategy to identify and seize those opportunities.
We coach our service-provider clients how to use this strategy to help their existing clients identify sources of funding for projects and to create opportunities for new accounts. That’s what I want to talk to you about today.
I’m going to walk you through how a recent client of ours helped their customer free up funds to pay for a project – and became a hero in the process.
Freeing Up Funds for a Financially-Strapped Government Agency
A recent client of ours, a mechanical contractor, was trying to win work with a government agency. One of the problems our client encountered was that the agency said they didn’t have the budget to pay for a project that our client knew would be hugely beneficial to them now and in the long run.
I don’t have to tell you that trying to convince a customer to pay for something you know is good for them is completely fruitless when they don’t have the budget.
Most firms would walk away, as there is no funding available. At RESET, we teach a different approach with Stewardship to Equity. And that’s exactly what we did with the mechanical contractor.
We worked with our client on how to present the value of their service offering and how to help the client free up the funds to pay for it.
Knowing that funding is a major business and political issue for government agencies, we were able to approach stakeholders with a solution in mind. Since we knew what issues were at play, then we could work together to remove barriers and move projects forward.
That discovery caused us to shift our focus to helping the agency solve that problem first.
Yes – we taught a mechanical contractor how to help a government agency find alternative ways to fund projects.
This is the power of The Connection Process and the Stewardship to Equity strategy!
Here’s how we did it …
The Enhanced-Use Lease Opportunity
By working with our client to find and assess the government agency’s business and political issues, we discovered that this agency had an interesting asset: unused land.
We knew that Enhanced-Use Lease (EUL) might be the perfect solution for the agency, and an alternative way to create the original project.
We coached our client to share this opportunity with the major stakeholders at the agency.
The concept of EUL is actually a simple one – it’s just not widely known. EUL is a partnership between a government agency and a public entity or private developer in which the latter leases land that the government is not currently using.
The lessor either pays the government fair market value for the land, or they provide services (such as land enhancements or facilities) equal to the fair market value for the land.
Examples of EUL projects include:
- Solar farms
- Hotels
- Multi-family housing
- Research parks
The benefits to the government agency could be:
- New streams of revenue
- New facility
- Shared services (lowering operating costs)
- New amenities: live/work/play
- Community engagement
But there is huge socio-economic value as well, especially considering that more often than not, this land belongs to a military base. Leasing the land to developers enhances the quality of life for everyone on or near the base. It also boosts the local and regional economies surrounding the base.
If you want to see some public examples of EUL in action, I suggest checking out these articles:
The Bottom Line
The traditional sales process is broken. In today’s world, you have to get creative – and sometimes you need to use more complex strategies to win the work.
By helping decision-makers solve their underlying business and political issues, service providers can increase their value to these customers dramatically.
That’s what The Connection Process and Stewardship to Equity are all about.