Let's say yours is an A/E firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas, with six additional offices across the Southwest — Austin and Houston, Texas; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Phoenix, Arizona. One of your primary market sectors is land development, especially large, mixed-use residential communities. One of your biggest land development clients has offices and projects in every city where you have offices. So their local staff members deal with your local staff members in every one of your offices. Your Texas and Arizona offices each have multiple projects with the client. Your Oklahoma and New Mexico offices each have one project with the client. This client is responsible for almost 10% of your firm's total revenues.
One morning, the president of your firm gets a somewhat disturbing phone call. It seems that some of the client's Dallas folks had occasion to visit your New Mexico office. Since they only had one small project with your Albuquerque staff, they were treated in a relatively cavalier manner—some staff couldn't take time to speak with them, people kept moving in and out of the meeting, people took personal phone calls, etc.—as if your Albuquerque folks didn't recognize the client's importance to your firm's bottom line.
As a matter of fact, they DIDN'T recognize the client's importance to the firm.
Part of this could be traced back to the information corporate thought appropriate to share with staff and the specific individuals to whom corporate shared that information. Part of it had to do with the social dynamics—the way business was done—prevalent in each city. Part of it may have been due to your accounting system, which treated each of the client's seven offices as separate, individual clients, never aggregating their business into one total number that reflected their importance to your bottom line.
And part of it came from staff in all seven offices NOT realizing that they were ALL ONE COMPANY! This is something that often happens, especially with growing companies. They don't realize that, consciously or unconsciously, they are encouraging offices to compete with each other rather than with the other firms in their market.
The overall solution to this challenge is to manage client interactions across services, departments, divisions, and offices. To have a set of standards for client interaction that can respond to the social dynamics of each city where you have an office, while maintaining the minimum level of knowledge, interest, courtesy, and respect for the client. Just like you have one set of CAD standards that all offices follow, so they can share work when workloads dictate.
In other words, TO BECOME ONE COMPANY.
Regardless of the physical or financial size of the client, the number of projects it has with each of your offices, or the percent of your firm's bottom line for which that client is responsible, there must be a minimum standard of behavior, a FIRM way of doing things, despite the local social dynamic of how business is conducted. You want to make sure that client staff can expect to be treated the same way no matter which of your offices they visit and no matter which of their offices they are from. Just like you want them to expect the same quality of work no matter which office is doing a project for them.