Hi there, and guten Tag!
This is unbillable hours: a podcast about professional services marketing. Stick around and listen to our insights, tips, and best practices to improve your firm’s marketing and even – your career!
Praise for ubhrs (sort of):
Wait, wait... who are you?
We’re Ash and Flo, two marketing nerds and professional services marketers, and the fellows behind unbillable hours.
Like you, we’re interested in how to make a firm’s marketing so much better it starts to truly drive (*gasp*) pipeline and growth – and this podcast is where we explore the very question.
Ash (or, Aashiq) …
… has had career(s) that took him from tech to creative to marketing for over a decade and a half; he – to use the consulting term – pivoted a lot and often. If there’s something that would make him happy it’d be to reduce business ambiguity and have meaningful analytics.
Despite his tech and engineering background, he started his career working/consulting in advertising and media production for various clients before ending up working for a few of them (some well-known and loved brands) and somehow landed back in this industry.
London-based because he still isn’t too tired of the city to leave, yet. Anything else you can ask; the scribbled notebook is open.
Flo (or, Florian) …
survived more than 10 years in the industry, where he started with brief stints in strategy consulting before switching to the marketing side. There, he put in the hours as a copywriter, strategist, and (eventually) account director and even led an agency office for a bit.
During his time there, he mainly consulted… well, consultancies, from fortune 500 and mid-market firms to super-niche boutiques.
After a while, he joined one of his old clients (Accenture), where he led all global content marketing efforts for the firm’s “Industry X” group before quitting to found his own professional services marketing consultancy, “client friendly.”
Based in Germany, the father of three says he’s “living a rich personal live which, seriously, is of zero relevance here.” Oh, okay then ..
The mission behind this:
Let’s be honest: helping you isn’t the main reason for why we started this podcast. The mission behind unbillable hours is, in fact, very selfish:
We’ve grown, uh, a bit frustrated with the not very strategic, “cost-center” role marketing plays in many service firms. And we’d like to help the function break it this pigeonhole, and, ah… become both much more valuable and way more fun.
So, we’re building this podcast: as a way to build our own skills – including my writing – by exploring, thinking and chatting about what we (and others) think makes for best-in-class firm marketing.
And, yes: We’re doing this mostly for ourselves, and to learn. But you’re welcome to join us, of course, and to listen in.
Oh, and – don’t worry: We’ll not try to sell you anything.
The things you'll find here.
With unbillable hours, we try to read, think, and experiment with all the things that go into our (and: your) jobs. So, expect to hear insights into:
If it’s strategy, we’ll do it – and chat about it here. So… expect tips and tricks for ideal client definition, firm and practice positioning, messaging, and strategic planning (yay, planning!)
Ah, our favorite buzzword! If you’re tasked with creating and distributing points-of-view, thought leaderhip messages, and TL programs, then this here will be for you… stay tuned!
Ah, yes… digital marketing! The not-so-forte of most consulting firms! We’ve learned a few things about PPC (over-)spend, and continue to experiment with how not to do it. Hear it all here!
We’re all managers here, right? So we’re interested in function- and team management, working with biz-dev and “the business”, and all the other crazyiness that is “working at the firm.”
Care to reach out? Great!
You can find our professional bio and contact info at LinkedIn, reach out to us on twitter, or send us an e-mail at ‘hello@unbillable-hrs.com”.
But, please note: this website, and our social profiles, while centered around my professional work interests, have nothing to do with our “day jobs”. So, please: if you’d like to reach out with anything related to the firm we work for, please find us through said firm’s official channels.