Andrew Lindsay, of York, a director of the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, calls on the region’s service sector to give quality and value.

IT'S BEEN an interesting two years. I can’t think of any previous economic cycle when the business community has spent more time wondering about the future, but being less certain about it.

Will there be a double dip? Will inflation take off after all the quantitative easing? Will the banks start lending again? The unanswered questions pile up like traffic on the M62.

As a commercial and corporate legal adviser, I am regularly asked to provide answers to difficult questions by clients. In fact, that’s what they pay me for. My crystal ball is very cloudy and I don’t have any special insight into the future, but do the above questions really matter anyway?

In fact, when were we ever able to forecast the future?

If I were to offer any advice during this period of economic uncertainty to the region’s lawyers, accountants, surveyors and bankers etc (the so-called “professional service community”) it would be that as service providers, we are here to service our clients - it is not the other way round!

In a difficult market, everyone wants more bangs for their buck. So the fees we charge have to be right. Service providers that price themselves out of the market, will get found out, and rightly so.

It’s about getting the quality right as well. In any recession, buyers of goods and services demand quality and value; they don’t just want one or the other. A cut price service that lacks quality, is a service that is just not good enough. If we don’t get the quality right for our clients first time, there often won’t be a second time.

We all know that the market for professional services has shrunk.The service sector thrives on activity, and if clients aren’t active, then neither are their advisers.

Really thinking about our clients is also vital. The delivery of an unsolicited idea, even if not taken up, sends out a positive signal that you are interested in them. It’s also an opportunity to keep in touch; to ask how our clients are getting on, and to learn more about their future requirements. I often wonder if advisers really spend enough time considering how they are perceived by others. For instance, are their websites constantly evolving, useful, electronic tools, or are they just static on-line brochures?

But, of course, the window dressing of an impressive website is not enough. There must be substance behind it. Is the impression we are trying to deliver about ourselves to our clients, genuine? Before I communicate any new initiatives to my own clients, I ensure they are credible and can really be delivered.

From the way we answer that first phone call, to the way we deliver our final bill, we are all creating an impression. They are all impressions we can control, so we want them to be good ones.

Admittedly, it is difficult to be entirely objective about how we are perceived by others. So it’s worth asking our clients what they think about us, or engaging a consultant to tell us. The service sector in Yorkshire and Humberside is robust and resilient. And it is client focused. It’s no accident that after London, the Leeds City Region has the second largest concentration of service providers in the UK.

But the past two years have been a wake up call for us all. To stay ahead in today’s market, we need to deliver quality and value at every stage. Fortunately, this is something that Yorkshire folk know only too well.