On Trust as a Growth System
An interview with Andrew Dietz about how trust drives reputation, relationships, and revenue for professional services firms.
Andrew Dietz from Creative Growth Group, has known me long enough to recognize when I am making an observation, and when that observation is in danger of becoming a book!
Andrew was one of my trusted advisers when I was leading Inforte, and we worked together again years later at TopRight. He recently invited me to discuss the ideas behind my forthcoming book, Built for Trust, for his excellent Earned Growth Substack. The result is Trust is a Growth Systeman exploration of what Trust Architecture means for professional-services firms.
Professional services are built on individual relationships. Clients trust the partner who has advised them for years, the consultant who understands their business or the specialist whose judgment has repeatedly proved reliable. But clients never experience only that individual. They experience the team, the analysis, the billing process, the handoffs, the responsiveness when something goes wrong and, increasingly, the firm’s choices about data and artificial intelligence. Every interaction either reinforces or diminishes the credibility the lead professional has earned. That is why trust cannot remain a personal attribute or a marketing claim. It has to become an organizational capability.
As I told Andrew:
“Build trust into the operating system, not just the marketing message”.
If a firm describes itself as integrated while its partners guard their client relationships from one another, the operating model has overruled the marketing. If it claims to be client-first while its processes repeatedly create unnecessary friction, the client gets to decide which version is true. Said another way:
“Your brand makes the promise. Your firm has to prove it.”
In the interview, Andrew and I also discuss a practical way for leaders to examine that gap: regularly asking important clients whether the firm is helping them achieve the outcomes that matter, what is becoming harder, where the firm is creating friction, and what the client would want done differently if they were hiring the firm again today.
The point is not to demonstrate perfection. Clients know that the human beings working at the firm will occasionally make mistakes. Trust grows through honesty, responsiveness, and visible evidence that the organization is learning. The commercial implications are significant. Trusted advisers are brought into conversations earlier. They receive better information, meet more decision-makers, gain permission to address adjacent problems and earn introductions to others.
The growth chain is straightforward:
Trust → Access → Better Information → More Ways to Help → Retention, Expansion and Referrals → Revenue Growth
Trust may be intangible, but its economic consequences are not.
My thanks to Andrew for a thoughtful conversation and for translating the principles of Built for Trust so effectively for professional services leaders. His article demonstrates why trust is more than a virtue, a value statement or a reassuring page on the website.
It is a growth system.
