In professional services, clients buy what they understand. The rest is landscape (or, rather, vanity). No law firm, consulting firm or professional services firm is judged solely on what it knows. And their reputation is not built on their final opinion
There's a meeting room in Lisbon where, on the other side of the window, you can hear the check-in from the apartment above. On this side, a client who has come from another country is signing the papers that will change his life. Nobody comments. Everyone pretends not to have heard. And it is precisely there, in this uncomfortable silence, that reputation begins to be negotiated.
Preparing for my specialist exam forced me to systematize something that, in practice, I've been living professionally for years: in professional services, reputation is not a side effect of technical quality. It is the business model itself. In law firms, consultancies, auditors (or marketing and communications companies) there are no linear products. There are people, complex decisions and long-term relationships. The service is often how it is explained and not just what is delivered.
In recent weeks I've seen this principle tested on different levels. In ESCS classes, listening to one of the country's largest law firms explain how it articulates communication, reputation and stakeholder relations. In the day-to-day running of the agency, providing communications advice to professional services. Together, these experiences point in the same direction: whenever the service is based on trust, the quality of the explanation is as critical as the technical performance.
I recently had an experience that is worth a metaphor. We're evaluating premises for a new office. We're looking for the right location, the address in line with our desired positioning. But the real estate crisis in Lisbon is stark naked and it's not just affecting families. It is quietly redrawing the map of professional services: the Amoreiras - Castilho - Avenida da Liberdade axis is full of offices compressed into properties designed for residential use, shared with Erasmus student residences, local accommodation for digital nomads and families who live their daily lives there.
Sharing elevators with successive check-ins, having confidential meetings half-walled with short-term rooms, installing teams in spaces with no privacy - all of this communicates, and it rarely communicates “premium”. The address may look good in the footer of an email; but if it ignores the ecosystem in which it is inserted, it says more about a lack of reputational awareness than about brand prestige.
Reputation is “the source of the sale” and the silent criterion that decides whether an organization is even considered when a need arises. Jeff Bezos put it another way, in a phrase recovered from one of the sessions: reputation is what they say about you when you leave the room. Reputation is the opinion of others: you can't control it. You influence it consistently, or you waste it unconsciously. And it is often wasted on details that no one anticipates.
What the major companies that shared their experience at ESCS agree on is that we live in a Reputation Economy and that, in professional services companies, people are their product. This convergence is not just theoretical. It can be seen when the client experience is consistent, organized and transparent: the perception of value changes and this can be seen in business retention, fees and the ability to attract new opportunities.
At the end of the day, it's simple: in a market where any customer can compare experiences in a few minutes, it's not enough to be good. You have to know how to communicate well. And it is in this gap, between what we do and what the customer really understands, that reputation is born, grows or dies.