Let’s be honest. We’ve all felt that little pang of anxiety. You see one of your top experts killing it at a conference, their LinkedIn is blowing up with engagement, and a rival firm’s CEO just liked their latest article. The pride you feel is quickly followed by a cold knot in your stomach.
“What if they get poached?”
“What if they leave and start their own firm?”
“Are they overshadowing our company brand?”
These fears are completely rational. They also may be steering you away from your single greatest marketing asset.
In our research at Hinge, we’ve studied hundreds of high-growth professional services firms, and we’ve given these industry stars a name: Visible Experts®. They are professionals who have a potent combination of deep expertise and high marketplace visibility. And while nurturing them can feel like a risk, the data shows that the real risk lies in hiding your best talent away.
Let’s tease apart these fears and see what’s really going on.
Your Fear Is Real. But Misguided.
The hesitation to elevate individual experts usually comes from three core anxieties:
- The Poaching Nightmare: This is the fear I hear most often. By making your expert more visible, you’re just putting them on a silver platter for headhunters. The reality? If they’re good, recruiters already know who they are. Trying to keep your experts a secret in the age of LinkedIn is a fool’s errand. In fact, creating a stifling culture where personal brand-building is discouraged is far more likely to send your most motivated professionals running for the exits.
- The “Solo Act” Split: The next worry is that your newly-minted star will fly the coop to launch their own competing firm. This can happen as non-competes are often difficult to enact to their full extent. But top-tier talent is inherently ambitious. The choice isn’t between them staying quietly forever or leaving. It’s between creating a supportive environment where they can thrive or a stifling hot house that sends them outside gasping for air.
- The Brand Eclipse: Does an expert’s fame overshadow the firm’s brand? It’s a valid question, but it misses a psychological phenomenon called the halo effect. When a buyer has strong, positive feelings about one of your experts, those feelings transfer directly to your firm. Their star power doesn’t eclipse your brand. It makes your firm shine brighter.
All of this is not to say that these fears never come to fruition. Visible Experts leave their firms for all kinds of reasons. Which is why you should never put all your hopes and dreams behind a single top performer. But more on this topic in a moment.
Moving from Perceived Threat to Proven Asset
Once you move past your fears, you can begin capitalizing on the enormous opportunities that a firm of Visible Experts creates.
- A Marketing and BD Supercharger: Each time one of your experts writes a blog post, delivers a webinar, or gives a speech, they are offering prospects a risk-free way to experience your firm’s expertise firsthand. This builds trust that is difficult to achieve any other way. If, for instance, one Visible Expert can influence 1,000 people a year, ten of them could reach 10,000. They are, quite literally, business development engines.
- A Magnet for Top Talent: In a competitive hiring market, what makes your firm special? A formal program to develop Visible Experts is a massive differentiator. You’re not just offering a job; you’re offering a platform for ambitious professionals to become industry leaders. By actively and enthusiastically supporting your experts’ career-building goals, you catch the attention of top recruiting prospects and incentivize your best people to stay.
- The Ultimate Resilience Strategy: Here’s, perhaps, the most powerful counter-argument to the fear of losing a star player: build a deeper bench. Your goal should not be to develop a single Visible Expert. Instead, cultivate a firm of them. When you have a stable of recognized experts, your organization becomes more resilient. The departure of any single individual, while unfortunate, doesn’t create a vacuum or cripple your brand. You not only protect yourself from losing the face of your firm, you build a portfolio of stars who can reach different audiences and produce visibility that far exceeds that produced by any single thought leader.
Your Next Move
The revolution in professional services marketing is already here, and it’s being led by expertise. The sooner you realize that expertise is marketing, the sooner your firm will prosper.
Stop letting fear drive your talent strategy. The risk isn’t that your best people will become well-known and leave. The risk is that you’ll fail to support them, and they’ll leave anyway—taking their invisible, untapped potential with them. It’s time to stop hiding your greatest assets and start building a firm that’s impossible to ignore.
