Many founders spend years growing a firm without ever fully understanding the type of business they are running. Matt and his co-founders thought they were building a marketing agency. Revenue was increasing, clients were strong, and the team was busy, but progress felt heavier than it should have. Everything changed once they realized they were running a professional services firm and began operating it that way. That shift unlocked clearer decisions, healthier margins, and a fundamentally different view of growth.
What you’ll get from this session:
• The mindset shift that separates stuck founders from scalable firms
• How misidentifying your business model quietly limits growth
• What changes when you run a firm as a professional services business
Why it matters:
• Many founders work harder because they are playing the wrong game
• Professional services firms follow patterns that only work once recognized
• This realization often marks the turning point from hustle to leverage
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, we’re here to do three things. That is to help you make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. And we are dedicated exclusively to founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business, this is for you. And on today’s show, we’re gonna talk about something that is a big issue for most, and it’s a nuanced issue, and that is, what does the term professional services mean? So, for example, am I a marketing agency, or am I a professional services firm? Am I a law firm, or am I a professional services firm? Am I a consulting firm? Or am I a professional services firm? And my point of view is that we’re all a professional services firm first. Because we share a common business model. The way we make a profit is similar. The domains are very different. In fact, within Professional Services, which is industry code 54, that’s the reason why it’s in our name, Collective 54, there are literally dozens of types of professional services, but they all share the same business model. I know this might sound like splitting hairs, but it’s a big deal, and I’m going to prove it to you by introducing our guest.
Greg Alexander: He is a long, well-respected, well-elected member of Collective 54. His name is Matt Jenkins. And Matt and I recently had a conversation, and he brought this up to me, and I said, geez, we should talk about this publicly and put exposure on this topic to lots of people. So that’s why Matt is here. We’re going to talk about his journey. So Matt, for those that don’t know you, would you please introduce yourself and your firm?
Matt Jenkins: Absolutely, thanks, Greg. I’m happy to be back talking here. My name’s Matt Jenkins, as you said, I’m one of the founding partners of Other. We’re a North American integrated media and creative agency. So we work with clients to run all their media, to plan it, buy it, and execute all their media. We have a creative services line of business as well. So we work across North America. We started the business from the ground up, and we’ve got, you know, a team now in a couple of offices throughout North America, and it’s been quite the journey. Collective 54 has been a huge part of it the last couple years, and some of these realizations that you’re talking about, so looking forward to getting into it.
Greg Alexander: Alright, very good. So the way this came about is, you, me, and Kat were on a call, and we were catching up at the end of the year, and you brought this up. And you shared with me a few things that you did as a result of realizing that, yes, you were a media agency, but you really were a professional services firm who happened to express being a professional services firm through being a media agency. So just as a way to set the table, share with everybody what you meant by that, and then we’ll double-click on a few items.
Matt Jenkins: Sure, sure. So, when we started the company, myself and my two partners, Nick and Kat, we came from some of the big six holding company media agencies. And the game then, and the game, I would suppose now, later, was a top-line game. It was all about top line. It was just new clients, new clients, new clients, new clients. And there was not a huge narrative around optimization of the delivery of the work and the delivery of the labor, the delivery of the outcomes for the clients. And so when we started our company, that’s what we did. We just went after top line. And for the first few years of the company, we just said, are we acquiring new clients? Are we retaining the ones we have? That’s obviously an important part of it. But there wasn’t a whole lot of discussion around how you optimize the way that you deliver work to clients, and the way that you make money within that framework. How do you optimize your labor model? How do you use tools and technology? How do you standardize delivery processes, or narrow an ICP, or do those kinds of things that can help you to deliver work more efficiently? And on top of that, there was a whole set of metrics, of operating metrics, that we’d never even heard of.
Matt Jenkins: Utilization and things like that. It sounds, you know, somewhat silly now in the rear view, but we hadn’t looked at those things. We just looked at growth as the top-line growth, as the most positive indicator of success, and we ran the business that way. And, you know, it worked through that stage, and we were younger, and we were smaller, and so there didn’t necessarily need to be as much rigor around that. You can kind of manage it a little bit more with hand-to-hand combat. Make sure that things are going well.
Matt Jenkins: But then we joined Collective 54, I guess that was a few years ago, and started hearing from, you know, other folks in the group, started hearing from yourself about how the sausage gets made in professional services, so to speak, right? And we’d never really thought about that. It’s like, these are the inputs that you’re going to look at, this is how you’re going to measure the quality of those ingredients, and whether they’re working or not. Whether the thing tastes good at the end of the day, and clients are enjoying it. So, we discovered that, and it was like, wow, we’re, you know, we’re just like so many of these other firms, and I think there’s a lot we can learn from there.
Matt Jenkins: You know, you’ll appreciate, I’ve always found it so interesting in entrepreneurship that, you know, there are tens of thousands of marketing agencies, or consultants, sales consultants, SaaS people that do roughly the same thing you do, and it feels like you’re the first person ever on the planet to do it.
Greg Alexander: Right.
Matt Jenkins: Right? No matter how many companies have done it. And so, coming in, and that’s how we felt, I think, up until joining into Collective 54, was like, hey, we’re way out here on an island. Like, we’re just figuring this out for the first time. And then coming in and learning, no, you’re actually a professional services company, and there’s a model for this, you know, really, it really, like, opened the doors to a whole new realm, and it’s had a real positive impact on the way that we run our business for everybody involved. It’s better value for our clients. It’s better, in terms of the health of our own organization, and it’s a better working environment for all of our teams. So that realization has been real and learned, and, you know, we’ve got a ton of value out of it.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so a couple of questions for you. So, it makes my heart swell when I hear that story, because I have conversations with people literally every day, and I hear something like, hey, I’m a consulting firm, what am I going to learn from an accounting firm? Or, you know, I’m in IT, and what the heck am I going to learn from marketing? And I try to explain it to them. I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in the professional services business, which means, here’s the profit model. And you’ve got to optimize for these things. For example, your inventory are people.
Greg Alexander: And your… how much revenue you generate at the firm level is an interesting number, but it’s way more interesting when you break it down to unit economics. How much revenue per employee, or how much profit per employee, and how do you optimize for those things? So you had, to your credit, and Nick and Kat’s credit, you guys have zero ego, which I love that about you, maybe that’s because you’re Canadian and you’re nicer than us Americans, and you’re just open to even, like, consider what’s possible. Not everything is going to work, but you, you know, what are the menu of things that I can look at, and which of those make sense to me, and how do I apply them to my business and my unique world?
Greg Alexander: And there is uniqueness. I mean, being in the media business is different than being in the IT business, but the concepts are the same. So my first question is, how did you remain open to just considering that in the first place?
Matt Jenkins: I mean… I think it’s part of our entrepreneurial DNA, like, our specific entrepreneurial DNA, which is, like, we try to turn over every stone, right? We don’t believe that we know everything. And so, you know, often, I know lots of people who operate businesses or in senior positions, and, like, you know, they really dislike when salespeople reach out to them. And, like, are prospecting them. They’re like, leave my time alone, I don’t need your thing whenever you’re selling. We’re the opposite of that. It’s like, what if this person has something of value that could make our company better that we might want to buy?
Matt Jenkins: And I think we’ve always had that ethos of, like, okay, well, let’s check it out. You know, let’s take a call here and check it out, and if it’s not good, then it’s not good. If it is, then, you know, great, then we’re gonna build something out of it. Collective 54 was no different. We got referred in by somebody who was already a member, talked to Matt, like, sure, this might be interesting, and, you know, away we went, and we’ve been a member for a long time. So I think it’s part of that, like, just looking at salespeople reaching out to you, or something that you hear from somebody one-off in a conversation as an opportunity.
Matt Jenkins: And as a leader of a company, being like, I need to look into that opportunity, and I need to see if there’s some value there for my company. I think that’s the sort of underlying piece that we’ve always thought about that probably brought us here.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Great advice. I mean, there’s always something to learn from everybody. Remain open. You never know when you’ll stumble into that one big idea that might make a big difference.
Greg Alexander: Okay, let’s get more specific. Maybe give me an example or two on the things that you did differently in running your firm once you made the switch from realizing you were a professional services firm. So once you became aware of that, what are one or two things that you did as a result of that newfound understanding?
Matt Jenkins: Probably pretty simple off the top, but it’s like, start measuring those things that matter. Like, start measuring things like utilization and revenue per head, and yield, and start looking at them, and understand what they mean. That was an important part, right? It’s like, do we have… are we tight in the way that we track time? Do we have a granular enough look at the way that we deliver work to understand where our opportunities are?
Matt Jenkins: And so just collecting the information and building rigor around the way that we collected it was important at the outset. And so we’ve been doing that for several years now, and we have a whole bunch of data going back, and, you know, we have a really good sense of, to go back to the analogy, like, how the sausage gets made in our company.
Matt Jenkins: Then the second part of it was to not just focus on top line, but instead, look at it and say, yes, top line is always a priority, and growth is always gonna matter, and you can’t forget that. But what are the pieces within the value chain that you’re optimizing for, for your clients or for your business? And when you start to look at those more granular, professional services-focused metrics, I think it’s much more directive, or I’ve found that it’s much more directive in helping you to focus where your time and effort needs to be.
Matt Jenkins: It’s like, you know, we need to… people need to be more productive, maybe. Revenue per head might tell you the people need to be more productive. And so you look at it and say, well, where are we wasting time right now? And, you know, what are we doing… what are we spending a lot of time on in the organization right now that’s not value-adding? Okay, that’s a focus for us. And so it was number one, measuring those things and actually looking at them and reporting on them on a regular basis. And then the second piece was, and this just fell naturally, was orient your strategy around it. Orient your strategy around actually fixing those things and moving the needle on those things.
Greg Alexander: We found that.
Matt Jenkins: As we move the professional services metrics, I’ll call them, forward, they always have a positive impact downstream. They’re always going to help improve revenue, they’re going to help improve profitability, they help improve client satisfaction. It’s not just about our firm. It’s about making sure what our clients are getting as good, right? And it’s value-adding. We’re doing work that they actually find important.
Matt Jenkins: And so those would be the two big things. It’s the reporting on it, and then moving the strategy to be oriented around those things, rather than just sticking with the sort of top-level metrics.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, you know, you bring up the client impact and how they feel this, and it’s very real, and I’ve seen this with members. Where their client satisfaction ratings go up, which lead to client retention, expansion, revenue, etc. And I had one member share with me, the client said, hey, not only am I hiring you, this was a software development shop, because you guys write great code, but you run a tight ship.
Greg Alexander: Client know that you guys know what you… You become more dependable. That’s all part of… that client experience is just as important as to the result you deliver for the client, how they feel when they engage with you. And they’ll feel like… they’ll feel better if you’re a professional services firm. Emphasize the word professional. Like, you…
Matt Jenkins: Yeah.
Greg Alexander: Doing, right?
Matt Jenkins: Yes, yes. They can see the… they can see the rigor. Right. They can see it, even if it’s not overt, and it’s just through osmosis, and the way that you’re doing business with them, they can see it, and they can feel it, and I think that they feel more comfortable working with you, understanding that, you know, you’re… you’re delivering that… that kind of rigor. Also, they want dependable partners.
Matt Jenkins: They don’t want to see your revenue going up and down, and your profitability going up and down. They want to know that in 24, 36 months, like, you’re going to be better and stronger, and that you’ve reinvested in your services and your offering. And so, yeah, I totally agree.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. I mean, let’s say the client has a big mission-critical project. I mean, they’re not going to give it to you if they think you might not be around in a year. They’ll think you… but if they know you’re running a tight ship, and you’re profitable and stable and all that, then maybe they give you the bigger deal. All right, my last question, and then we’ll save the rest for the private member Q&A, which will be a rich conversation.
Greg Alexander: When you made this switch from realizing that you were a professional services firm, I asked you previously what are some of the things that you started doing, and you mentioned paying attention to the metrics, etc. Was there anything that you stopped doing when you became aware of this?
Matt Jenkins: Stopped doing… You know, I mean… somewhat the inverse of what I said when we started. We stopped focusing necessarily so much on the macro-level metrics, at least with the frequency that we were looking at them before. It’s still very important, and, you know, those are the big ones that matter long term.
Matt Jenkins: I think one of the big things is… is looking, in some respect, more deeply at… or stopping, assuming that every new engagement or every new project was going to need to be tied to incremental headcount. And instead looking and saying… like, that detachment that we talk about sometimes, instead looking and saying, like.
Matt Jenkins: Okay, well, how could we get this done better by tightening up a standard operating procedure, by leveraging a piece of technology, or creating some synergy somewhere else? Has been one for us, and we’ve got a lot of success out of that. Takes investment, like, of course, to do that kind of stuff, but again, for clients, it adds value.
Matt Jenkins: Like, if you can get something done with a piece of technology or a really tight standard operating procedure that doesn’t require another headcount, if I’m on the other side of the table, like, I’m into that. I’m buying that. And so, I think that, like, there was a… not a, you know, a dedicated, we’re gonna stop talking about this, but a natural migration in that way, and thinking about how we could optimize that process, and getting away from that has been helpful. Not that there’s not a huge element of it still, but it pushed us away from that a little bit, for sure.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, we’re seeing that a lot right now, because we’re in this AI era. You know, there’s things that we can do now with tech that, just as recently as a year or two, required people. And the tech, especially intelligence tech, not automation tech, sometimes can do these things better than humans can do it, and they certainly can do it more cost-effective. So even though AI might not necessarily be resulting in job loss yet, it’s certainly resulting in… I don’t need to go hire the next 5 people. And for the owner of a professional services firm, that’s fantastic, because that increases profits.
Greg Alexander: You know, one thing that I would share with you, Matt, as a third-party observer of your firm, a fan of your firm. I’ve seen how you, Nick, and Kat behave now as owners. I will tell you that you’ve improved dramatically, and it’s been great to see this, and it’s a big compliment to you guys. You guys, when I first met you, I would say you were probably three-part operator, 1-part owner.
Greg Alexander: Now I think you’re a three-part owner and one-part operator. You think about enterprise value creation, profit. You know, before you launch a new service, you think about, okay, how would we deliver this, and can we engineer it in such a way that’s super efficient? Et cetera, et cetera. You just… your whole, like, I don’t know, your whole mental model is different now. And just, I wanted to point that out, because part of having role models on the podcast is for people to model their behavior after people that are doing really well. So, I would leave the audience with this. Remember, when you’re a owner-operator, you have two jobs.
Greg Alexander: You wear two hats. You have the operator job, you gotta sell work and deliver work and hire people, etc, etc, but you’re also an owner. And you get distributions as an owner if you run a profitable firm. And being an owner requires a set of skills. A new mental model, just like an operator does. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Matt Jenkins: It certainly does. One thing I wanted to make sure that I pressed on is, like, I cannot express the amount of time, effort, and money saved, never mind our transition on the… like, on the mental model, but the amount of time, effort, saved in dumb tax the last few years… I’m not kidding, like, you laugh, but it’s… it’s like, once you… you listen to other people who have done it.
Matt Jenkins: And, like, we have, we have, honestly, our clients are, like, some of our greatest mentors and teachers. And they’ve taught us so much about… about leadership, about operating businesses or business units. We have many mentors and, you know, people who help us outside of it, yourself included, who have helped with that. But, those are the people, like, I’ve really found us accelerate a lot.
Matt Jenkins: By spending a lot more time talking about that kind of stuff, talking about how you lead and how you operate a business, and how you mentor and grow people, and create good and sustainable business models, just learning from other people. I think has really shifted that. So if I had something for somebody else to take away, it’s like, spend time on that, and talk to people who are doing that, and listen to them, like we said at the beginning. They’ve done it before, listen to them, you can avoid a ton of dumb attacks, and you can take your company to the next level if you do that. That’s been instrumental for us.
Greg Alexander: That’s a great piece of advice. You know, as… for those that are listening to this, you know, like, and I’ll use Matt just because he’s our role model this week, but he’s in the media business, and sure, there are things to learn in the media business, but he’s probably already an expert in the media business. So the things he’s going to learn there are probably incremental. I mean, that’s why his clients come to him.
Greg Alexander: But this other stuff, you know, like ownership and entrepreneurship and professional services, there’s probably transformative things to learn there. Like, the bang for the buck, or the bang for the hour of learning there, is greater than spending an extra hour in the domain itself, right? Yeah. Hopefully that made sense.
Matt Jenkins: One of our… one of our mentors calls it your return on effort.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, that’s a great way to think of…
Matt Jenkins: Yeah, what’s your return on effort? How much are you getting back for the, you know, effort that you’re putting in? And if you’re not getting it, then I think you… if you’re not happy with that return, you want to increase the altitude, like, of the discussions that you’re having with people. And it will help. So, yeah, that’s been instrumental for us, just to have a lot of people around us who have done a great job with this already, and, you know, try to model their behavior and build our firm around it.
Greg Alexander: I love that return on effort. All right, well, Matt, once again, you’ve made a big contribution to our collective. On behalf of all the members. I want to thank you for being here today.
Matt Jenkins: Thank you, Greg, I appreciate the time.
Greg Alexander: Okay, and a couple calls to action, just real quickly, as we conclude. So, if you’re a member, look for the invitation for the weekly role model session. You’ll have a chance to hear more about Matt’s story and be able to ask him questions directly. If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you might be interested, go to collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you.
Greg Alexander: But as always, I greatly appreciate the attention that you gave me today. I hope I was… helpful. I hope Matt was helpful, and I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm, and we’ll see you on the next show. Thank you for listening.