Your AI Strategy Is Not a Strategy — Unless Your Fundamentals Are

Jim Collins introduced the concept of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal — the BHAG — in Good to Great as a clarion call for bold, long-range thinking. But Collins was careful to distinguish between a BHAG born of disciplined strategy and one born of desperation. The former is a North Star. The latter is a Hail Mary. The difference between the two, Collins argued, isn’t the size of the ambition — it’s the soundness of the foundation beneath it.

Right now, as artificial intelligence reshapes the professional services landscape, I’m watching Collective 54 members sort themselves into three distinct camps. And as someone who has spent over three decades diagnosing why firms fail — often when they least expect it — I recognize the pattern. I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t always end well.

The Three Camps

Greg Alexander’s framework in The Boutique is built on a foundational premise: that starting, scaling, and selling a professional services firm requires disciplined execution across a specific set of operational checkboxes. Not some of them. All of them. The firms that skip steps don’t scale — they stumble. Keep that in mind as you place yourself in one of the following three camps.

Camp One: The Incrementalists. These companies are integrating AI tools thoughtfully, anchoring each adoption decision to their existing strategy, their defined client base, their service delivery model, and their competitive positioning. They are asking the right questions: How does this tool improve our yield? How does it enhance our client experience? How does it strengthen our intellectual property? This is the BHAG in its truest form — bold aspiration, disciplined execution. Collins would recognize it immediately.

Camp Two: The Sideline-Sitters. These companies are watching. Waiting. Telling themselves they’ll move when the technology matures, when a competitor proves the model, when the timing feels right. Some of them are doing this from a position of strength and genuine strategic patience. But many — and this is the part that should concern you — are sitting still while the pressure builds quietly behind them. In turnaround work, we call this the slow bleed. The firm isn’t in crisis yet. The financials still look acceptable. But the operational and competitive ground is shifting, and the delay in response is compounding the eventual cost of action. Bankruptcy doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks up. By the time the urgency feels undeniable, the options have narrowed considerably.

Camp Three: The Script-Flippers. These companies have done the opposite of the sideline-sitters. They’ve moved — aggressively, urgently, and in some cases, recklessly. They’ve treated AI adoption not as a tool to be integrated into a sound strategy but as the strategy itself. They are swinging for the fences. And as any serious student of the game knows, the hardest swing is also the one most likely to produce a strikeout. When AI becomes the plan rather than an accelerant for the plan, the underlying operational fundamentals get bypassed. Greg Alexander’s checklists — on client relationships, fee quality, leverage, replication, culture — don’t disappear because a firm has deployed a new technology platform. They become more important, not less.

What My Work Tells Me About All Three

At Newpoint, we use a proprietary diagnostic called the Turnaround Action Matrix Evaluation — the TAME™ — to assess companies that are underperforming or in distress. It asks roughly 120 questions across ten operational categories, scoring each on a one-to-ten continuum from best-in-class to immediate threat. What we find, consistently, is that firms in trouble aren’t failing across all ten categories. They’re failing in two or three — and those concentrated weaknesses are bleeding into everything else.

Here’s the hard truth: the TAME™ analysis doesn’t care whether your firm has adopted AI. It cares whether you understand your cash flow, whether your client relationships are institutionalized, whether your service delivery model is scalable, whether your leverage ratio makes sense. These are the questions that separate a firm with a future from one that is mortgaging it.

When I apply that lens to the three camps above, the picture comes into focus quickly.

The Incrementalists are stress-testing their AI adoption against these fundamentals before committing. They know their TAME™ score, even if they’ve never taken the formal assessment. They’re asking whether new tools strengthen existing capabilities or paper over existing weaknesses.

The Sideline-Sitters often have TAME™ vulnerabilities they haven’t yet confronted. The delay in AI adoption is frequently a symptom of a broader avoidance pattern — a reluctance to look hard at what the diagnostic would actually reveal. The pressure building behind them isn’t just competitive. It’s operational.

The Script-Flippers are the most dangerous case. They’re swinging hard precisely because something in the business isn’t working — and AI feels like the answer. But in my experience, technology adopted to solve a strategic problem that hasn’t been properly diagnosed doesn’t fix the problem. It accelerates the consequences of it. In Collins’ framework, this is the desperate BHAG — bold on the surface, hollow underneath.

The Diagnostic Question You Should Be Asking

Before you decide where AI fits in your firm’s future, ask a more fundamental question: Do I actually know where my firm is weak?

Not where you think it’s weak. Not where it was weak two years ago. Where it is weak today, measured honestly, across the full operational spectrum that Greg Alexander maps in The Boutique — from client relationships and fee quality to leverage, culture, and intellectual property.

If you can answer that question with data and candor, AI adoption becomes a strategic conversation. You know what you’re accelerating, what you’re strengthening, and what you still need to fix before the technology can deliver its full value.

If you can’t answer that question — if the operational picture is blurry or uncomfortable to look at — then AI adoption, however bold it feels, is just a swing in the dark.

A BHAG built on a clear-eyed assessment of where you stand is a plan. Everything else is a hope. And in my line of work, hope is not a strategy.

Ken Yager is the founder and president of Newpoint Advisors Corporation, a turnaround advisory firm serving businesses with $5M–$50M in revenue. Since 2013, Newpoint has recovered more than $1.9 billion in debt and saved over 15,000 jobs. Learn more at newpointadvisors.com.