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What I Learned Working with a Board (After Years of Going It Alone)

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When I returned to Management One in 2025, I came back to something I’d never really had before: a Board of Directors.
I’d built and run M1 for years making every major decision myself. That’s how most entrepreneurs operate – you figure it out, you trust your gut, you carry the weight. And for a long time, that worked. But one of the reasons I originally sold the business was the loneliness of it. The weight of every big decision sitting entirely on my shoulders. The isolation of being the only person who could make certain calls.

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How To Apply Signals That Scale And Avoid Noises That Stagnate Founders And Their Firms In 2026

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Every Scale-stage founder in Collective 54 is likely doing some version of the same thing right now.
Reviewing 2025. Refining a plan for 2026. Deciding what to double down on — and what to stop.
That feels responsible. It’s also where many founders quietly lose a year.
Not because they lack intelligence or effort. Because they fail to separate signal from noise at the exact moment it matters.
I’m writing this as a Scale-stage founder who just completed his first year of the scaling phase and had to confront that reality.

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Sharing Thanks After Thanksgiving: A Weekly Ritual

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Our winter holiday season has almost passed us by, and hopefully some of us got to enjoy the time with family and friends over stories, laughs, good food and some much-deserved rest. Even though the holiday starts with Thanksgiving (although my wife would say it really starts with Halloween, her favorite holiday), and turkey and stuffing is well since in the rear-view mirror, let’s not forget what the intent of the Thanksgiving holiday is. Let’s try to actively remember the intent of that holiday every week.

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You Can Choose Your Bottom

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I’m Todd. I’m an alcoholic.

My parents were both the first—and only—people in their respective families to go to college. Not just college: professional degrees. They worked their asses off and built a legitimately good life. Dad had a thriving accounting practice. Mom was a nurse until she had me, then she stayed home and played a lot of tennis. We had a large suburban house, the club memberships, a beach condo, and a lake place. From the outside, it looked like a clean, stable upper-middle class win.

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Nail It Before You Scale It in the Age of AI

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“Nail it before scale it” is powerful in professional services because scaling multiplies whatever and wherever you are already. This is especially true of quality delivery, margin discipline, and operational chaos. When your core offer and delivery system aren’t repeatable, growth forces constant reinvention, creates overpromising in sales, and drives margin leakage and burnout. Nailing it first means you’ve defined a clear ICP, a standard engagement with consistent outcomes, and a delivery playbook that average talent can run without heroics. Then you can scale with confidence because you’re replicating a proven, profitable system rather than amplifying variability.

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Strategy Isn’t the Race. Momentum Is.

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Most professional services firms don’t lose because they lack strategy. They lose momentum—often before the year even begins.
For CEOs, this shows up in familiar ways: leadership teams stuck in planning mode, decisions deferred until January, and organizations waiting for “clarity” while the market moves on. By the time the year officially starts, speed has already been lost.

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