In the agency world, positioning often gets treated like a tagline exercise. Pick a platform, pick a service, polish the capabilities deck. But real positioning isn’t cosmetic. It’s a set of choices about who you’re built to serve and the problems you’re willing to own. And when you commit to those choices, entirely new opportunities open up.
If Part 1 was “plan via the journey” and Part 2 was “fund the journey,” Part 3 is about putting it all into motion. Planning and budgeting only matter if they lead to results. Execution is where growth happens or stalls.
By January, most firms have their plans and budgets approved. The question now becomes: how do you turn those plans into measurable progress your executive team can see by the end of Q1?
From May through August, most executive teams, whether at brands or professional services firms, are knee-deep in building strategies and budgets for the coming year. But many are using outdated models: departmental budgets created in isolation, growth projections rooted in past performance and plans that treat customer experience as a byproduct rather than a priority.
What if your best strategic insights didn’t come from consultants, books, or conferences, but instead from your own clients?
When we launched our first Client Advisory Board in 2022, I quickly realized how true that was. The experience reshaped how we make decisions, identify blind spots, and improve our service. Here is what we have learned about building a board that actually works.
There’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over again: the people who know or have done very little often speak with the most certainty and entitlement, while the people with true expertise are far more measured (even hesitant) in their recommendations.
Most boutique firms don’t lose momentum in March or April.
They lose it in January.
Research from Gartner shows that 67% of annual plans fail by the end of Q1, often because teams enter the new year without clarity or focus. And Harvard Business Review reports that 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy, which means many firms start January reacting, not executing.
For decades, the economic engine of professional services was built on one deceptively simple concept: leverage.
David Maister popularized the term in his classic book Managing the Professional Service Firm. His formula was clear: the more junior professionals a partner could supervise and bill, the greater the profit per partner. The model worked brilliantly for the industrial era of expertise, when value creation depended on human effort.
In the high-stakes world of boutique professional services, it’s easy to believe that success is solely the result of relentless effort, sharp strategy, and personal ambition. But what if the real differentiator is something deeper—a guiding faith and a set of values that transcend the bottom line? By juxtaposing the common narrative of self-made success with a perspective rooted in faith and humility, we discover a new framework for leadership and growth.
The moment your team complains about a client, you’ve already lost. Not because the client hears it—usually they never do. But because the mindset behind those words begins to reshape the way employees see, value, and serve the people who trust them.
Change is hard.
At Intevity we have spent two decades helping large, complex organizations transform; modernizing systems, redesigning processes, realigning teams, and unlocking real business value. We’ve seen firsthand how much friction there is in navigating the old and adopting the new. But we’ve also seen the payoff: agility, scale, and clarity on the other side.
For decades, the consulting industry has relied on a simple formula: smart people sell their time to solve complex problems. The more complex the problem, the higher the hourly rate. But a new era is arriving—an era when the marginal cost of intelligence falls to zero.