Every January, I find myself making some version of the same promises. This is the year we grow faster. This is the year we get more disciplined. This is the year the business finally feels like it’s running instead of being carried.
Lately, I’ve been revisiting some of the most basic fundamentals of professional services. Not because they’re broken, but because Era 3 is changing how fast firms can scale, and what gets exposed along the way. AI has made it possible to grow a firm faster than most founders ever imagined. Work that took weeks now takes days. Teams can do more with fewer people. Margins can expand quickly. On the surface, it feels like a new playbook.
Remember 2022? Even 2024? When you’d tolerate almost anything to keep a warm body in a seat? That senior consultant who hadn’t read a client brief in months but was “essential to continuity.” That project manager who turned every 30-minute check-in into a 90-minute therapy session but “knew all the stakeholders.” That analyst whose work needed complete rework every time but “at least they showed up.”
You have built something real with your hands, mind, and will. Few people truly understand what that requires. You do, because you lived it.
At some point in our careers, many of us who’ve found success in business are asked to give back by serving on a nonprofit board.
Becoming a nonprofit board member is both an honor and a recognition of one’s standing in the community. For charitable organizations, adding business leaders to their boards provides invaluable access to those leaders’ brainpower, resources and connections.
Last year, I had 539 one-on-one calls with founders and executives of boutique professional services firms. From QBRs to onboardings to sales conversations and diagnostic readouts. After that many conversations, one lesson stands out above the rest: the firms that thrived in 2025 were bold, and the firms that struggled played it safe.
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.
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.
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.
Every firm in the world is trying to make decisions about AI right now.
It feels like progress. New tools. New workflows. Faster output. But underneath the activity is a choice that will matter a lot over the next few years.
I am seeing firms headed down one of two paths. Problem first or tool first.