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.
French novelist Marcel Proust once said, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”
That’s exactly what AI enables when it comes to win and loss analysis.
For years, firms knew win–loss reviews mattered. But the way they were done made them slow, incomplete, and easy to deprioritize.
As the co-founder of a consulting firm that has spent years inside boardrooms, C-suites, and crisis war rooms, I’ve learned that the quickest way to lose credibility with an enterprise client is to show up selling services. The quickest way to earn lasting trust? Start with their strategic plan.
When a consulting engagement concludes, the formal deliverables are often complete, but the relationship with the client is just beginning. Too often, firms end projects with a handoff and a “thank you,” leaving future opportunities to chance. At Empactful Advisors, we believe one of the most overlooked tools for creating long-term value is the executive debrief. Done well, a debrief not only reinforces the outcomes of the engagement but also opens the door to deeper partnerships, new projects, and expanded services.
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 But many are using outdated models: departmental budgets created in isolation, growth projections rooted in past performance and plans that treat customer experience as a byproduct rather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.