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.
The platform feels broken, but pulling back might be the bigger mistake. A marketing director told me last week that her team constantly asks themselves about “the true and current value of LinkedIn.” Her team is still posting, still investing time, still showing up consistently. But internally, the conversation has changed. They used to ask, “How do we do more on LinkedIn?” Now they ask, “Should we keep doing this at all?” Every planning meeting circles back to whether the investment makes sense.
As CEO of End State Solutions, an aerospace certification consultancy at the forefront of emerging technology, I’ve observed that while AI promises transformative efficiency gains, many capable founders and organizations resist its adoption. To understand this phenomenon, I turned to an unlikely source—a 20-year-old college student and USMC enlisted “Forward Observer”, who we will refer to here as Ethan, whose thoughtful skepticism about AI mirrors the concerns I witnessed.
I was going to write this post about the importance of customer experience in professional services. Over the past few days I had prepped for this by working with Claude on concepts, outlines and drafts and was going to reference that chat this morning to finalize the piece. Upon firing up my browser to got to Claude’s website I got this error:
Every leader who’s flown a kite understands the paradox: grip the string too tightly and you’ll snap it; let it go slack and the kite plummets. The same delicate equilibrium defines every thriving professional services firm. Too much internal tension creates rigid hierarchies, excessive oversight, competing agendas left to fester which result in your best people burn out or break away.