Are you still building your consulting practice on the traditional pyramid model while your competitors race toward AI-powered transformation? Here’s a wake-up call: the consulting industry has fundamentally changed. While you’re optimizing billable hours and adding junior analysts, forward-thinking firms are already leveraging AI-amplified expertise to deliver five times the value without increasing their overhead.
At the start of 2025, I made a simple New Year’s resolution: complete a marathon.
Up until then, most of my training had been for baseball or CrossFit. Strength mattered more than endurance. Running had never been my thing. But, I wanted to see what would happen if I set a big goal and followed through.
There are two conversations happening in your business. The first is public: growth, new clients, visible momentum. The second happens in private, at 11pm, in your office. You are putting out fires your team should have handled, missing another evening with your family while a proposal only you can approve sits unfinished. The thought creeps in: “If I stop, everything stops.” This is the conversation we need to have.
Content just became cheap. If you haven’t noticed, you now have access to millions of AI-generated articles explaining how AI is changing content. Take the AI of your choice – it lowers the threshold for publishing ideas.
As professional services owners, we know the importance of having a strategic plan. We spend considerable time each year crafting thoughtful annual plans, setting ambitious but achievable goals, and mapping out the path forward. But here’s what I’ve learned over the years: the real challenge isn’t creating the plan—it’s keeping it alive and relevant throughout the year while maintaining focus on what truly matters.
There has been much talk of AI-Generated “Workslop” after a recent HBR article made headlines. Like most things AI, the issue is not new, but it’s magnified and faster…. Slop with a new name and a Ferrari engine.
Most founders think growth comes from more leads, new offers, or better sales tactics. But one of the most powerful growth tools is already sitting inside your firm: the post-project review.
For founders of professional services firms, growth cannot depend solely on chasing new logos. The most sustainable path to scale comes from expanding within your existing accounts. Many founders in Collective54 tell me that Account growth is critical, and has historically been their top growth lever. But it’s not predictable, and seems like it’s very much customer driven – not sales driven. Account growth delivers higher margins, lowers client acquisition cost, and creates fertile ground for referrals and reputation.
Whether you love it, hate it, or try to pretend it doesn’t exist, generative AI is out there changing the way people buy just about everything. If you think it hasn’t made its way into the B2B buying cycle just yet, I’m here to share some very recent data points that say otherwise.
For decades, professional services firms have survived, and even thrived, on founder dependency. The founder was the rainmaker, the strategist, the client-saver. Clients bought you. Deals closed because of you. Delivery worked because of you. In Era 1 and Era 2, this model slowed scale but didn’t always kill you. You could grind harder, hire around the edges, and keep going.