Here is what I believe is happening right now. Many of us are intellectually keeping up with artificial intelligence. But we are not keeping up with changing how our firms operate with AI. That gap is where firms will start to separate.
A member said something last week that I’m still thinking about. His firm built a tool that saved entry level associates about four hours on every deck they created. What used to take half a day now takes about 12 minutes. And here’s the part that hit me:
Picture this. Your firm’s best partner has a client onboarding process that takes three days and produces consistently great results. Your other two partners? Their onboarding takes five days and the quality varies. The methodology exists, but it lives in one person’s head.
Over the past several years, I’ve worked hands-on with four investor-backed leaders across four industries. They had built real businesses with deep expertise, and every one of them was invisible online.
Then they started showing up. One sold for over $2 billion, one grew headcount 26% during a talent crisis, one IPO’d at $5.6 billion, and one built a $200 million market from scratch while the biggest retailers in the country started referencing his LinkedIn posts in sales meetings.
Jim Collins introduced the concept of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal — the BHAG — in Good to Great as a clarion call for bold, long-range thinking. But Collins was careful to distinguish between a BHAG born of disciplined strategy and one born of desperation. The former is a North Star. The latter is a Hail Mary. The difference between the two, Collins argued, isn’t the size of the ambition — it’s the soundness of the foundation beneath it.
We see it every week, and most of the time it was avoidable. There’s someone in the business who needs to go. You know it. Their co-workers know it. Half the management team knows it. But nobody has actually done anything about it. That delay doesn’t help. It makes things worse.
Most professional services firms treat compliance as a burden.
More rules.
More documentation.
More audits.
The natural instinct is to do the minimum required and move on. We initially approached it the same way at ACE Consulting.
When the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) requirements began affecting federal contractors, the first reaction was predictable. It looked like friction. It looked like overhead. It looked like something that would slow us down. Instead, it strengthened our firm.
Imagine a private equity investment committee reviewing two nearly identical companies. Both generate $30 million in revenue. Both operate in the same industry and serve similar customers. On paper, their historical financial performance looks remarkably similar.
As boutique professional services owners, most of us are trying multiple ways to profitably grow our business. For organic growth, this includes investing in AI, improving sales effectiveness, or cutting unnecessary costs.
If your outcome-based pricing proposal hit my inbox, it would likely get rejected. Not because the concept is wrong, but because the attribution is lazy. Here’s the good news: I’m going to tell you what folks like me need to see to accept these proposals. I’m having these conversations right now with clients.
