Scaling a Professional Services Firm – Part 4 Prime Heuristics for Scaling*
Prime numbers are a crystallizing way to categorize heuristics for scaling businesses, and professional services in particular:
Pro Serv Blogs
Rethinking Business Development Metrics: How Growth-Focused Firms Track What Actually Matters
Most firms track business development like they’re reading the scoreboard after the game. Website traffic. Proposal counts. Win rates. These stats may look important, but they only tell you what’s already happened. They don’t tell you why things happened or where your next opportunity lies.
What Happens When Founders Get in the Room Together
Three years ago, Collective 54 hosted its first annual event for founders of boutique professional services firms. It began as a simple idea: bring together leaders who had been collaborating virtually to connect, learn, and grow in person.
Stop Selling Time – Start Selling Impact
How to shift internal mindsets and client expectations to transition from
hourly billing to outcome pricing.
For decades, professional services firms have relied on the familiar (but flawed) currency of time. Billable hours remain the default across much of the professional services world, yet they are increasingly out of sync with the value clients actually seek. Clients rarely care how many hours something takes; they care about the outcomes achieved.
Why Now Is the Safest Time to Take the Riskiest Bet: Founders, Don’t Wait on AI
How much of your hesitation around AI is about real risk—and how much is about uncertainty?
Lately, I’ve had a lot of conversations with other founders about privacy and IP in the age of AI. Most are worried. They fear exposing client data, losing control of their IP, or stepping into a legal gray zone they don’t fully understand. Those are real concerns. But here’s the thing: every transformative technology starts this way: undefined, messy, and full of opportunity for the ones who move first.
As You Seek Success in the Long Game, Gain Confidence from the Small Signs of Progress
When Greg Alexander asked me to be one of many irregular bloggers for the Collective 54 community, I embraced my role as the entrepreneur in a smaller company. Most notably, that is where I believe I fit within our community – one of the CEOs with fewer than 20 employees, knowing that the transition from CEO to Founder is necessary but not quite as easy as it seems for other C54 quarterbacks with broader and deeper benches behind them.
Pressured to Adopt AI? How to Turn Board Mandates into Real Results
CEO’s are putting a lot of pressure on their organizations to “adopt artificial intelligence.” Often it stems from a board mandate. But few know what it means to “adopt” and recent data from MIT proves this point.
Reframing Client Retention & Lifetime Value Optimization
There’s a truism that’s never changed throughout my career–a satisfied client is the best business strategy of all. It might sound trite, but it’s true, and when you’re focused on improving client retention and lifetime value optimization, keeping client satisfaction as the goal is essential.
Seeing Around Corners: How Cash Flow Forecasting and Adaptive KPIs Keep Growth from Outrunning You
When a business crosses $5 million in revenue, founders often relax. Sales feel steady. The team’s expanding. The future looks predictable.But growth doesn’t create stability — it exposes fragility.At Newpoint Advisors, we’ve seen hundreds of companies scale from $5 million to $50 million. The ones that stumble rarely run out of customers. They run out of cash — or worse, visibility.
How to Make Business Development a Firmwide System, Not a Personality Trait
Many consulting firms depend on the founder or a few charismatic partners to bring in new business. That approach works until it doesn’t. When those rainmakers reach their capacity, get too busy, or fail to evolve their approach, the firm’s growth stalls.