Collective 54’s Greg Alexander frames the lifecycle of a professional services firm as a 15-year journey: 5 years of growth, 5 years of scale, and 5 years to exit. If I had followed that path, I’d be on my third company by now.
The second half of the year is where discipline matters most. You’ve already launched your 2025 plan, and undoubtedly, conditions have changed. Some of your original assumptions are holding, others are not. The target remains the same: profitable growth. But how you get there will depend on how quickly and decisively you adjust.
Most mid-market companies track the obvious metrics such as revenue, margins, utilization rates. But when we dig into their operations, we consistently find that the data they’re watching isn’t telling them where to actually focus their attention. They’re measuring outcomes instead of the inputs that drive those outcomes. The result is that even strong operators end up reacting to lagging indicators instead of managing the levers that actually move them.But there’s one question that still trips up even seasoned professionals:
In the early days of your firm, you were the business. You had the courage to bet on yourself. You decided your talents could help solve real problems for clients. You sold the work. You designed the services and delivered the work. You fixed the messes. You built the culture. That was survival and it took your resilience and brute force to grow into a real firm.
Most mid-market companies track the obvious metrics such as revenue, margins, utilization rates. But when we dig into their operations, we consistently find that the data they’re watching isn’t telling them where to actually focus their attention. They’re measuring outcomes instead of the inputs that drive those outcomes. The result is that even strong operators end up reacting to lagging indicators instead of managing the levers that actually move them.But there’s one question that still trips up even seasoned professionals:
If you’ve embraced the idea of focusing your business development efforts on a short list of key relationships, you’re already ahead of the game.
But there’s one question that still trips up even seasoned professionals:
Most cybersecurity leaders have embraced AI’s obvious benefits. You’ve automated log reviews, accelerated threat detection, and improved incident response times. Your dashboards look impressive, and your team feels more efficient.
Early in my consulting career, I noticed something odd—smart, capable consultants showing up like robots. Great résumés. Fancy decks. But no humanity. No warmth. No soul. I remember sitting in a room of very senior executives as a 22-year-old with what I thought was a dumb question. My internal monologue went like this:
Your calendar assistant nudges an internal meeting 15 minutes later. An AI tax module files the firm’s quarterly return with a digit off. Both lean on AI. One slip just shuffles a coffee break; the other invites the IRS and torches your reputation. So which jobs can roll on autopilot and which stay human-led?
Multiple rocket stages are an apt metaphor for exploring the free scaling aspects of small teams. As the number of small teams expands in the first stage, it reaches a tipping point around 7 to 9 teams where a second stage forms, requiring another small team of up to 7 to 9 team members to govern and manage the other teams. The second stage allows the professional services firm to scale to around 100 employees. To scale to around 1000 employees, a third stage of another small team is necessary to govern and manage the earlier two stages of small teams of small teams. These stages can be added iteratively so long as small teams can collaborate effectively with an overarching shared purpose with minimal friction. This is the fractal nature of layering small teams in a free scaling structure.