Most professional services founders know these fundamentals. But in the day-to-day grind of building a business, it can be easy to forget them or let them drift.
This post is a reminder. A quick audit of the core elements that make firms successful. If you’ve got these dialed in and things are scaling nicely, great. If not, this might help you identify what needs attention.
“The riches are in the niches” is a phrase I’ve heard time and again during my time with the Collective 54 community—and it couldn’t be more true in professional services. Clients aren’t just buying time; they’re buying expertise. They want proven frameworks, methodologies, and insights that increase their chances of success. Here are three reasons why your professional services firm should strive to be a true specialist in your niche:
Before I started Collective 54, I had a front-row seat to the power of peer advisory groups. I’ve been in rooms where wisdom flowed from experienced operators, where confidential issues were unpacked, and where lifelong business friendships were formed.
The first calls seemed like every small professional services firm’s dream scenario. We were being introduced by a very credible reference to a top-tier management consulting firm as “the right company” for highly specialized aerospace certification work with a Middle Eastern client. The referral came through a former FAA executive whose credibility in aircraft certification had opened doors that typically remain closed to small firms – great niche for a boutique!
Big Deal Excitement Can Blind Us. Imagine you have a massive deal in the pipeline. This is it, it is your ticket to the big time. You’re excited, as you should be. But is the deal a good deal or not? Sometimes our excitement lends us rose-tinted glasses; glasses that blind us to agree to terms or be overly optimistic for performance. We once experienced a client engagement where our excitement blinded us, which caused us to lose meaningful money, something we didn’t anticipate due to several terms within the deal.
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: