His First Engineering Hires Are Aimed at His Own Services
Eclipse Consulting Group advises large enterprises on data management. In its entire history it had never hired a full-stack engineer to work on anything internal to the firm. Now in the AI-era, Michael Ivie has hired a team of them, and pointed their work at productizing the services Eclipse already sells.
October 9, 2026
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1 min read
The reason he gives is simpler than the strategy.
The team is split in three ways: the data management practice, the risk management practice, and one central team works on the firm's own operating model. The first two group's brief is the one worth copying. Their job is productizing what Eclipse sells. Ivie's phrase for it is working out how to cannibalize themselves.
He notes the irony himself. Eclipse stayed out of commoditized engineering for years, deliberately, renting it from partners when needed, but otherwise staying focused on selling strategy and judgement coupled with execution knowhow rather swivel chair application development support. Then it had to build that capability in-house anyway to industrialize the capabilities and products unlocked by the AI-era.
Why it matters to you.
Most founders who decide they are the bottleneck hire more of what they already sell. More senior people who look like them, who can carry client relationships and make the calls. That adds capacity and leaves the model exactly as it was, which is why the bottleneck reappears a year later one level down. Ivie hired people who look nothing like his firm, then gave them the job of making his firm's work repeatable and scalable. The second decision is the one with teeth. Capability aimed outward at clients is just another service line. Capability aimed inward at your own delivery is leverage, and leverage shows up in what the firm is worth rather than in what it bills this quarter. Deciding which way the new team points is the whole move. The limit is money. A team that productizes your services bills nothing while it does it, so you are funding it out of current profit. A firm that needs every hour sold cannot run this play, and should not pretend otherwise.
“I am so committed to not being the founder bottleneck anymore, so I built an entire AI team. For the first time in our company's history, I've hired full-stack engineers. - Michael Ivie, Managing Partner, Eclipse Consulting Group”
Your one thing.
Name the part of your delivery you would least like a competitor to turn into a product. Then ask who inside your firm is working on turning it into one. If the answer is nobody, you have found the thing worth staffing.
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