The Firm Where Clients Stopped Asking for Specific People
A client told Dave Makerewich something most agency owners would love to hear: everyone wants your team, but nobody is fighting over specific people. That was by design.
September 8, 2026
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1 min read
Dave Makerewich is founder of Maven, a healthcare marketing agency. For years the firm ran the way most boutiques do. The founders made the decisions, put out the fires, and carried the quality on their own backs. Looking back on the firm's tenth year, he named the single change that mattered most: they stopped treating urgent client work as the top priority and started training their leaders instead.
From that shift came a structure. The firm built an accountability ladder inside small teams it runs as pods, where authority and accountability scale together. Pod leaders took over their own profit and loss, pricing, scope, and the growth of their book. The founders moved from making every call to designing the system: clear roles, the right dashboards, aligned incentives, and then trust.
The payoff showed up in that client's offhand comment. Quality is consistent across every team, and no single person is the reason a client stays. The same structure is now surfacing the firm's next generation of leaders.
Why it matters to you.
A firm whose quality lives in a few star people is fragile and hard to scale. Every new client stretches the founders thinner, and every resignation is a threat. Push real ownership down into a defined structure and three things happen: the firm grows without the founders in every decision, quality holds as you add teams, and the business becomes far more valuable to a buyer, because it keeps running when any one person walks out the door.
“The client work is always going to be there, it's always urgent, but I have to prioritize training my people first. - Dave Makerewich, Founder, Maven”
Your one thing.
If your best client's favorite person left tomorrow, would the relationship survive? Name one decision you make today that a defined role in your firm could own instead.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
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