Most boutiques launch with a single high-margin service line, but that model often hits a ceiling. In this episode, members Matt Geddie and Paul Voisard of The Maker Group explain how they expanded from negotiation training into full commercial capability—and doubled revenue while extending client lifetime value.
What you’ll get from this episode:
• A real-world example of how to identify adjacent services and time expansion
• A framework for balancing growth with delivery quality and brand trust
• A process for using technology to extend engagement duration and reduce churn
Why it matters:
• Short-run engagements limit scale and predictability
• Expanding too fast or unfocused erodes credibility and delivery
• Technology and service integration unlocks long-term revenue and client stickiness
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, it is exclusively for founders of boutique professional services firms. Who are in the expertise business. And are trying to grow, they’re trying to scale, and someday, they’re trying to exit their firms. And on this show, we aim to help you to make more money, make scaling easier, and to make an exit achievable.
Greg Alexander: And on this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about service line expansion. In the use case we’re going to discuss is the maker group. And they, like most of us, launched their firm originally with a single service line. And then, through exposure to clients, realized that these clients had opportunities in addition to that original problem. And they expanded their service line to capture that, and as a result of that have grown their firm rather nicely over the last time period. So, they’re gonna share their story with us, and hopefully we learn something from it. So, Matt Geddie and Paul Voisard are the co-founders of the Maker Group. So guys, would you introduce yourself, and maybe Matt will start with you.
Matt Geddie: Yeah, absolutely, Greg. Thanks so much. And yeah, Matt Getty, co-founder of the Make Group. We started the Maker Group in 2019. And then prior to starting the Maker Group, worked at another consulting company, kind of boutique, in our core line of service in the negotiation space, and then prior to that, had a series of companies that I had started as well, not in the consulting space, but in the consumer packaged goods space.
Greg Alexander: Okay, great. And Paul?
Paul Voisard: Yeah, thanks for having us again, Greg. I really appreciate it. My name is Paul Voizard, other co-founder here at The Maker Group. 6 years here now at the Maker Group. Prior to that, worked at the same firm that Matt worked at, that’s where we met each other, in the negotiation space exclusively. Spent 5 years there. Prior to that, my background was entrepreneurship with an air towards technology and project management, have also started and sold a company before in the past, but also not in the professional services realm. So, this journey has been similar but different, and looking forward to sharing our experience.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Alright, let’s jump into it again, guys, again, on behalf of the community, we appreciate you coming here and sharing part of your story. So, I’ve got 7 questions I want to ask you, kind of starting high level and then double-clicking into some of the specifics. Again, the topic is expanding service lines, and as a result of that, growing your firm. So, before we get into the expansion of it, can you just maybe tell us what you started with at the Maker Group, and, I guess I’m gonna ask a question, and I’ll leave it up to the two of you guys to figure out who best to direct that question to, okay?
Matt Geddie: Yeah, I’ll take that one, then Paul, you can build on that. I mean, so we started in… with negotiation trainings. So that’s what Paul and I knew, that’s where we came from. And when we started the business, we knew negotiation trainings bring opportunity, right? It drives high client engagement. If you deliver an experience, you drive high client loyalty, but we also knew that from a negotiation workshop perspective, there was going to be issues with client cyclicality. I don’t know if that’s a word, but we’re gonna.
Greg Alexander: It is, yep.
Matt Geddie: Appreciate that, Greg. Along with… it’s short runways with clients, because once you go in and you train an organization, that’s it. And you’re done. And so, we kicked it off, and the nice part with delivering capability workshops is they’re highly profitable. So we were able to self-fund and bootstrap our consulting company, which we’re still doing to this day, but that’s originally where we started. And then, Paul, maybe you can speak to, kind of, our eye towards technology from the beginning.
Paul Voisard: Yeah, I mean, we, we, again, we knew we had a winner on our hands with negotiation training. It was a solid product. Clients loved it. But based on our experience at our previous employer, we also understood that there is an opportunity to use technology in a much more effective way that other organizations in the space were not doing and were not using. So, we began with our focus on negotiation training and workshops, and we, from the very beginning, infused it with technology. So we invested in technology from the very beginning as a differentiator, and also as something that made us stickier with our clients. Because, to Matt’s point, the problem with trainings are, again, they’re short engagements, they’re maybe a few days, you do them, you’ve trained everybody in our organization, and then it’s, okay, what’s next? And if you don’t have anything that’s next, then the phone goes quiet for a really long time until there’s enough turnover at an organization to warrant further trainings, or there’s new hires. But that becomes a very big game of high-low cyclicality that we want to try to avoid.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, and scaling a lumpy business like that is really hard, because you really can’t see past next Tuesday, right? So it makes it tough to make decisions. Alright, so then, you guys, as I understand the story, you pivoted to what you refer to as full commercial capability. So I’d like for you to define that term, and then I’d like to hear what were the drivers behind that pivot? What were the risks that you were willing to accept? And then, as you tried to execute that pivot, you know, what did you learn from that that our members might benefit from?
Matt Geddie: Yeah. Paul, you want to take the defining commercial capability, then I can take.
Paul Voisard: For sure.
Matt Geddie: The mistakes we’ve made.
Paul Voisard: Yeah, no, I’m glad you mentioned the risk. When we define full commercial capability, think about the entire life cycle of buying or selling any good or services in a B2B capacity. That’s… we play in the B2B space. So, if you think about negotiation, that is one piece of the puzzle, but it is the piece of the puzzle at the end of the transaction tail, right? There’s a whole lot of stuff that happens leading up to the negotiation itself. How you plan for that negotiation, how you strategize for it, how you communicate it, how you sell it in. All those are all distinct tasks that need to occur before you even get to the negotiation phase of the selling or buying process.
Paul Voisard: Early on, we recognized that negotiation was just one piece of the puzzle, and we always had an eye towards the full commercial capability picture. In the early days, we didn’t have that skill set ourselves, so we just focused on what we knew. But as we gained momentum and traction in the negotiation space, that is what allowed us to unlock the possibility of going after full commercial, which involved, obviously, to your point, Greg, risks from a hiring perspective, from a resource perspective, from a cash flow and an investment perspective. And I’ll let Matt speak to some of that.
Matt Geddie: Yeah, and I… so the commercial capability space, the biggest risk is we’ve built a relationship with the client, and most of our clients are Fortune 500 Enterprise. We’ve got about 117 clients, and you build a relationship, they know you do this really well, but they have to trust you to do now this really, really well. And so when you say, hey, we’re gonna come in and we’re gonna deliver you a storytelling training, or we’re gonna build your entire sales go-to-market training, or we’re actually gonna come in and reinvent your strategic annual long-term, and strategic 3-year planning cycle with your executive team. You’ve got to come in and actually deliver, and so what our biggest focus on was, is how do we go get the right people? How do we go get the right people that can deliver credibly, that fit our culture, and that focus on that. And so Paul and I have spent, 6 years curating, we’ve got 27 consultants, we’ve got 10 full-time developers, but a lot of our consultants are people we chased for many, many years, trying to convince them to come on this journey with us, and selling them the vision of. Yeah, not only are we doing training, but we’re going to push you professionally into experiencing new things and new excitements, but again, there’s the risk there is… and we did lose a client, because we promised we could build an analytical dashboard, because our whole methodology is in the commercial space, we’re going to say yes, we’re gonna figure it out. And we… so far, we’ve only lost one client. They did come back to work with us in a different space, back to the negotiation space, because we did drop the ball and really mess up, the data analytical dashboard, but… I almost killed our team doing it as well. But again, the risk there is when you expand how do you make sure that you’re not biting off too much? And that’s one of the things the team does a good job of, I think, rating us in, or maybe myself in, in terms of… we always used to say yes, now we’re saying yes more selectively within that core solution, because I think one of the issues as well is when you start looking at service line expansion. Where does it stop? And where does it… and how do you actually… and Greg, you talk about this a lot, you have to productize your service audience. We’re ever actually going to scale and sell and train people, to be able to go deliver it brilliantly. And so, for us, a big part of that has been. How do we figure out when to say no in terms of that service offering scaling?
Greg Alexander: Yep. Listen, you got 117 clients, and you only lost one. I mean, that’s pretty good, right? So, the reward was certainly worth the risk, and you guys have executed well. Speaking of that, I want to talk about the impact of the pivot. So, in preparation for this call, I did a little homework on you guys, primarily talking to my team. And as I understand it, you have recently doubled revenue. You have much larger engagements that last a much longer time period, and you have much higher client retention, which are all things that our members are aspiring to. First off, is that true, and do you have any color commentary on those numbers? And… you know, have therefore, because of those numbers, has the risk that you took to expand your service lines—was it a good risk?
Matt Geddie: Short answer, good risk, yes. I obviously have no hair, so, I mean, I was losing my hair before the business started, but, if I had hair, it’d be gone. Because managing cash flow when you’re doubling your business. Yeah, we doubled, last year, this year, we’re on track to double again. Which is great, and so we’ve invested in people, and you know, this cash flow is the biggest name of the game when it comes to clients, and so that’s a big focus of ours. And so, yeah, when we think about doubling the business, growing the business. Our client retention is very, very high, and our client engagements now, we’ve got one client we’re on a 3-year engagement with, we’ve got another client we’re on, probably a four-year engagement with, and so that… we’ve gotten out of that training cycle of just, hey, I’m gonna book a workshop here, I’m gonna talk to you guys next year, versus really diving in with some strategic partnerships, and I’ll let Paul also speak to how we’ve done that from a technological perspective in terms of the softwares that we built.
Paul Voisard: Yeah, so again, coming back to the idea of how do you stay ever-present in your clients’ minds when you’re not in the room with them, you know, so they’re not forgetting your name? We’ve used technology, I would like to say, fairly successfully at this point. We’ve built solutions that buttress our in-person deliveries, right? So, we go and deliver a negotiation training or a category management training to procurement operation and division. And, you know, you go through a training or, you know, a strategy session, everybody thinks it’s great, and then you leave the room, and inevitably, learnings tail off, and people fall back to their old habits. So, early on, we developed software solutions that help people keep those lessons alive, and essentially what we’ve always… we’ve always referred to it as having a consultant in your pocket. Right? How do you… how do you keep our ideas top of mind for them? And so we’ve built several different, tech solutions that our clients use to plan, prepare, and execute, negotiations or category strategies that, again, kind of walk them through the process in a very easy way. That keeps us top of mind, and keeps, most importantly, the lessons and the learnings top of mind. And we’ve had a great deal of success with that thus far, and now we’re venturing into the AI phase of the technology, solutions, and we’re infusing all the solutions with AI. We’re in the process of doing it right now, and we feel that that’s just going to take everything to the next level, which is probably a whole different kind of conversation, so I’ll keep it at that.
Greg Alexander: You know, you guys doubled the business, and then you’re gonna double it again, which is incredible. I’m sure there’s been some growing pains associated with that. Particularly around legacy employees that need to be upskilled. You probably need quite a bit more process discipline, because the two of you guys now can’t be everywhere, because, you know, the business is just too big. Tell me a little bit about the growing pains you’ve gone through, and how you’re addressing them.
Matt Geddie: Oh, you wanna take that one?
Paul Voisard: Oh, where to begin? Lots… I mean, listen, it’s…. To your… you nailed it. There are people pains, there are financial pains, there are operational pains, there are every kind of pain, there are physical pains that keep you up at night. You know, we’ve had to exit a few employees along the way, you know, in a small business, that’s kind of a… the first, like, I don’t want to swear on your podcast, but oh sh…. moment. You know, when you’ve… you start to outgrow people, people who were there at the very beginning are no longer necessarily the right ones that need to be there at this stage in the journey. You know, that was a… that was a learning lesson for us. Implementing processes, to your point, there is, you know, at any entrepreneur’s early stages, you know everything that’s going on in the business. You know where every dollar is being spent, you know where every person is, you know how every hour is being tracked. At a certain, you know, stage in growth, you kind of have to let go of those reins and accept that you’ve got the right team in place that can do the right things in the right times in the right ways. And so that was also a, you know, a tricky thing to, you know, give up the reins a little bit and trust in others, but if you build the right team, and you’ve got the right people. Then, that becomes a lot easier to do. Matt, you wanna fill in any of the blanks?
Matt Geddie: Yeah, and I also just think legacy employee upskilling’s massive. So for us, obviously, we’ve got some consultants that will play in just some specific parts of our solution offering. What we’ve done is we’re investing in two weeks a year where we get the whole team together, and we’re spending those weeks in terms of just upscaling collaboration. We’re a fully remote organization, so we’ve got 27 consultants, and 5 or 6 countries around the world, and so we’re all over the place. And so every year, we’ll bring people for a full week, and we’ll focus on a specific solution in terms of kind of a bucket, and let’s say, hey, we’re gonna focus on our sales training, sales development, sales strategy, and upskill these individuals. And then we also make it a personal choice for the consultant whether or not they want to take that on and go engage. Say, hey, you know what? Your job is still secure in this space, but if you want to grow for yourself. So we’re much more doing, kind of the pull, like, hey, raise your hand if you’re interested in doing this, raise your hand if you’re interested in learning this. I mean, for us, one of our big pain points is going to be succession planning, because we’ve got some people who are, you know, a couple years from retirement that deliver some really strategic projects, and so we’re very cognizant of making sure that we’re backfilling those consultants with individuals. But yeah, I mean, growing pains, obviously, cash flow. We’ve got very, very experienced people, and I think we’ve talked about this before, where we don’t have a lot of junior individuals or associates in the firm, and so because of that, when we make an investment, we’re paying somebody top dollar, we’re paying them premium. We incentivize all of our consultants on a commission basis as well to go sell and build that client engagement, and so for us, yeah, those are the biggest hurdles and growing pains, and then operationally, yeah, I mean, trying to get people who’ve never used a CRM, or used to remember, hey, back in the day, there were four of us in a garage, and we were just sitting around delivering trainings. I don’t need to do a CRM, I don’t need to keep track of my time, I don’t need to do X, Y, and Z. It’s definitely a pain point, and so what we’ve really focused on is, like, hey, Salesforce was… we beat the drum on Salesforce last year. This year, we’re beating the drum on project management and time, and really taking it one bucket at a time to build that process. But it’s a giant pain in the ass.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, it sure is. And all of the members of our community are going through that with you right now. And as you guys know, I did it myself, and it is a giant pain in the ass. Speaking of that pain in the ass… You guys, when you introduced yourselves, you are serial entrepreneurs. You know, this is your first rodeo. And sometimes, entrepreneurs prefer, you know, to go from 0 to 1, as Peter Thiel once taught us. And then you get to a certain size, where, you know, systems and people and all that, that’s better suited for somebody else, and that triggers when you should sell the firm. And then you land your firm in a bigger entity, and then they then take it from there and fix all those pain-in-the-ass problems. Have you guys thought about that, and how do you think about, you know, whether to keep going, or whether to land your people and your clients with a bigger entity that maybe brings some of those things to the table?
Matt Geddie: Yes. I mean, at a high level, we’ve talked about it, we’ve aligned on the number that we want to sell for, … Greg, I’m… I am a serial entrepreneur, I’m a builder. I mean, I’m also one of the issues developing processes in the organization, like, even though we’re establishing those processes, I might be the worst at following those processes, just… that’s just my personality, that’s who… that’s who I am. … But, yeah, I mean, that’s one of the focal points, and that’s where, for us, getting to the right size, and then finding the right firm to take it over is really, really important to us, because again, our people are the most important thing to the firm, and making sure that they land in a place that then continues their development, gives them safety, gives them security, is a really, really big focal point that Paul and I talk about a lot. Paul, anything you want to add to that?
Paul Voisard: Yeah, I would just say that… we’re not… I don’t… we’re not there yet. I think we’ve got a lot of exciting runway in front of us, we’ve got a lot of exciting product launches and service launches that we see in the very, you know, near-immediate future that we think can continue to fuel growth at this rate for, you know, the foreseeable future. Then tack on AI and what that’s gonna do. Some people are afraid of AI, a lot of consultants are afraid of AI, because, you know, if all you do is just data crunch and synthesize, then, you know, yeah, sure, ChatGPT can do that and take your job. You know, a lot of what we do is, I would like to think, a lot more strategic and deep level with our clients. So, we’re not too worried about the threat of AI replacing us anytime soon. Quite the opposite. We’re excited about the possibilities that AI can, you know, produce for us from a technology standpoint. Again, a lot of people are now trying to shoehorn AI into whatever they can kind of, you know, figure out. Oh, if I put AI in this thing, then I can sell it to my client. But we’ve had those technological solutions all along. And they work, they’re good, and clients love them. And so now it’s like, hey, imagine that thing that you love, supercharged with this AI thing. How much better and easier would that make your life? And clients are like, yes, yes, give us that. So, we’re really excited about the possibilities that that presents, so… you know, are we gonna sell the business one day? Yeah. I think that we aligned very early on. We knew that when we started this business, right? Like, you have a choice when you start a business. Do you want it to be a lifestyle business, or do you want to actually build a real business that, you know, you can eventually sell? And me and Matt were aligned on that from day one. This will be something that gets sold. It just has to be at the right time to the right… to the right place.
Matt Geddie: Yeah, and…. Greg, I mean, your advice as well, right? Like, the $5 million target is definitely our target, like, we’re… We’re confident we’ll… we can definitely get there by 2027. We might get there by 2026. And then to your point, that opens up the doors, right, in terms of finding the right partner, the right strategy, things along those lines.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. All right, so I thought maybe I could throw some… my own personal insights into this conversation as a giveback to Matt and Paul on what they’re working on, and also maybe to… share some insights with the broader community. So you asked a question earlier when expanding your service lines. Where to stop?
Greg Alexander: And in my opinion, The concept of the whole solution is the way to define that. So the whole solution was taught to us by the great Jeffrey Moore way back in the late 90s when he wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm.
Greg Alexander: Now, that was applied to early-stage technology companies, but if you, you know, raise up a level of abstraction there, the concept can be universally applied, particularly to the boutique professional services firm. And I’m going to dramatically summarize here, but what it basically says, if you work backwards from the client’s problem. And you say that I am going to solve that problem in its entirety. Not a piece of the problem, but the entire problem. And deliver the outcome the client wants. What are the blocks? What are the building blocks, or the pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together to solve the problem in its entirety? And if you can understand that, maybe in collaboration with the client. You can figure out where your services lines start and stop. You know, you can think about it from the problem perspective. And then, once it expands beyond that, and starts to address an entirely different problem. Then you say, okay, that’s when I exit stage left. Like, that’s not in my remit. What’s in my mandate for the client is this problem, so… For those that are listening to that, think about it from the client’s perspective. What is the totality of the problem? What are all the pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together to solve the problem in totality? And that can help you figure out how big the breadbasket really needs to be.
Greg Alexander: But listen, we’re at our time window here, but Matt and Paul, thank you very much for contributing to our community, and I wish you guys much continued success, and congratulations on what you’ve done so far in a relatively short time period. We’re really proud of you guys.
Matt Geddie: Awesome.
Paul Voisard: Appreciate that, Greg. Thanks for having us.
Greg Alexander: Alright. Couple calls to action for the listeners, so if you’re a member, and you’re thinking about expanding your service lines, you want to learn more about Matt and Paul’s journey, look for the invitation for the private member Q&A, and you can ask your questions directly of them.
Greg Alexander: If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you think you might want to be, go to collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you.
Greg Alexander: But until next time, I want to thank everybody for their time and listening to us today, and wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and sell your firm someday.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.