Scaling a Professional Services Firm – Part 4 Prime Heuristics for Scaling*
Prime numbers are a crystallizing way to categorize heuristics for scaling businesses, and professional services in particular:
founder
Market Eminence: The Professional Services Imperative for 2026
Every professional services firm thinks it has what the market wants: expertise, experience, and a strong track record.
But in 2026, that is the baseline. Nobody pays a premium for smart people doing competent work. AI can already produce reports, frameworks, and recommendations that look as good as what your junior consultants bill for.
The Mindset Shift That Unlocks Your First Great #2
There are two conversations happening in your business. The first is public: growth, new clients, visible momentum. The second happens in private, at 11pm, in your office. You are putting out fires your team should have handled, missing another evening with your family while a proposal only you can approve sits unfinished. The thought creeps in: “If I stop, everything stops.” This is the conversation we need to have.
Your To-Don’t List Is More Important Than Your To-Do List
Let’s be honest: your to-do list is lying to you.
It looks productive. It feels necessary. But in reality, it’s a guilt trip disguised as a plan — a mashup of legacy tasks, half-finished habits, and things you swore you delegated but somehow ended up doing again this week.
Differentiation in Professional Services: Be a Specialist, Not a Generalist
“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:
Scaling a Professional Services Firm is Like Traveling to the Moon — It Isn’t Rocket Science: Part 3 – Teams of Teams of…
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.
Market Eminence: How To Truly Stand Out as A Professional Services Leader
For professional services leaders who want to win more respect, reputation, and revenue, the worst thing you can be is forgettable. Look around. Your field has plenty of smart, capable, hard-working leaders, but only a few truly stand out. Even fewer have earned genuine trust.
The Unburdened Founder: Finding Freedom in Operational Excellence
Every founder experiences the exhilarating rush of building something new. However, this initial energy often gives way to overwhelm as daily operations become overbearing. This article shares the journey of a Collective 54 member who met this juncture and found a path forward. Names and specific details are omitted to focus on universal lessons that echo the struggles many others face.
Scaling on Purpose: Metrics and Questions for Deliberate Growth
Growing a boutique professional services firm can feel like flying blind. You’re hiring more people and chasing more projects, but somehow it’s getting harder to see where all the effort is going. Many founders and members that I speak with admit they’ve been scaling without the clarity of hard data or many measurable metrics. Here’s one for you.. I won’t name names but I spoke with a founder this month doing $24M in revenue that asked me what EBITDA meant.
Do You Want to Be Rich or Be King?
In 2010, Clayton Christensen, renowned professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma introduced a concept that every founder must eventually confront: the choice between being Rich or being King.