Every January, I find myself making some version of the same promises. This is the year we grow faster. This is the year we get more disciplined. This is the year the business finally feels like it’s running instead of being carried.
Lately, I’ve been revisiting some of the most basic fundamentals of professional services. Not because they’re broken, but because Era 3 is changing how fast firms can scale, and what gets exposed along the way. AI has made it possible to grow a firm faster than most founders ever imagined. Work that took weeks now takes days. Teams can do more with fewer people. Margins can expand quickly. On the surface, it feels like a new playbook.
Last year, I had 539 one-on-one calls with founders and executives of boutique professional services firms. From QBRs to onboardings to sales conversations and diagnostic readouts. After that many conversations, one lesson stands out above the rest: the firms that thrived in 2025 were bold, and the firms that struggled played it safe.
In the agency world, positioning often gets treated like a tagline exercise. Pick a platform, pick a service, polish the capabilities deck. But real positioning isn’t cosmetic. It’s a set of choices about who you’re built to serve and the problems you’re willing to own. And when you commit to those choices, entirely new opportunities open up.
If Part 1 was “plan via the journey” and Part 2 was “fund the journey,” Part 3 is about putting it all into motion. Planning and budgeting only matter if they lead to results. Execution is where growth happens or stalls.
By January, most firms have their plans and budgets approved. The question now becomes: how do you turn those plans into measurable progress your executive team can see by the end of Q1?
From May through August, most executive teams, whether at brands or professional services firms, are knee-deep in building strategies and budgets for the coming year. But many are using outdated models: departmental budgets created in isolation, growth projections rooted in past performance and plans that treat customer experience as a byproduct rather than a priority.
There’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over again: the people who know or have done very little often speak with the most certainty and entitlement, while the people with true expertise are far more measured (even hesitant) in their recommendations.
In the high-stakes world of boutique professional services, it’s easy to believe that success is solely the result of relentless effort, sharp strategy, and personal ambition. But what if the real differentiator is something deeper—a guiding faith and a set of values that transcend the bottom line? By juxtaposing the common narrative of self-made success with a perspective rooted in faith and humility, we discover a new framework for leadership and growth.
For decades, the consulting industry has relied on a simple formula: smart people sell their time to solve complex problems. The more complex the problem, the higher the hourly rate. But a new era is arriving—an era when the marginal cost of intelligence falls to zero.
The platform feels broken, but pulling back might be the bigger mistake. A marketing director told me last week that her team constantly asks themselves about “the true and current value of LinkedIn.” Her team is still posting, still investing time, still showing up consistently. But internally, the conversation has changed. They used to ask, “How do we do more on LinkedIn?” Now they ask, “Should we keep doing this at all?” Every planning meeting circles back to whether the investment makes sense.
I was going to write this post about the importance of customer experience in professional services. Over the past few days I had prepped for this by working with Claude on concepts, outlines and drafts and was going to reference that chat this morning to finalize the piece. Upon firing up my browser to got to Claude’s website I got this error: