A room full of members walked into a workshop in Sundance, Utah last month. They weren’t there to learn about AI. They were there to fix their pipelines.
These weren’t founders sitting on the sidelines. They were pioneers. Members of Collective 54 who had already committed to becoming Era 3 AI firms. They didn’t need convincing. They didn’t need a hype session. They wanted help getting started and getting it right.
We just got back from our first workshop style retreat in Sundance, Utah.
We brought ~30 members together for two days of deep work.
The focus: lead generation and deal management using AI native tools.
After two packed days, one insight kept coming back up.
AI handles the lower value tasks so humans can focus on the higher value work.
In the boutique consulting world, you hire the best minds, wrap them in a methodology, and sell their time as the delivery vehicle for specialized knowledge. At SureStep, we spent 15 years doing exactly that—providing high-level GRC and technical expertise to companies around the world.
How Pro-Serv Firms Can Use AI to Serve Small and Mid-Sized Clients Better (Without Becoming Tech Companies)
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.