I was on the road for a good part of the last few months and saw an interesting trend: CEOs who know they are underpriced for their value are uncomfortable (at best) to increase their prices. This fear falls into three main categories:
There’s an irony that every professional services owner eventually faces: we built our businesses by providing expertise to clients who need specialized knowledge, yet when it comes to growing our own firms, we often resist seeking that same level of expertise for ourselves. We’ll spend months trying to figure out complex marketing strategies, stumble through people management challenges, or wrestle with operational inefficiencies—all while charging our clients premium rates for the exact same type of specialized guidance in our own domains.
Most firms track business development like they’re reading the scoreboard after the game. Website traffic. Proposal counts. Win rates. These stats may look important, but they only tell you what’s already happened. They don’t tell you why things happened or where your next opportunity lies.
There’s a truism that’s never changed throughout my career–a satisfied client is the best business strategy of all. It might sound trite, but it’s true, and when you’re focused on improving client retention and lifetime value optimization, keeping client satisfaction as the goal is essential.
When a business crosses $5 million in revenue, founders often relax. Sales feel steady. The team’s expanding. The future looks predictable.But growth doesn’t create stability — it exposes fragility.At Newpoint Advisors, we’ve seen hundreds of companies scale from $5 million to $50 million. The ones that stumble rarely run out of customers. They run out of cash — or worse, visibility.
When I started Newpoint Advisors, I thought scaling a professional services firm would be a straight line — a predictable path where each win stacked neatly on top of the last. Not unlike getting on an elevator and going up. If you had the right service, the elevator just went up. You only had to be patient. Boy, was I wrong.
At the start of 2025, I made a simple New Year’s resolution: complete a marathon.
Up until then, most of my training had been for baseball or CrossFit. Strength mattered more than endurance. Running had never been my thing. But, I wanted to see what would happen if I set a big goal and followed through.
Content just became cheap. If you haven’t noticed, you now have access to millions of AI-generated articles explaining how AI is changing content. Take the AI of your choice – it lowers the threshold for publishing ideas.
As professional services owners, we know the importance of having a strategic plan. We spend considerable time each year crafting thoughtful annual plans, setting ambitious but achievable goals, and mapping out the path forward. But here’s what I’ve learned over the years: the real challenge isn’t creating the plan—it’s keeping it alive and relevant throughout the year while maintaining focus on what truly matters.
Most founders think growth comes from more leads, new offers, or better sales tactics. But one of the most powerful growth tools is already sitting inside your firm: the post-project review.