Most boutique firms don’t lose momentum in March or April.
They lose it in January.
Research from Gartner shows that 67% of annual plans fail by the end of Q1, often because teams enter the new year without clarity or focus. And Harvard Business Review reports that 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy, which means many firms start January reacting, not executing.
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.
Data shows that slow movement in the sales process kills deals – which means saving time in your sales process is an extremely high priority.
Today we are being offered new innovative tools at a rapid rate which means that the burden of choice and then adoption can be overwhelming – so today I’m sharing a way you can accelerate your use of a templated sales proposal and use of your LLM to make proposals even faster without buying more tools.
As boutique firms grow, founders face a familiar tension:
You want to stay close to clients — the very people who built your firm’s reputation — yet you’re pulled into scaling, selling, and systemizing.
Most boutique firm owners believe revenue growth comes from hiring a “rainmaker.” The truth? One star seller won’t save you. What scales is a repeatable system, not a heroic individual — and today, AI can help build it faster and smarter.
As you know, growth isn’t just about winning one more client or launching one more offering. Growth must be sustainable and intentional. For my firm, this means identifying and nurturing partnerships that expand our reach and increase our revenue.
The bottom line: Just because someone refers business to you doesn’t mean you should take it. The wrong project can derail your momentum, burn out your team, and cost far more than the revenue it brings in.
As founders of professional services firms, C54 members know the value of every hour. Most feel they simply do not have enough hours in the week. Many admit that they do not get around to business development because they are wired, even trained to dislike “sales”, so when they look at their calendar, any other option seems more attractive. So today let’s talk about how to get the best leverage out of your business development time even if you hate selling.
As an avid tech stock investor over the years, I remember coming across Net Revenue Retention (NRR) as a metric that often appeared in investor reports and earnings calls, especially for SaaS companies with a solid base of recurring subscription revenue.
When I joined my father’s marketing research company in 1997 as his first employee, I had no idea that letting go of sales would ultimately 10x our revenue. My initial role was building our new research service, while my father handled all sales. Since our new service was an upsell to existing clients, the sales process was relatively straightforward at first.