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.
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.
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.
The mission of Collective 54 is to help us founders grow, scale, and exit their boutique professional services firm. We are all on various points in that journey experiencing all of the same elation and frustrations that are part of the territory. I have recently become more focused on the exit that I will, in part, define the culmination of that journey.
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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 professional services firms hit a ceiling. The cause may be one of a hundred things. It’s not usually lack of talent. Quite often, it’s fractured data.
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.
In the competitive landscape of Professional Services, boutique firms often face the challenge of growing, scaling, and eventually exiting successfully. Collective 54, the first community exclusively for founders of Professional Services firms, is dedicated to helping its members achieve these objectives. One effective strategy that firms can adopt is the Win, Keep, and Grow approach. This blog will explore how focusing on these three simple concepts can lead to profitable growth.
In the early days of your firm, you were the business. You had the courage to bet on yourself. You decided your talents could help solve real problems for clients. You sold the work. You designed the services and delivered the work. You fixed the messes. You built the culture. That was survival and it took your resilience and brute force to grow into a real firm.