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.
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 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.
As professional services owners, we’re wired to solve problems and deliver results. But between daily firefighting and pursuing big goals, we can lose sight of something equally important: actually enjoying the work we’re doing and the relationships we’re building.
One of our core beliefs at Tenzing is that deep, authentic conversations have the power to drive business forward. Over the years, we’ve found that sharing stories—especially those of fellow Experts, Operators, and Practitioners—has not only enriched our community but also helped strengthen our brand and attract new clients.