I was going to write this post about the importance of customer experience in professional services. Over the past few days I had prepped for this by working with Claude on concepts, outlines and drafts and was going to reference that chat this morning to finalize the piece. Upon firing up my browser to got to Claude’s website I got this error:
Every leader who’s flown a kite understands the paradox: grip the string too tightly and you’ll snap it; let it go slack and the kite plummets. The same delicate equilibrium defines every thriving professional services firm. Too much internal tension creates rigid hierarchies, excessive oversight, competing agendas left to fester which result in your best people burn out or break away.
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.
A simple, repeatable plan to pick wins, launch pilots and measure impact.
You don’t need a lab or a giant budget to start. You need a clear why, a short list of high-impact problems, and a fast way to test. Here’s the formula I’ve used for my company and clients that you can run as a visionary founder or owner to build your “getting started” roadmap.
Prime numbers are a crystallizing way to categorize heuristics for scaling businesses, and professional services in particular:
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.
How to shift internal mindsets and client expectations to transition from
hourly billing to outcome pricing.
For decades, professional services firms have relied on the familiar (but flawed) currency of time. Billable hours remain the default across much of the professional services world, yet they are increasingly out of sync with the value clients actually seek. Clients rarely care how many hours something takes; they care about the outcomes achieved.
When Greg Alexander asked me to be one of many irregular bloggers for the Collective 54 community, I embraced my role as the entrepreneur in a smaller company. Most notably, that is where I believe I fit within our community – one of the CEOs with fewer than 20 employees, knowing that the transition from CEO to Founder is necessary but not quite as easy as it seems for other C54 quarterbacks with broader and deeper benches behind them.
CEO’s are putting a lot of pressure on their organizations to “adopt artificial intelligence.” Often it stems from a board mandate. But few know what it means to “adopt” and recent data from MIT proves this point.
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.