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.
Every professional services firm thinks it has what the market wants: expertise, experience, and a strong track record.
But in 2026, that is the baseline. Nobody pays a premium for smart people doing competent work. AI can already produce reports, frameworks, and recommendations that look as good as what your junior consultants bill for.
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.
There are two conversations happening in your business. The first is public: growth, new clients, visible momentum. The second happens in private, at 11pm, in your office. You are putting out fires your team should have handled, missing another evening with your family while a proposal only you can approve sits unfinished. The thought creeps in: “If I stop, everything stops.” This is the conversation we need to have.
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