It’s a financial paradox that baffles many business owners: the Income Statement shows a healthy profit, but the bank account balance keeps dropping. This disconnect is the key to understanding why profitable companies still run out of money. The simple truth is that profit does not equal cash.
In the last blog I talked about why I’m deliberately disrupting my own consulting firm and dragging it toward an AI-first future. That was the aspirational part. The vision part. The “future of the firm” part.
Seneca said it first. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. “Founders love that quote. They put it on LinkedIn. They cite it in keynotes. Then they run their firm the same way they always have and wonder why the exit didn’t go the way they hoped. Most founders in professional services are not prepared. Not for the opportunity in front of them right now.
Over the past several months, I have found myself in a familiar set of conversations with founders and leadership teams.
The business is healthy, the work is strong, and the pipeline is active. And yet, at some point in the conversation, things slow down and a founder will say something like:
“Things are moving… but it still feels like everything runs through me.”
It is not frustration or panic. It is awareness.
And it is worth paying attention to, because in most cases, this is not a time problem. It is structural.
I just got back from a speaking trip in the New York/New Jersey area. And I had one of those moments that just stops you cold. I was standing in the middle of Times Square — surrounded by a wall-to-wall assault of color, sound, and messaging — and it hit me all at once: this is what it costs to be invisible. Every one of those brands lighting up the skyline is paying an enormous premium just to be heard. And most of them? Still not breaking through.
Here is what I believe is happening right now. Many of us are intellectually keeping up with artificial intelligence. But we are not keeping up with changing how our firms operate with AI. That gap is where firms will start to separate.
A member said something last week that I’m still thinking about. His firm built a tool that saved entry level associates about four hours on every deck they created. What used to take half a day now takes about 12 minutes. And here’s the part that hit me:
Picture this. Your firm’s best partner has a client onboarding process that takes three days and produces consistently great results. Your other two partners? Their onboarding takes five days and the quality varies. The methodology exists, but it lives in one person’s head.
Over the past several years, I’ve worked hands-on with four investor-backed leaders across four industries. They had built real businesses with deep expertise, and every one of them was invisible online.
Then they started showing up. One sold for over $2 billion, one grew headcount 26% during a talent crisis, one IPO’d at $5.6 billion, and one built a $200 million market from scratch while the biggest retailers in the country started referencing his LinkedIn posts in sales meetings.
Jim Collins introduced the concept of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal — the BHAG — in Good to Great as a clarion call for bold, long-range thinking. But Collins was careful to distinguish between a BHAG born of disciplined strategy and one born of desperation. The former is a North Star. The latter is a Hail Mary. The difference between the two, Collins argued, isn’t the size of the ambition — it’s the soundness of the foundation beneath it.