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.
Data shows that slow movement in the sales process kills deals – which means saving time in your sales process is an extremely high priority.
Today we are being offered new innovative tools at a rapid rate which means that the burden of choice and then adoption can be overwhelming – so today I’m sharing a way you can accelerate your use of a templated sales proposal and use of your LLM to make proposals even faster without buying more tools.
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 an acquirer buys your professional services firm, they’re not buying your history, they’re buying your future. They don’t value your firm based on how long you’ve been in business, how many logos sit on your client slide, or how many awards are framed in your lobby. They care about one thing: what happens next. They’re buying a stream of future cash flows that are predictable, repeatable, and transferable without you. The more confidence they have in those three things, the more they’ll pay.
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.
Are you still building your consulting practice on the traditional pyramid model while your competitors race toward AI-powered transformation? Here’s a wake-up call: the consulting industry has fundamentally changed. While you’re optimizing billable hours and adding junior analysts, forward-thinking firms are already leveraging AI-amplified expertise to deliver five times the value without increasing their overhead.
At the start of 2025, I made a simple New Year’s resolution: complete a marathon.
Up until then, most of my training had been for baseball or CrossFit. Strength mattered more than endurance. Running had never been my thing. But, I wanted to see what would happen if I set a big goal and followed through.
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.
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.