For twenty-five years, I have lived by a simple truth. The service business is a human endeavor.
At OneAccord, we lead middle-market companies through transition. We do not do this with slogans. We do it by placing seasoned operators directly into leadership roles. These are men and women who have sat in the seat themselves. Because of this human-first heart, I was a skeptic of Artificial Intelligence.
If you talk to most firm leaders right now, there’s a similar pattern that comes up. Pipeline feels less consistent. You’re not getting pulled into as many opportunities. Deals that do come in take longer to close. You’re doing the right things, in many cases more of them, but it’s not translating the way it used to. What makes it frustrating is that nothing is obviously broken. Your work is strong. Your clients get results. Your team knows what they’re doing. And yet, something feels off.
If you’re a business owner looking at AI, you’ve probably felt the same tension we did: AI is moving fast, clients are asking for it, and it’s hard to justify building everything in-house from scratch. So we partnered with an outside AI firm to bring an AI capability to market quickly — and learned a painful lesson when that firm abruptly shut down with no warning. Here’s what happened, what we were building, and the safeguards we’ll never skip again.
If you’re running a boutique professional services firm, you’ve probably embraced Greg’s hyper-specialization thesis of winning by going narrow and deep in your market. Pick your niche. Own it. Become the obvious choice.
There’s a rule most founders learn early: work on the business, not in it. It’s good advice. Usually. Right now, it’s wrong. If you run a boutique consulting firm and you’re not personally spending serious time inside AI tools, you’re making a strategic mistake. Not a technology mistake. A leadership mistake.
You pulled up your pipeline this morning. The number looked reasonable. You’re about to make hiring, spending, and growth decisions based on it.
Half those deals aren’t real and you know it. Your sellers know it too. The CRM just doesn’t.
I see stages advance because someone sent a follow-up email, not because the buyer did anything. I’ve watched forecasts get built on records that haven’t been touched in a month.
Every boutique professional services firm I’ve ever seen has some version of this going on.
Recently our community had a pretty heated debate about EOS – specifically, whether the Entrepreneurial Operating System is still the right framework for running a professional services firm in 2026.
At Collective 54, I talk to hundreds of founders and executives of boutique professional services firms every year. Right now, AI comes up in almost every conversation. Where to start, what tools to use, how to get teams on board, and how to think about the future of the firm. We believe the future of professional services is becoming AI native, and everything we do as a community is oriented around helping firms get there.
You just finished a big call. A real prospect. The kind that could change your year.
You took notes the entire time. Two pages. You feel good about it.
Here’s the problem: what you wrote down isn’t what they said. It’s what you heard. And those two things are not the same.
Most professional services firms put the majority of their energy into winning new business. New logos, new pipelines, new pursuits. And while that matters, it often comes at the expense of the most overlooked growth opportunity sitting right in front of them: their existing clients.
The difference between firms that grow steadily and those that scale meaningfully is not just how well they sell; it’s how well they expand.
