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Strong expertise doesn’t guarantee commercial performance. Many consulting leaders assume that stronger expertise naturally leads to stronger commercial performance. In our experience, that relationship is far weaker than most expect. The missing link is often not the quality of the expertise itself. It is how that expertise is defined, packaged, articulated, and commercialised. That distinction matters even more today. AI is making broad capabilities easier to access, while buyers are becoming more selective about where they place their trust, budget, and confidence. This carousel explores why expertise alone is rarely enough, and why the consulting firms that outperform over time tend to build stronger proposition systems around the expertise and intellectual capital they already possess. Enjoy reading the carousel.

China’s jet engine program reveals the limitations of industrial policy.

Big consulting firms tell us they have no authority to improve their value models. Wrong! I have struggled with this argument for years because I never really understood why so many practice leaders treat the global structure as a fixed commercial ceiling. International service lines, industry groups, geographic accountabilities, approval processes, and global brand rules clearly create friction. But I am convinced they still leave far more room for value model improvement than many leaders imagine. Improving the value model does not require redesigning the entire firm. A practice, regional team, or industry group can still: 🔹 Sharpen specific priority business issue(s) 🔹 Define the target buyer and client context 🔹 Design a repeatable path to outcomes 🔹 Align partners around one shared value narrative 🔹 Strengthen proof through case evidence and outcome data codification 🔹 Create a low-friction entry offer 🔹 Pilot the approach in one practice or market These are meaningful commercial choices. They shape how the firm attracts clients, frames value, compounds expertise, reduces delivery variance, and improves value monetisation. I have seen this from the inside. When our consultancy was acquired by Deloitte, we remained highly active commercially. We faced some friction around geographic accountabilities, but very few real limits on how we shaped our market approach, articulated value, and developed opportunities. That experience is one of the reasons I push back so strongly when practice leaders say they are “not allowed” to improve anything. In many cases, the perceived boundary is much tighter than the real one. 👉 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘’𝗦 𝗠𝗬 𝗔𝗗𝗩𝗜𝗖𝗘 I am convinced that large consulting firms have far more commercial room than they use. The real challenge is recognising where that room exists and acting on it with enough courage and discipline. The structure may be fixed. The commercial possibilities are usually far wider than practice leaders imagine.

The Boeing 747’s retirement marks the end of an era in American engineering and culture.

Explore the Buttolph Collection of historic restaurant menus from 1880-1920.

A step-by-step guide to Fragment Shaders.

A guide to small-scale pen plotting for DIY projects.

A collection of teardowns I documented, to understand and appreciate how things are crafted and operated.

Mathijs Gast (31) & Marcus Groeneveld(31) werden Selfmade Miljonairs door te zorgen voor vrije dagen Een kleine rekensom leert dat de besparingen groot zijn: Freeday bezorgt heel wat mensen een vrije dag door ze te vervangen door hun AI-agents. Waar werken oprichters Gast en Groeneveld naartoe? ‘We willen met Freeday echt de Randstad van robots worden.’ Lees het artikel via de link in de comments. | 50 comments on LinkedIn

Relationships in consulting matter. But they are not a commercial model. Most consulting leaders know this, yet many consultancies still depend on relationships as their primary growth engine. Relationships help create trust. They open doors. They create opportunities. The challenge appears when the consulting firm’s commercial performance depends almost entirely on partner effort, personal networks, and individual credibility. In our experience, that creates a fragile growth model. Revenue becomes difficult to scale beyond the people who hold the relationships. Expertise remains trapped inside projects instead of becoming repeatable proof. New opportunities require fresh persuasion instead of benefiting from accumulated market confidence. Over time, the consulting firm becomes busy. Yet the underlying commercial system hardly improves. The highest-performing consulting firms we have observed combine strong relationships with a consulting proposition that compounds. They become easier to recognise. Easier to trust. Easier to buy from. And that changes the economics of the consulting firm. A relationship can win a meeting. A proposition can build a business.

Most Consultancies Design Their Own Scope Creep. In a new article Florian Heinrichs discusses a common problem in consulting: scope creep. He looks into how it happens and what consulting firms can do to to establish clear boundaries around their client engagements. Enjoy reading! https://lnkd.in/eaN3sZhc

[Live webinar] How to go from 20 content ideas to 20 finished visuals in a single session using Claude Code and Paper.design Most content teams still make visuals one by one. Brief the designer. Wait for a draft. Give feedback. Wait again. It works, but it does not exactly help you publish more often. In this live session, Rutger Katz, AI GTM Consultant, will show the actual workflow he uses to speed this up: • Brainstorming at scale → turning 15 to 20 content ideas into a structured work order inside Cowork • Claude Code in action → using that work order to build sections and designs automatically • Real-time iteration → giving Claude feedback on things like drop shadows, layout, and positioning without starting from scratch • Mass editing → connecting Claude Code to Paper.design so all 20 visuals can be edited from one template • Fine-tuning → finishing the output manually in Figma or Paper.design, or asking Claude to help with the last details The interesting part is not just that it is faster. It is that the workflow changes from “make one asset, review one asset, repeat” to “build the system once, then adjust the whole batch.” One brainstorm session in Cowork. One work order for Claude Code. One template refined together. 20 visuals ready to clean up and publish. Come see Rutger and myself live for a more in-depth walkthrough: https://lnkd.in/ed_AahFW 🗓️ Tue June 23 ⏰ 16:00 CEST 🖥️ LinkedIn Live 💙 We hope to see you there! #AI #GTM #B2BSaaS #AIAgents

A lot of consulting firms try to fix commercial performance by repairing whatever looks broken first. The proposal isn’t converting ... so the proposal gets rewritten. Lead flow is weak ... so someone suggests a lead generation agency. The website feels unclear ... so the messaging gets refreshed. None of this is unreasonable, of course. But these fixes only work when the commercial foundations underneath them are already in place. ❌ If the proposition is unclear, a better proposal is mostly making the confusion look more presentable. ❌ If the client journey hasn’t been defined, lead generation just brings more people into a conversation the firm still doesn’t know how to guide. ❌ If the firm hasn’t decided which problem it wants to own, new messaging becomes a cleaner version of the same broad story. There’s no progress here; only busy-ness for busyness sake, wrapped around some unresolved issue in the commercial logic. It’s how firms become busier without becoming stronger (let alone more valuable). More decks, more campaigns, more movement around the same friction. But inside the business, the same questions keep returning. What are we actually known for? Who are we really working for? Why should a client choose us? The firms which break out of this tend to build their commercial system in a different order... and in different steps. 1️⃣ At the foundation: a clear proposition. Not a slogan. A real business proposition making trade-offs around the specific issue, specific client cohort, and specific method the firm will commit to. 2️⃣ Then, a strong, expertise- and experience-backed point-of view (which Luk Smeyers and I consider a part of the wider consultancy proposition... but it’s worth breaking out here): How should the issue the firm specializes in be resolved? How should it not be? 3️⃣ And then, the client success journey. Services stop competing for attention as standalone deliverables. They become supporting mechanisms inside a larger story. Discovery stops being about writing a proposal and starts being about helping the client understand the problem well enough to make a confident decision. We saw this recently with a 350-person consultancy. Discovery had been a loss leader. Afterward, it became a defined, fixed-price first step. 19 service lines collapsed to 7. BD toil dropped sharply. And the same content, reframed around a clear issue, saw readership increase 4x for key pieces. None of that was in the original goals of the proposition work. It was downstream of getting the foundation right. When the foundation is weak, every later-stage fix has to compensate for it. But with the right building blocks in place, the rest of the system (like the outcome specification, the service refinement, the go-to-market) has something to build on. Hence, my recommendation: Use the coming summer months to put your firm’s foundation in place... and then enter Q4 not busier, but more effective than usual. Hope this helps!

For years I tried to keep channel and direct sales apart. I was wrong about that. 2 motions, 2 teams, 2 pipelines. That was the model I defended. Then I watched our best deals close, and the pattern was always the same. A partner was in the room before we were. There is one go-to-market motion. Partners run through all of it. You can hit your number without them. You will just cap how good you get. The strongest AEs I work with do not treat partners as a referral source. They treat them as leverage across the entire cycle. 3 ways they do it. Pre-cycle, they bring a partner in as the expert. The partner already has trust in the account. The AE borrows it. Mid-cycle, they bring a partner in to build the business case. A partner who knows the customer’s stack makes the ROI real, not theoretical. Post-sale, they bring a partner in for implementation. The deal that lands well is the deal that expands. This is not a soft benefit. Partner-attached deals close 40 percent faster. Partners influence up to half of pipeline. Retention roughly doubles when a partner is involved in delivery. The AE who learns this early stops carrying the deal alone. They build a network that carries it with them. - - The best sellers are not the best closers. They are the best at borrowing trust. Trust they did not have to build from zero. Trust that was already sitting in the account, waiting. What have you seen work best to bring a partner into a live deal? | 14 comments on LinkedIn

Most consulting firms misunderstand productisation. The moment the word appears, many consulting leaders immediately think I am talking about standardisation, rigid delivery, cookie-cutter consulting, or reducing flexibility for clients. That interpretation misses the real point completely. Productisation in consulting has very little to do with turning expertise into a factory. It has far more to do with how a consulting firm structures, packages, and commercialises expertise. That distinction matters enormously. Many consulting firms try to “productise” too late in the process. They start with templates, SOPs, delivery processes, automation, or operational efficiency. But those are downstream components. The real starting point sits much further upstream: ▪️ Which business problem is valuable enough to build expertise around? ▪️ What economic stakes make the problem urgent? ▪️ What outcomes should the consulting firm repeatedly help create? ▪️ What path to progress should become repeatable over time? ▪️ Which expertise deserves to compound across engagements? This is where consulting proposition design becomes critical. Because the strongest consulting firms do not productise broad capability coverage, but a repeatable path to client value. That shift changes the consulting firm economically. In our experience, several things start happening: ▪️ proposals become easier to scope ▪️ buyer confidence increases ▪️ delivery variance reduces ▪️ pricing discussions become stronger ▪️ knowledge compounds more effectively ▪️ junior enablement improves ▪️ expertise becomes less dependent on individuals And perhaps most importantly, the consulting firm starts moving away from a commercial model built around continuously reshaping delivery for bespoke requests. This is where many consulting firms still struggle. They standardise activity while keeping the same capability-led commercial model underneath. Efficiency improves a bit, but differentiation, pricing power, value monetisation, and scalable expertise remain weak. What Florian and I have learned is that productisation only becomes commercially powerful when it starts with a sharp consulting proposition: a specific issue, a specific context, a defined path to outcomes, and expertise worth repeating. The consulting firms that strengthen over the coming years will likely be the ones that package expertise into repeatable paths to client value instead of continuously reshaping delivery around bespoke requests.

Every positioning strategy falls into one of 3 archetypes. 🟣 Win a piece of an existing category Customers already know they need a solution. They’re actively comparing vendors. Your job is simple: Win the comparison. Think: Linear vs Jira Monday vs Asana You aren’t creating demand. You’re competing for demand that already exists. 🟢 Grow an emerging category Customers have the Job-to-be-Done... ...but many haven’t adopted a solution yet. Your job is: To bring non-market participants into the category (ie. grow the category) Think Shopify. eCommerce platforms already existed. But millions of businesses still weren’t selling online. Shopify didn’t just take market share from competitors. They expanded the market itself by making it dramatically easier for new businesses to participate. 🔵 Create a new category Customers aren’t actively shopping for your product. They also certainly don’t have budget. They may not even realize the problem exists. Your job is: Create demand and convince people to buy a tool they’ve never bought before. Think Gainsight. Before Customer Success software existed, most companies didn’t have Customer Success teams. Gainsight wasn’t competing against another Customer Success platform. They first had to convince companies that Customer Success should exist in the first place. Only then could they sell software. The mistake I see founders make all the time: 💥 They borrow positioning strategies from companies playing a completely different game. A company trying to win market share positions itself like a category creator. A company trying to create a category positions itself like a feature-comparison vendor. A company trying to grow a category spends all of its energy talking about competitors. The result is messaging that feels disconnected from how customers actually buy. - Want to learn more about these strategies and when to apply them in your startup? I’ll be doing a deep dive as part of the B2B Brains on June 23rd at 9am CST. (joining Adam Holmgren, Adam Robinson, Sam Dunning, Tim Davidson, Philip Ilic and Steffen Hedebrandt) - link in comments. | 15 comments on LinkedIn

“The era of the service vendor is over. And the era of the tech expert is running out.” Heard this recently. And while I’d push back on the hyperbole a little... I do believe the direction is right. Selling raw, unpackaged capability - “here’s what we can do, who needs some?” - is becoming a riskier commercial stance for consulting firms by the month. Clients are more sophisticated; software includes ever-more best-practice... and then, there is AI, of course. All of which means firms that cannot express clearly and succinctly which issues they resolve and which outcomes they facilitate (because all they ever do is speak about their capabilities) are at an even greater disadvantage. But - and this is the good news - these firms CAN change their stance and model, and improve how they go to market and compete. Here’s a simple way to start: 🏆 Define your ideal engagement - not necessarily the biggest or most prestigious, but the one where the work was energizing, the client was right, and the outcome was genuinely strong. Most firms can name four, six, or eight without even thinking hard. 🔬 Review past successes: Pull a short list of past engagements that came close to your newly-defined “ideal” and review them side by side: → Which business issue were you actually solving? → Whom did we solve it for (client and buyer) - context, role, context, what they were under pressure to achieve? → What were they struggling with that made them reach out in the first place? → What did they get out of it - which business results did the work actually influence? Patterns will emerge faster than most firms expect. A recurring client situation. A specific type of problem. A consistent way the firm framed and resolved it. This is the raw material of a firm’s proposition. Not invented, not drawn up at some whiteboard... but excavated in real-life, paid-for work. And once it’s named, the shift from capability-selling to issue-resolution selling becomes a lot less abstract - because you can now present strong answers to all the review questions above... and then, build from there. Hope this helps! (Image: designed by Luk Smeyers; lifted from our shared repository over at @TheVisibleAuthority)

When customizing projects, rates must be 30% higher. When a consulting firm starts every project from scratch, it loses the economics of repetition. No compounding expertise. No reliable data gathering. No codification. No IP creation. No delivery efficiency. No outcome variance reduction. Custom work should carry a premium, but most firms cannot get 30% higher rates in the market. That is the warning. Stay away from custom projects that the market refuses to price properly. | 10 comments on LinkedIn

80 lessons, hot takes, and core beliefs to celebrate hitting 80k followers: 1. Without true product innovation, startups have only one weapon against incumbents: specialization 2. Startups can win by intentionally enduring pain that larger companies aren’t willing to take on (i.e. shrinking their market, saying no to customers, lowering prices, using more customer-centric business models, etc.) 3. The reason so much cold outreach is ineffective/irrelevant is because it relies on account lists that were built via firmographic details (which an incredibly blunt tool to determine need for your product) 4. If you can’t get an idea to spread with an organic algorithm, getting it to spread through paid means will be incredibly expensive (and may indicate the product isn’t solving a real issue) 5. Most problems should be solved with process changes, not through hiring more people 6. Every problem in an organization can be traced directly to a decision the CEO made 7. Most founders would be better off giving the money back to their VCs and going back in house 8. Startups spend too much time focusing on competitors their size (that prospects will never hear about) and way too little time focusing on competitors 100 to 1,000 times their size (that prospects constantly compare them to) 9. There are lots of marketers who do not know how to market, and lots of non-marketers who do know how to market 10. People value “years of experience” way too much when hiring 11. AI has made product development exponentially faster, but marketing and sales have essentially stayed at the same speed as 10 years ago (or even have slowed down from then) 12. Every founder thinks they are unique or visionary in the exact same way as every other founder 13. The most important job of a CEO: make decisions that require tradeoffs 14. Positioning is MORE important before a company has product-market fit, not after 15. Going public almost guarantees a company will eventually destroy itself (paving the way for future startups to disrupt them) 16. It’s easier to launch a new product than to change people’s perception of an existing one 17. Most shouldn’t change your brand name (even if you outgrow it) - h/t Liam Moroney 18. People will only think of your company for your first big success, and that’s a good thing you stop fighting against 19. Custom service agencies have the worst business model in existence 20. If you want to sell an expertise-based business, you need to publicly demonstrate your expertise (h/t Drew McLellan) (Hit the character limit, the rest continued in the comments | 119 comments on LinkedIn