How to grow ANY boutique professional services firm: This is the framework we use at Madison to help our clients grow. It's gone through several iterations, and I'm sure will continue to evolve over time: ✅ Get VERY clear on your Point of View. Who you serve, what you believe to be true about your domain, why you are unique, and how you approach your work. Put a stake in the ground and decide who you do (and don't) serve. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ When possible, codify your thinking into frameworks that are easy to understand and create differentiation. ✅ Translate that Point of View clearly into your primary channels. Your website, LinkedIn page, etc. should help people understand immediately who you are and how you might be able to help them. ✅ Create a menu of solutions tailored specifically for who you serve (bonus points if they descend from your framework). Ideally they map to various stages of the client's work. Ideally you have some stuff that starts early and strategic, helping you earn the right to assist with implementation. Ideally some of them are recurring. ✅ For each, state clearly what problem it solves, when that problem tends to arise, how they currently try to solve it, and what solving it would mean for their business. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ Become gratuitously helpful. Give away your best insights, your best ideas. Challenge your marketing team to start thinking like a media company. Look at firms like McKinsey & Company or Bain & Company as models. You certainly can't do all of what they do. But what's your smaller version of that? ✅ Teach your team to give away their secrets as well. Imagine if your 5 (or 20, or 100) partners all were regularly sharing their best ideas on LinkedIn with the people they seek to serve. Imagine if each of them became Trusted Advisors who immediately come to mind when buying windows emerge. The key to being top of mind is being helpful and consistent. ✅ Provide gentle ways to deepen relationship. Webinars specifically focused on major pain points. Lunch and learns in office where you show them EXACTLY how to solve the problem. At each step overwhelm them with value. ✅ Teach your team to be disciplined around nurturing relationships. Help train them on how to be insanely helpful 1 month, 3 months, 12 months in. Make sure they don't wing it - show them how CRM can help them build amazing relationships at scale. ✅ Nail onboarding. Knock your client's socks off during the first 30 days. ✅ Teach your team to systematically ask for referrals, in respectful ways, ideally mapped to key client success or inflection points. ✅ Pursue strategic partnerships. Find complementary businesses that think the way you think. Create partner-specific sales enablement tools so they know what to say when. What did I leave out? (P.S. If you need any help with the above, DM me.)

My son is so smart. He was winning by one point. Benched his defense last minute. I never would have thought to do that.

The best way I’ve found to figure out what you want in life: visualize your ideal (realistic) day/week/month/year. As vividly as possible. YOURs. Not what you read in a book or from some influencer. What I wrote down for myself: I never picture having a second home. I picture going to new places all the time. I never picture a second family car. I do picture renting fun, fast cars to drive around those new places. And perhaps some fast car that I drive around a track in semi-competitive races. I never picture a country club. I do picture playing 9 holes of public course golf, once a week, in the morning, with a group of guys I enjoy, drinking great coffee. I never picture a bigger house. When my kids are grown, I picture a smaller one. But big enough to host a great party on the main level. I picture a sauna I use daily. A gym I use daily. I picture good friends I see every week. I picture a lot more date nights. Quarterly staycations in the city. I picture a weekly massage. I picture a great, tailored wardrobe. Age appropriate. Classic. I picture Sunday dinners with friends at my house. I picture a meal that takes all day to make, in a kitchen that is perfect. I picture good wine. I picture long walks in my neighborhood. I picture a great comfortable chair with a nice view where I can read with a great cup of coffee. I picture being able to fly home to see my folks in their twilight years. I picture calling my kids, telling them about the adventure my wife and I are about to go on, asking them if they want to come. I picture a work life that allows for me to be busy but unhurried. I picture moving at a pace that somehow helps those around me feel more peaceful themselves. I picture a small office in Evanston with a team of amazing people building something we love. I picture a bunch of remote folks who are obsessed with their craft. I picture flying everyone to a fun place each year to hang. I picture champagne toasts when we land clients. Clients who are friends. Doing great work at a sustainable pace. I eventually picture a bookstore, that I own, with comfortable seating in the front, where a group of old friends come in the mornings to hang out and drink great coffee. It has a fireplace (somehow), and my dog sits by it. I have those glasses with the strap and the magnet in the middle, and when customers come in I look up at them and smile. It doesn’t make much money. That’s not the point. And in between customers, I write. Maybe I publish it. I don’t think it matters. Mostly I picture a healthy cadence. Meaningful work. Great friends. A fantastic marriage. Lots of time to think. The point though - this is mine. You don't need to do mine - you probably shouldn't. You should figure out yours. I find it much more motivating than vague notions to build a company and make a bunch of money. More importantly, I find it helps give me guardrails on the kind of decisions I make - especially the kind of work I do. I found solitude DEEPLY helpful as a practice in this. It allowed me to unplug from all the inputs surrounding me, and actually hear my own mind. Consider going into the woods :)

Unpopular opinion: I love checking a bag. I love walking around with just my laptop and a book and a coffee. I love not fighting for overhead space. I don’t mind the extra few minutes upon arrival. It’s a reminder to slow down. Lost luggage? A story for later.

I've always wished I could spend the weekend driving 45 minutes to O'Hare to get weird stuff from Brookstone.

We do prospecting. But most consulting revenue comes from people who already know and trust you. Investing in existing relationships will usually pay off more than cold outreach. How to do it: - Time block it. Keep it sacred, no matter how busy you are. The top rainmakers in nearly every firm will tell you this is their foundational secret. - Your CRM is probably too noisy. The Hubspots and Attios of the world are begging you to ingest all your contacts. That's not what you need. You need to keep track of 100 or so folks. Current clients. Past clients. Actual projects (not a lead list). Connectors - folks who can introduce you to others. (Psst: Authentic CRM is built specifically for this.) - Reach out to 5 people a week. You can of course do more. But focus on building the muscle first. - Always add value. My favorite framework for this I learned from my wife - every touch should include either an idea, an introduction, or an invitation. - Every person on your list should get a touch at least once a quarter. The best networker I ever met had a spreadsheet with 5 names, 25 names, 150 names. He'd hit up the 5 each week, the 25 each month, the 150 each quarter. I've never been able to maintain that pace, but I try. - The secret to 5/25/150 - the 5 aren't the people who can help you the most, but the people you can help the most. They typically have a life event of some kind - a new job, a promotion, a lost job, a new kid, a newly empty nest, a retirement. These are triggers that tend to force big changes in people's lives and can be disorienting. Show up for them in material ways during these seasons of life. Consider building a list of ideas for specific ways to help during each. - Thought leadership can be a great passive way to stay top of mind without feeling pushy. Post your best thinking consistently (need help here? DM me.) - Partner with other complementary firms and vendors. Channel partnerships are highly underrated. - Face-to-face as much as possible. Video calls are efficient, but in-person builds trust much faster. - Be patient, and don't think transactionally. Consulting engagements often take months or years to manifest. Trust the process, even when nothing seems to be happening. - Teach your team how to do all this as well! Many firms struggle with the founder being the sole rainmaker. None of what I've listed is something only the founder can do. Teach your team to fish.

I don't believe in "10 to 15 appointments on autopilot." I don't believe in building, enriching, and churning through lead lists. In mad lib spam. In "warming up domains" (which should tell you everything you need to know about that strategy). In 7 touches in 14 days. In "quick question" subject lines. In "you didn't open my first 6 emails for 1 of 3 reasons." I believe in building relationships. I believe in serving. I believe in being generous with ideas. I believe in every touch providing either an idea or an intro or an invitation. I believe in treating clients like clients before they're clients. I believe in acting like we're going to be in business for a while. I believe in being charming and winsome and above all supremely helpful.

They say "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room." I'm not sure I agree. Generally speaking I think this is fantastic advice. The best way to grow is to surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do, have become what you want to become. But if you're NEVER the smartest person in the room? I think that's a problem as well. There comes a point where you're too accomplished to only focus on what you can learn and how you can grow. You need a SECOND room. A room where your focus is on serving others. Where you focus on how to be as helpful as possible.

I’ve never met someone whose life was devoted to serving others who struggled with finding meaning in their lives. Might have had other struggles. But not that.

Pro tip: you can own something not because of what it might resell for later, but just because you like it.

Definitely nailed #3

Great writing still matters. Great writing can be stunningly beautiful. Great writing can, for example, make you tear up reflecting on the career of a point guard who never won a single championship: "He always decorated his one-man coast-to-coast trips with immaculate bursts of color and fury. And if he got to the rim, it was an explosion at the paint factory. It was like he filmed on IMAX and everyone else shot on flip phones. Westbrook was athletic in the same way that the Grand Canyon is big." "In my notes, it says here that watching him play is “like getting dragged around by a horse, only fun?” I remember the highs were so high you’d walk around feeling invincible by association. You think I’m going to die? Yeah, right. I’m a Westbrook fan. I’m gonna live forever." "Westbrook never, ever developed a consistent jump shot. He also made colors brighter. You don’t like his shot selection? Interesting, he makes me feel like I am riding a comet. Some people value players with quality shot diets. I value players who make me feel like I might touch God." "Some players play basketball like the game owes them something. He played basketball like he owed the game, the fans, and himself his best. He showed up and gave all he had. What more could we possibly ask for?" I want to write like this. I don't really care if the robots can do it faster than I can. Yes, I know writing and thought leadership can build a business and get clients. But ultimately I write because I like to. Full article by @tylrparkr here: theringer.com/2026/08/17/nba…

Super interesting that bookmarks don’t influence the algorithm at all. Would have thought “I want to come back to this later” would be a huge signal.

Starlink on airplanes is fantastic.

I've said before that my notes are my most prized professional possession. It often raises eyebrows. But here's why, and how you can use note taking to utterly transform your career: In college I read book by Tom Peters. Among other ideas, he suggested that creativity is simply taking two existing ideas and smashing them together in new ways. And that the implication of that was you need to increase the amount of inputs you have. I noticed early in my career a big part of what made the best consultants great was their "pattern recognition." Which was informed by two things - the engagements they had worked on, and the things they had read. They had built up a massive toolkit of frameworks and mental models and anecdotes they could employ whenever the situation required it. So I resolved to do the same. I became a reader and a note taker. I used a variety of tools over the years. First paper, then an app called Bear, then Readwise. Eventually tools like Roam Research and Reflect and Obsidian came out, all of which introduced "bi-directional linking" - the ability to create wiki-like pages out of thin air by putting brackets around words, giving you the ability to have index pages of everything you've ever read about a particular topic. It takes time, but eventually (1000 notes or so) you reach a critical mass. The ideas and connections start to become exponential. As long as you're good about reviewing your notes, you have a virtually inexhaustible supply of ideas and concepts available to you. You have a completely unique neural network of sorts. It's a tremendously valuable asset. Earlier in my career, I found this helped me be much more useful in meetings. I was able to see things others couldn't. I was effectively the resident expert on a variety of topics, despite my age. As I layered on professional experience on top of it and acquired my own set of war stories, it became an incredibly powerful connection. It also was instrumental in writing. As I said, its utility is maximized if you review it regularly. Without a good reason to review though it doesn't become a habit. I try to post 4-5 times per week. And I know my set of notes, built up over the last 15 years, is the best place to go whenever I'm stuck. When people ask how I'm able to be so prolific, this is a major part of the answer. And I've seen first hand the impact writing can have. I know for a fact it's helped others. And it's grown my business. It's gotten me clients and team members. It's led to speaking gigs all over the world. It played a major role in landing my Kellogg gig. None of that would have happened without the writing. And the writing wouldn't have happened (at least the way I do it) without my notes. I'll always tweak how I do it. Lately I've been experimenting with Karpathy's LLM-wiki, and exposing my notes to Claude to help me find novel connections more quickly. But I'll never stop. It's one of the most valuable things I do.

I’m all for progress and empathy and social action. But anyone who lives in the US who looks around and concludes “things have never been worse” hasn’t read very much history.

If the only reason you write (or design or code or do business or make music or whatever) is for money, then AI “taking your job” will feel existential. If you also do those things because they give you joy, it won’t matter. You’ll write anyway.

The Bryan Johnson stuff is nuts. People gloating over the fact that someone has a disease is pretty horrible. I'll never understand why the idea that someone wants to try and live as long as possible is so offensive to people.