The Professional Services Transformation Paradox newsletter offers short perspectives on the economics and institutional design of professional services, delivered to your inbox every second week.
I write about the structural changes reshaping professional services firms, including artificial intelligence, private capital, changing economics, operating models, governance and the future of the partnership model.
Archive
#11 – What Will Clients Still Buy?
Why AI may change not only how professional services are produced, but what clients still choose to buy externally.
#10 – One Firm. Several Operating Models.
Why different combinations of clients, services and teams increasingly require different economics, operating models and management systems.
#9 – The Institutional Test
Private equity has proved that accounting firms can be recapitalised, consolidated and transferred. It has not yet proved that the resulting institutions will become stronger.
#8 – Trust Capital
Professional services firms manufacture judgment, but they accumulate something equally important: the trust that allows others to rely on that judgment.
#7 – Manufacturing Judgment
How professional services firms have historically developed judgment through client work, and why artificial intelligence may disrupt that production system.
#6 – The Industrialization of Tax
Recurring expertise increasingly behaves like infrastructure. Human judgment becomes premium.
#5 – AI Economics in Professional Services
Why making professionals faster does not automatically make professional services firms more profitable.
#4 – The Real Economics of Private Equity in Professional Services
What actually changes economically when a professional partnership becomes a capital-backed platform.
#3 – The Two-Speed Firm
Why professional services firms are increasingly becoming multiple economic systems operating under the same brand.
#2 – Are Professional Services Firms Measuring Profitability Correctly?
Why traditional measures such as contribution margin can increasingly obscure the real economics of serving clients.
#1 – Private Equity in Professional Services: One Question Most Boards Avoid
Private equity can enter professional services. The more difficult question is how it eventually gets out.
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New research, case studies and perspectives on the economics and institutional design of professional services.