Growth Strategy

Building the Business Behind the Practice

By Big Wheel Performance | Dave Slovin · 2026-06-24

Why Big Wheel is building a practice for professional services firm leaders

Over the last 15 years, I’ve spent a lot of time working with professional services firms and the technology companies that support them. Most professional services firm owners and leaders have built excellent practices. Clients are happy, teams are talented, and reputations are strong. Yet growth today feels harder to predict and sustain than it once did.

The Big Wheel Performance team has spent years helping B2B tech company founders and investors address growth challenges and build revenue engines. That experience is one of the reasons we're expanding our focus to professional services firms. Many of the business challenges firm leaders face today extend well beyond any single discipline, department, or technology platform. Sometimes the most valuable business lessons come from other industries.

The Environment Is Changing

For a long time, growth in professional services followed a relatively straightforward formula. Do good work. Build strong relationships. Earn referrals. Repeat. Those fundamentals still matter. In many firms, they remain the foundation of growth. What has changed is the environment around them.

The internet has leveled the playing field. Prospective clients can research firms, compare options, read reviews, and access expertise more easily than ever before. Competition is more visible. Buyers have more choices. Relationships still matter, but they don’t always guarantee future work the way they once did.

At the same time, firm leaders are being asked to navigate an increasing number of business decisions. Marketing, business development, hiring, reporting, technology, and operational efficiency all compete for attention.

AI has added another layer of complexity to the conversation. Every technology now includes AI. Every conference has AI sessions. Every vendor has a point of view. Some of those opportunities are real, while others are distractions. Most firm leaders are still trying to determine where AI can create meaningful value for their business.

Growth Challenges Rarely Travel Alone

One of the patterns I’ve seen repeatedly is that growth challenges rarely exist in isolation. A law firm may have a healthy flow of inquiries but struggle to convert opportunities into clients. An accounting firm may deliver an outstanding client experience but rely too heavily on a few partners for business development. A wealth management firm may have strong demand and client retention but limited visibility into what’s actually driving performance.

Individually, each issue may seem manageable. Collectively, they create friction that limits growth, consumes leadership attention, and makes decision-making more difficult than it should be. This is one of the reasons many growth initiatives fall short. The focus is placed on one part of the business while constraints in other areas continue to hold the firm back.

Growth Is a Business Problem

Growth depends on more than the quality of your work. It depends on how demand generation, client acquisition, client experience, team performance, reporting, and operational management work together to support the firm’s goals.

When those functions are aligned, growth becomes more predictable. When they aren’t, growth becomes increasingly dependent on the people holding everything together. This is what we mean when we talk about the business behind the practice.

The objective isn’t to change what makes your firm successful, but to build the structure needed to support the success you’ve already created. That requires looking at the business as a whole rather than treating each challenge independently.

An Operator’s Perspective

Big Wheel was built by operators. Our team helps founders and investors identify what's limiting growth, strengthen the systems behind the business, and create the structure required to scale. We bring that same operator perspective to professional services firms.

AI is a big part of the growth conversation. We evaluate AI the same way we evaluate every other business investment: by determining whether it improves efficiency, visibility, client outcomes, team performance, or financial results. Sometimes AI is part of the solution. Sometimes it isn’t. Big Wheel implements AI when it creates measurable business value.

That’s why professional services feels like a natural extension of the work we’re already doing. The questions are often remarkably similar.
How do we grow more consistently?
How do we improve performance visibility?
How do we reduce dependency on firm leaders?
How do we decide where to focus first?

Those are business questions. They’re also the conversations we enjoy having. You built a great firm. Now build a great business behind it.