All posts by Jason Blumer

We coach and consult with many service-based organizations and we are finding some patterns after the pandemic. Many entrepreneurs are struggling with what it is like to now lead a company considering the remembrance of where they were before the pandemic, what the pandemic has done to their companies, and how they have been affected personally as leaders.  We’ve all been struggling personally after the impact of the pandemic on our lives and those around us. And now an unstable economy is bringing a lot of discouragement to service entrepreneurs. You are not alone if you feel this too. Many [...]

With experience comes a lot of value and power in business. You can typically raise your price or hourly rate as you learn more and hold yourself out as an expert. We teach entrepreneurs how to narrow into a market just so they can do this - become experts. But with experience and knowledge comes the belief that you ‘know enough.’ You prove this to yourself every day as you solve complex problems and you become the person that people go to for answers. You begin to believe that you know enough. This belief can sneak up on us as [...]

This year is an exciting journey through the world of capacity planning, and research around resource planning for service firms that are growing. I’m partnering with Ian Vacin in this work and we are learning a great deal of information in the research we are conducting with service organizations around the world. For a brief primer, when service organizations (like agencies) scale and expand, they often run into the complexity of knowing the ability of their growing teams to be able to produce revenue. How you bring in your revenue is important. Project-based vs recurring revenue will dictate and change [...]

I know we’ve heard this before, but as a reminder, there are no people with magic skills who are smarter than us at business. But we do get confused when we see people who seem to have a touch of ‘magic’ in the craft that they perform. How do they do that? When you study these people you find that they have a different view of what it takes to achieve mastery in their work. Essentially, mastery of something is a matter of getting in more reps than anyone else in your craft. Kobe Bryant is one of those people. [...]

When designers and freelancers begin to think about growth, they eventually run into needing to hire. When you sell services there is no other way to grow except to hire people. You can use software, become more efficient, and even let AI help you do some of your work. But you will eventually have to replace yourself if you want to grow the revenue of your creative studio.  Who do you hire first? Of course this depends, but there are some general principles we can learn from here. When growing, most smaller design and freelance studios think of replacing themselves [...]

My partner and I work with a lot of service-based entrepreneurs that are seeking to grow their firms, agencies, and consultancies. We’ve been doing this for decades, and the more we work with these entrepreneurs the more we see the trouble so many have with something that is generally labeled “Capacity Management.” Many want to know if they have the right team capacity to take in a larger amount of revenue. Many don’t even understand how closely capacity management is tied to revenue performance. And many don’t look at these concepts at all, and their agency begins to consume them [...]

One thing we believe that sets us apart as a firm is our commitment to learning with our team. You can always know this about our firm: we are talking about new things, learning new things, being challenged by what we already (think we) know, and making presentations of new concepts to each other. It means we are in a constant state of maturing as a team. Of course, we have to do this on the technical side of our profession (it’s required!). And we let the team lead this learning too, from their own perspective. Our leadership team is [...]

We’ve just hit a pretty amazing milestone in our firm. My Dad started our firm in November 1997, 25 years ago now. And 6 years later, he let me join the firm to lead the firm into the future. It was so special to celebrate this anniversary with my Dad recently, with Julie, my wonderful partner and friend, and our whole team at our team retreat. I know it’s common to write the obligatory “25 Things I Learned from Leading our 25 Year-Old Firm” but I’m not going to. I’m just going to share two key areas where I’ve learned […]

Watch as Jason Blumer, CPA, Adam Davidson, and Meghan Phillips discuss Davidson’s book, The Passion Economy, at SXSW 2022. Jason and Meghan were featured subjects in the book on what passion entails in the world of entrepreneurship.

So you have a growing firm. And you have wisely created a leadership team to take some of the weight off your shoulders as an owner and to help manage the day-to-day activity of running the firm. But have you considered taking them out of the day-to-day activity of running the firm? Have you considered holding an annual leadership team retreat, with just firm owners and leadership team? You should! Why A Leadership Team Retreat? My partner and I say to clients we consult with “you can’t read the label on your own bottle.” In order to read the contents, […]