Doug Stewart:

I help knowledge professionals plan their business.

Knowledge professionals are unique, compelling people. They have two concurrent, and possibly conflicting, goals: financial (rising income and equity value); and personal (meaningful work, engaged clients, motivated staff).

Their client relationships are unlike any other in business: they are symbiotic (both sides benefit as their exchange value rises); they are recurring (client issues tend to be recurring and therefore clients should return); they are high trust (solving the issue does matter; their is risk to the Client).

These are significant business advantages.

And yet, their approach to marketing is again, ‘unique’. They tend to find new client acquisition a bother: it is expensive and time-consuming and difficult. But most of all, it's not what they want to do. After all they went into their field for the work — not the chase.

So here is the paradox: great natural conditions for a thriving practice, and yet most knowledge professionals feel their results should be much stronger.

The culprit is almost always the same — a churn environment, caused by functional service.

Deep specialty is exactly what clients pay for — but it also narrows the lens. The focus stays on technical and tactical delivery, and the broader opportunity goes unseen: to place the project within the context of the client's pursuit of success. Solutions of middling utility follow. Clients disengage. Return rates drop. Spend declines. And the practice grinds to replace what it loses.

The answer is to broaden what service means. When you focus on client success — on understanding what clients truly want and designing your work around that — loyalty rises, spend rises, and referrals follow naturally. Those three things together replace churn with profitable, compounding growth.

That is premium service. And it is a genuinely compelling way to work. It's creative, interesting, valuable, and honourable. It makes the work better and the business stronger.

I've worked across many types of knowledge professionals — architects, accountants, consultants, designers. The practices look different. The experience is remarkably similar. Educated, capable people, deeply invested in their craft — and yet struggling to see past the project scope to what the client is actually trying to achieve. That's not a personal failing. It's structural. And it's exactly what good planning can fix.

That's our next conversation; please email to schedule.

— Doug Stewart, Founder, Catapult Inc.