February 6, 2026
Dear Friends,
It’s 2:00 AM. Your biggest client has just experienced a catastrophic operational failure. Their supply chain has frozen, their board is panicking, and the CEO's personal stress is bleeding into their professional judgment.
Who do they call?
If you are operating in the accounting and consulting industries today, the answer to that question dictates the entire trajectory of your firm. If they are calling you—not to ask for a specific deliverable, but simply because they need guidance when everything is falling apart—you have achieved the rarest status in professional services: you are a trusted advisor. If they wait until 9:00 AM to ask for a tactical report, you are simply a vendor.
Growing up, my hero and mentor was my dad. He didn't have a college degree, but he built an incredibly successful wholesale printing company. Starting at age ten, I swept his shop floors and watched how he operated. He retired very comfortably not because he had the slickest marketing, but because of his unshakable integrity and interpersonal skills. He met his clients exactly where they were. If a client had a crisis, my dad was there. He lived by a simple rule: principles over profits.
Fast forward to my own career. Whether I was navigating the chaos of a derivatives trading floor in my twenties or directing massive engagements at Deloitte and PwC, I noticed an unsettling trend. As firms grow, they become obsessed with "cross-selling"—the act of pitching additional services to an existing client to maximize revenue.
But cross-selling, when viewed merely as a sales tactic, is fundamentally broken.
When my first corporate journey abruptly ended with a layoff while my wife was pregnant, I had to build my own consulting firm from the ground up. The market didn't care about my resume; it cared about whether I could solve its pain. I realized then that true cross-selling isn't about pushing products. It’s a natural byproduct of radical empathy. It happens organically when you understand your client’s business so deeply that you can anticipate their needs before they even articulate them.
Research published in the Harvard Business Review confirms this shift. In B2B relationships, buyers are no longer just looking for functional expertise; they are demanding subjective, emotional value—like trust, reduced anxiety, and a shared vision (Almquist, Cleghorn, & Sherer, 2018).
Are you actively training your teams to look beyond the spreadsheet? I firmly believe in constantly training people to replace me, because when you empower a team to lead with empathy, the entire firm elevates.
You must flip a decision switch. Stop asking, "What else can we sell them?" and start asking, "Where are they hurting, and how can we carry that weight?"When you focus relentlessly on client needs, you stop chasing business. You become the 2 AM phone call.
Look at your top five clients today. If their world cracked open tonight, are you the partner they would call?
Best Wishes,
Jack
[1] Reichheld, F. F. (n.d.). Prescription for cutting costs. Harvard Business Review. (Based on Bain & Company research regarding the economics of customer retention).
