Most business books about consulting are written by people who have never made payroll. This one isn't.
Adam Mattis started his first consulting company in a college apartment and named it after an empty liquor bottle. Over the next twenty years he built firms, sold them, watched the pieces get absorbed into one of the largest professional services organizations on the planet, then sat on the other side of the table as the executive deciding which firms to trust. Small Firm, Big Impact is what he learned in between, written so you can skip the tuition he paid the expensive way.
This is a field guide for the specialist who is tired of trading hours for dollars: the person who is excellent at the work but struggling to build a business that doesn't consume the rest of life, who has looked at the big firms and suspected there had to be a better way. There is. It starts with understanding why being smaller and more specialized was never the disadvantage you were told it was. Done well, it is the strongest hand at the table.
Inside, you will find the frameworks Adam used to build a boutique without outside money and without living at the office, honest accounts of what worked and what failed and why, and the parts of running a small firm that nobody mentions from a conference stage: the night spent doing arithmetic against a client's Net-60 terms, the payroll you are not certain will clear, the bet on a niche that can stop paying.
The book moves in four parts. The first three build the firm: the foundations, the people, the clients, the delivery, the growth, and the money. The fourth is the test the firm is built to pass, including the failure pattern that wrecks most organizations and the wave of AI and what comes after it.
This second edition reckons honestly with how much has changed since 2023. AI went from a curiosity to the thing every client wants to talk about, the economics of delivery began to bend, and the question of what a consultant is even for got sharper. The foundations that don't change are still here. So is a clear-eyed view of the change coming for any firm built for the era before it.
If the first edition was about building a small firm that wins, this one is about building a small firm that wins and then keeps standing through whatever comes next.
And if you buy consulting rather than sell it, you are welcome here too. The book is written for the seller, but a sharper buyer falls out of it for free.
