Scaling a Microsoft technology practice from a few hundred to 2,500 consultants wasn’t a plan I executed cleanly — it was a series of mistakes I made once, learned from, and tried very hard not to repeat. Here’s what I’d actually tell myself at the start, knowing what I know now.
Growth reveals your process gaps — it doesn’t create them
Every process weakness that eventually caused real pain at 1,000+ consultants existed at 100. It just didn’t matter yet, because a small enough team can paper over a bad process with informal communication and a few people who happen to know everything. The mistake I made early was assuming things were “fine” because nothing had broken, rather than asking whether the current approach would still work at three times the size. It rarely does, and by the time it visibly breaks, you’re fixing it under far more pressure than if you’d addressed it early.
Your best people are not a scaling strategy
Early on, it’s tempting to solve every hard delivery problem by routing it to your strongest people. It works, right up until it doesn’t — because it quietly trains the organization to depend on a small number of individuals rather than on a repeatable standard. The actual scaling unlock was investing in making the average delivery consistently good, not just making sure the best people were always available to save a struggling engagement. That meant real investment in training, delivery playbooks, and quality standards well before it felt urgent.
A 45% RFP win ratio is a lagging indicator, not a strategy
It took me longer than it should have to internalize that a strong win rate on competitive bids is downstream of things decided long before the RFP lands — the reputation of past delivery, the relationships built between engagements rather than during them, and whether the proposal team can speak to real outcomes instead of capabilities. By the time you’re writing the response, most of what determines whether you win has already been decided. The RFP process is where you find out, not where you build the advantage.
$30M+ in influenced deals taught me more about trust than about sales
The pattern behind that number wasn’t clever positioning — it was a small number of clients trusting the practice enough, repeatedly, to bring us into bigger and higher-stakes conversations. That trust compounds slowly and is very easy to spend quickly with one badly handled engagement. If I were starting over, I’d protect it even more conservatively than I did.
What I’d tell myself
Fix the process before it hurts, not after. Build the standard instead of leaning on your best people. And treat every single engagement as if it’s the one that determines whether you get invited to bid on the next ten — because, in a quiet, compounding way, it usually is.