Specific advice is good. Inspiration is great.

But thinking differently is what truly unlocks growth.

A few days in Fort Worth for the Collective 54 Reunion 2025 gave me a chance to do something that I can tend to overlook in a fast-moving business: step away, look around, and see differently.

It’s typical to treat professional events as a place to collect tips, frameworks and inspiration. And there’s plenty of that value at events like this one, catered to owners/operators of professional services firms. But what stuck with me following this event wasn’t one single piece of advice.

It was a key truth: perspective itself is an asset.

One story that stood out came from Robby Riggs and Eric Winton sharing how their firm, The Bridge, concurrently expanded service offerings and broadened across industries. This was beyond scaling; it was evolving.

It resonated with me how this approach began not from a mindset of increasing effort or generating more efficiency, but by reframing the question entirely. Their success wasn’t because they did more of the same; it came from viewing the problem through a different perspective.

That distinction matters because perspective changes how we identify and define problems in the first place. In my role, where I oversee how teams are resourced and structured for client work, it reminded me how valuable it is to zoom out from the day-to-day rhythm of client work and ask:

• ‘Are we looking at this problem the right way?’
• ‘How do my clients need to be looking at this?’
• ‘How do their customers perceive the situation?’

And that realization carried into how I think about the structure of my own teams. Since perspective shapes how we see challenges, resourcing is an available avenue to act on them.

I’m approaching this by balancing it with a second conversation that stuck with me regarding organizational structure and how people tend to operate most efficiently when they focus deeply on a few priorities rather than spread thin across many. While I do not disagree with this business insight, it made me pause.

While the business approach to depth over breadth is compelling—if not entirely convincing—in the agency world, diverse perspectives spark creativity and protect against tunnel vision.

So, this week I’m reminded to address resourcing less as a scheduling puzzle and more as a design decision: an intentional way to keep perspective and value built into how we work. That means creating dedicated or paired client teams who build deep context and trust, balanced with deliberate flexibility for additional voices to engage and offer fresh thinking.

That mix of focus with diversity is the structural equivalent of strategic perspective.

It’s easy, especially in professional-services work, to default to problem-solving: define the issue, design the solution, deliver the result. But perspective is different. It’s slower, quieter, and sometimes uncomfortable, because it forces us to see our own patterns from a distance.

Clients trust those in client services to bring clarity, to help them see themselves and their markets more clearly. That’s difficult to do if our own lens becomes narrow or static.

So, the real value of gatherings like Collective 54 isn’t the notepad full of ideas—it’s the mindset recalibration of being surrounded by folks solving different problems in different ways.

Specific advice? Got it.

Inspiration? You bet.

Thinking differently? What a gift!

Waterhouse is a brand reputation agency that helps emerging and fast-growth life sciences companies build competitive advantage. For more information email dmickle@waterhousebrands.com