I've spent nearly 25 years building software and leading product and engineering teams — from scrappy bootstrapped ventures to global public companies. 

Through successes, failures, and a lot of learning, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside world-class engineers, creatives, and leaders. That experience taught me what truly moves the progress needle: helping teams and people cut through the noise and align around shared context and meaningful work.

Today, I’m channeling that into Steady — an AI-native platform for coordinating digital teams without the overhead. Steady implements a set of open-source principles I helped develop called Continuous Coordination. Steady is a modern, human-first approach to work that aligns people with real-time context and helps teams deliver better and faster — without burnout.

Henry Poydar

My primary work is as CEO of Madison, helping professional services firms grow. 

People buy professional services differently than other services. It requires becoming a Trusted Advisor, which is done by having a compelling Point of View, communicated consistently through Authority Marketing, nurturing relationships over time. Madison helps busy professional services firms turn their team into Trusted Advisors at scale.

You can DM me to learn more, or you can learn more about how we think here: https://hiremadison.com.

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Once a year I help a group of 30-50 senior executives build more intentional lives through a six-week group program. During that time we:

- Craft a compelling vision for the next 10 years of your life.
- Identify the values you want to model your life off of.
- Translate that 10 year vision into 3 year and 1 year objectives.
- Implement a system to capture, process and organize every open loop in your life so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Identify systems and routines that fit into the natural cadence of your life, many of which can be automated so you don’t have to think about it.
- Create a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly operating cadence for managing the execution of your plan.

You can see what past members think and learn about the next cohort of that program here: https://www.sean-johnson.com/intentional-life-program

PREVIOUS WORK:

Previously I was a founding partner at Manifold, where I helped build a 70-person boutique enterprise consulting company, invested in over 25 companies with several exits, stood up an incubation practice, and raised millions in funding from LPs.

I have spent 9 years teaching at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation program.

My aggregate experience has given me a unique lens into the worlds of professional services, startups, and venture investing. I understand intimately the pressures of building a company, the struggle to balance making something incredible with creating a balanced and meaningful life.

FOLLOW ME:

https://sean-johnson.com
http://twitter.com/intentionally
http://instagram.com/intentionally_
http://youtube.com/@intentionally_

Sean Johnson

A day late on this. But the woman I most admire is my wife, hands down. She might be the most talented person I've ever met. 

It's been fun to watch her stand up her new venture at Unison. What we do at Madison at a tactical level for boutiques, she does at a strategic level for mid- markets. She helps $100M firms become $1B firms, and the scale and scope of her thinking is frankly staggering to me.

She supports other women. She built (and now has successfully handed off the reins of) a 600+ person non-profit organization called Big Careers Little Kids. I see the feedback from the sessions - the women routinely say it's the best organization they're a part of.

She works out every day, and can do more pushups than I can. She's three years into mastering a 56 page(!!!) piano concerto by Tchaikovsky. She helps our kids with math homework and plays pickleball with friends and is systematically working through a list of "great books" and loves to get dressed up for date night.

Perhaps her best gift is making others feel seen and heard and loved. She has a knack for seeing professionals others might have overlooked and finding the genius in them. Her colleagues and clients, past and present, adore her.

My daughter is now a teenager and shows up in rooms with confidence and poise and intelligence and humor. She knows she's good at school, and is excited about her future. And I think having a female role model at home has to play a material role in that. And I'm grateful my son sees that finding a woman who is smarter and funnier and more talented than you is something to aspire to rather than run from.

I look up to her (metaphorically) in dozens of ways. #IWD26

Sean Johnson 🔥

CEO @ Madison. Growing professional services firms. Kellogg professor for 9 years. Investor w/ multiple exits. Amateur chef. Former Founding Partner @ Manifold.

Elon Musk (whatever else you think of him) undeniably knows how to grow companies. One reason is well known. And you can learn to do it yourself. Here's how:

Marc Andreessen has said Musk is the most effective entrepreneur he'd ever met. And a major reason why is because he spends WAY more time than other entrepreneurs focusing on the "limiting step". 

And while I'm not sure Musk got it from this book, The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt explains what it is and how to address it.

The book talks about the "theory of constraints". It suggests the success of a business is only as good as its weakest link. And that a better way to grow a company is by focusing on increasing throughput rather than reducing cost. Most other things are noise.

Common knowledge in manufacturing, but I don't think it gets sufficient attention from the rest of us. And while Musk didn't invent it, he does operationalize it relentlessly.

Musk has a reputation for being a micromanager. But according to Andreessen (and Musk himself), he only descends into the details to fix limiting steps. He obsesses over finding it, fixing it, and then finding the next one. Across all his companies.

How to apply it in your own organization:

1) Define throughput correctly. 

It's not activity. It's "the rate at which your system generates its intended outcome". Define it so you don't optimize for the wrong things.

2) Identify the constraint. Examples:

-Market constraints (insufficient demand)
-Sales constraints (leads aren't converting)
-Delivery constraints (ops can't fulfill)
-Decision constraints (bottlenecks at the leadership level)
-Capital constraints
-Talent constraints. 

The trick is finding the constraint that is throttling throughput, not just the thing that's annoying to you.

3) Exploit the constraint.

This is subtle. The tendency when you find constraints is to throw money at it.  Instead, you re-organize work around the bottleneck. In Goldratt's words, you "get the absolute maximum output from the constraint using the resources you already have."

This means:

- Making sure it's never idle
- Stripping low value work from the constraint
- Give it better inputs
- Maximize its yield (again, useful output vs. capacity)
- Synchronize around the constraint. If your thing can make 50 widgets from raw material, don't buy 100 units of raw material and have it pile up. If you can handle 10 sales calls per week, don't run paid ads producing 50 bookings.

This is subtle, because it feels like you're throttling growth. But what you're doing is optimizing the system to maximize the output of that bottleneck. Then when you do expand the rest of the system is designed to maximize the utility of that increased capacity.

4) Ignore everything else. Hard to do. But don't optimize a bunch of stuff. Throw everything at that one thing.

Why writing on LinkedIn (and personal branding in general) is good not just for your business but your soul:

I initially started doing the thought leadership thing to grow my previous company. Like most people, it was uncomfortable at first. I was afraid of looking like a charlatan. I thought I didn't have much to say.

But with practice I learned. I got (I hope) a bit better. I started seeing ideas everywhere.

It helped our business. But the most surprising benefits weren't actually about business at all. 

Because I gave myself the freedom to write about whatever was on my heart on any given day, I ended up talking about all kinds of things.

Dealing with imposter syndrome. How to look better on Zoom. How I'm processing the rise of the robots. How I use Notion to organize my life. How to build more authentic personal relationships. How I'm trying to be a good dad. The impact my own parents had on my life.

Sometimes it's a form of therapy in a way. I use writing to help process ideas. Think through things. I give myself freedom to share things I believe today, knowing I might change my mind later. I don't try to be perfect, just consistent. 

And I didn't pay attention to how posts do. If I did I probably would have quit long ago. Or become a caricature of myself due to audience capture. I just try to write something helpful. If it takes, it takes.

A funny thing happens when you do this. People reach out to you. Sometimes just to say thanks. Sometimes to ask for access to your toolkit. Sometimes to hire your or ask you to come speak.

Sometimes they ask you if you do coaching. During my 18 month break between companies, I ran 150 folks through a process I use for getting clarity in my own life. And while I never wanted to be a coach, that was one of the most life-giving things I've ever done. 

These days, many of the folks who hire us do so because they "like us as people." Which I attribute mostly to how we've chosen to show up.

My life is richer because of writing. Most of the best things that have happened to me professionally, and a whole bunch of things personally, were a function of putting my ideas out there. 

Yes, you should do Authority Marketing so you grow your business. But remember you're not a brand, you're a person. 

Give yourself wide latitude in how you show up. Write or speak about what you are interested in. I promise there are folks who will benefit from your lessons and ideas. 

(And if you need help doing this, we're around. 😉)

I haven't found the secret to happiness. But this is close. And in the coming years, I think it will elevate from nice to have to essential: 


Disconnect your identity from your job. 

When you graft your identity too closely to your work, you start to associate your company's successes with your self worth. Its failures mean you're a failure. 

When I left my previous firm after 12 years of building, I realized I had made this mistake. My mood, my sense of self was inextricably linked to the state of my business. 

When we lost I felt like a loser. When we won, I asked myself how much better we could have done. Which meant I was unhappy most of the time.

When I left, you'd think I'd have felt better immediately. But not so. When you leave the company or sell the company or shutter the company, you're left with a void. Who are you? 

Turned out I got a ton of pride out of introducing myself at dinner parties and talking about who I was and what I did. Being...just a guy was really hard.

It took me 18 months to get my act together. Part of that was finding an idea I wanted to build. Part of that was recovering from some pretty intense anxiety. 

But I'm grateful in hindsight that it took as long as it did. During that time I was forced to cleave myself from my former identity. I learned to internalize the statement, "I am not my job." 

I think I'm in a much healthier place this time around. I have ambition. I want Madison to be the best in the world at what it does. But it's a distinct entity. It's not me. It will likely have someone else running it at some point. And I won't feel that same void if/when that happens.

It feels much more like what I assume a carpenter feels when they work on a chair. They take pride in their handiwork. They want it to be beautiful and functional and useful. 

But they don't confuse themselves for the chair.

Really excited to share this. We have strong beliefs about the way to build authentic relationships. And most CRMs aren't designed to help you show up the way we think you should. So... we built one. 😀

It's called Authentic. It doesn't let you build or import big lead lists and send mad-lib spam. Instead, it helps you manage the couple hundred relationships that matter to you. 

It suggests thoughtful ways to keep in touch based on everything it knows about your organization and the people you're trying to serve. It surfaces your own resources and thought leadership as ways to add value. It allows you to send thoughtful gifts to commemorate life events. It sends you triggers to keep in touch with people you haven't spoken to in a while, with truly personalized recommendations on what to say.

We've been using it internally for the last few months and have found it a joy to use. It's early days, but I think it could genuinely be helpful for people and teams looking to show up in a more authentic way.

We're letting folks in one at a time. If you'd like access DM me, or join the waitlist on the site.

Most CRMs are built on a lie. The lie is that business development is a numbers game. That sales is a transaction. That your goal is to move contacts 

Open article: We Built Our Own CRM. Here's Why (And How You Can Use It Too). by Sean Johnson 🔥 • 5 min read

We Built Our Own CRM. Here's Why (And How You Can Use It Too).

"I don't know what to say". Nurturing prospective client relationships doesn't have to be hard. Just think of them as a PERSON, not a lead. 23 suggestions:

1) Send a note about recent company news. They got funding or got acquired or had solid earnings - send quick congrats.

2) Share an article. "Thought you'd find this interesting."

3) "Trend we've seen in the last month with 5 different clients is X. Curious if that maps to what you're seeing."

4) Offer to make an introduction. Doesn't have to be professional. "You mentioned you were looking for a personal trainer - this has been my guy for the last 2 years."

5) Ask for a small favor. "I value your opinion. Could you give me some quick feedback on this doc before I send it?"

6) Coffee. "Been a while - I'm gonna be in your area next week for another meeting. Coffee before or after?"

7) Invite them to an event. "Hosting 6 folks for a private salon next week - any interest?"

8) Meet up at a conference. "Saw you're going to VIVE - same. Grab coffee before the morning sessions?"

9) Share a case study. "We just wrapped on this engagement - a few parallels to what we talked about."

10) Congrats on a milestone. "10 years at the same company is impressive - congrats!"

11) Follow up on a previous conversation point. "Last time we talked you mentioned the reorg. How'd the dust settle on that?"

12) Ask about next year's priorities. "We're doing our strategic planning, guessing you all do the same. What are you focusing on next year?"

13) Help their family. "You mentioned your son is graduating soon and starting to think about jobs. Happy to chat with him about what I'm seeing in our industry if helpful."

14) Support their causes. "That's awesome that you're doing that run for cancer. Make a donation in your name. Good luck!"

15) Acknowledge life events. "Congrats on the little one - dropped my daughter's favorite book in the mail." 

16) Share a recommendation. "You mentioned going to Italy for spring break - we went last year, had a blast. Here's my itinerary in case it's helpful."

17) Common on something they posted. "That's a really interesting idea. Couple additional thoughts..."

18) Quarterly check in. "You were on my mind this week. Just wanted to say I value our relationship."

19) End of year reflection: "We did a toast at our company party on all our wins this year, and my mind immediately went to you. It's been great to work together this year."

20) Ask their take: "I'm about to publish this article, don't want to sound like an idiot. You have 5 minutes to give me your honest take?"

21) Share early access: "We did a big study on <TOPIC> - going to publish it next month - thought I'd give you a sneak peak."

22) Send a personal newsletter. "I share a bunch of stuff internally with my team, thought you might find it interesting."

23) Send a book. "Tore through this on the flight home last week - lots of parallels with our conversation. Thought you might like a copy."

I’m an AI optimist, for a counter-intuitive reason. I think there’s a good chance it will create the conditions for more people to lean into their true work in this world.

I often talk about the framework Job/Vocation/Work/Life. Job is what I do for money. Vocation is what brings me joy. Work is the sum of lasting good I create in the world. Life is the person I’m becoming.

It seems plausible that many jobs will change, almost beyond recognition, and that our relationship to money and status and prestige will change with it.

But there’s a gift in that. I tend to think that if the robots do end up taking on many aspects of white collar jobs, what will remain will be vocation and work. I suspect we will be no less fulfilled - perhaps more so. And that those economies, while perhaps smaller, will be vibrant.

When I was a kid, we had a young authors conference at school where we got to write and illustrate our own books. It was the highlight of my elementary education. When I got to high school I read Dave Barry books incessantly. Tried to imitate his style in papers, to the chagrin of my teachers. And when I graduated college I (very ironically) wrote a book about how to get a job.

I think the seeds of my vocation and work were there from the beginning.

I have been many things in my career. And I love my work now. I’m not rooting for it to end, and I’m going to do my best to build something beautiful and enduring. 

I’m also leaning hard into the tools. I’ve never been more engaged or productive professionally. It’s a challenge to put it away at night. It’s that fun.

BUT. I’m also relatively at peace with the notion that I might get caught up in the AI wave eventually. Because I think it will mean I get to lean harder into vocation and work. 

When I was 6 I didn’t say I want to be a VC or CEO. I said a writer (and NBA player. Some dreams do die.)

If the robots do come for me, I suspect I will still write, even more than I do now. And cook. And perhaps perform mediocre stand-up again. And coach and teach and guide people, as best I’m able.

My job might change. But my vocation won’t. Neither will my work.

And I think if all that does happen, society will figure it out. I think it will be sorta like Covid. Perhaps it won’t happen as quickly as we’d hope, and there will be messiness for sure. But I think we’ll figure it out.

And when we do, many more people will remember the seeds of their own vocations. Will become teachers or dancers or musicians or firefighters or florists or poets or artists.

Which doesn’t sound too bad to me.

Looking forward to this. Our thinking has evolved a lot since we did this the first time in late 2024. Would love to have you join us.

Madison | We Market Professional Services Firms

View company: Madison | We Market Professional Services Firms

In our most comprehensive deep dive, Madison CEO Sean Johnson 🔥 Johnson walks through the entire Madison framework, and how you can use it to build a scalable and repeatable marketing engine for your boutique firm.

View event: How to Grow Your Professional Services Firm in 2026

How to Grow Your Professional Services Firm in 2026

Some suggestions on how to get more from your content:

I often tell clients one of their best marketing channels is the collection of revenue generating professionals in their firm. The women and men who are actually in market, advising current and prospective clients on a daily basis.

Those folks are (hopefully) engaged in multiple month (year?) business development processes. Building trust takes time, and numerous touches.

But it begs the question, "what in the world do I say?" What do I say 9 months after that intro meeting that went well but didn't have a clear next step?

I think this is where content is HIGHLY underrated. Too many firms write content, hit the publish button, perhaps post it on LinkedIn, maybe include it in their newsletter, but then stop. 

They think of their content as primarily being about creating awareness, not as a sales enablement tool. But that's often where it's most effective.

Yesterday one of our clients told me about a potential client they had met with 8-12 weeks ago. We'd just published an article about a topic that she remembered discussing with this person. She sent the article with a brief note, hoping it was helpful. They replied right away and sent along an NDA for an opportunity.

That is something that every member of your team can be doing systematically. But it requires work on the part of your marketing team to make it happen. Some suggestions:

- Don't write articles from the company. Always have them be from one of your revenue generating professionals. Link to them in the article. Create a cadence where you hop on calls with them periodically to get their ideas and thoughts (or have us do it 😉.)

- Whenever one of your team members gives a presentation, turn it into an article. Help them to send it to folks who "weren't able to be there in person."

- Create an internal newsletter for your BD folks showcasing the material that's been created in the last month.

- Consider "personal" newsletters, from the revenue generating professionals to the folks in their orbit. Different from the company newsletter. Sent in plain text. We've found a roundup of curated links works well here (with your content featured up top).

- When marketing creates a piece of content, also have them create some sample language your Partners or MDs can use to send to folks. 

- Whenever you publish something new, consider going through your CRM and looking for 5-10 folks who would benefit from it. (this can be tough to do - one reason our internal CRM does it for us - DM me if you want to see it.)

- Consider a one-page doc in Sharepoint of Drive or Notion with all your content, mapped to the buyer journey or how you approach engagements (example attached). Routinely point to it in your BD meetings.

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The Battle

Henry Poydar

Sean Johnson

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taplio

The Battle

Henry Poydar

Sean Johnson

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sean Johnson's LinkedIn Performance

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