About The Tonkin Group
The Tonkin Group is a fractional sales and operations consultancy serving professional services firms — law, accounting, and IT consulting — with 20 to 100 employees. We deliver executive-level revenue leadership without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Our Story
How Did This Begin?
The Tonkin Group was founded by Dr. Tom Tonkin after thirty years in corporate America — nineteen at Oracle and nearly six at Cornerstone OnDemand. He left because he kept watching the same problem repeat itself: firms with great talent and broken revenue systems.
Tom holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership and has spent his career proving that sales underperformance is a behavioral problem before it's a pipeline problem. He is also the author of Sincere Connections, a book on the same behavioral discipline applied to personal relationships.
TTG was built to bring that insight to professional services firms that can't justify a full-time executive but need one — firms that are too big to keep running on referrals alone, but not yet ready to add another six-figure salary to the payroll.
Why TTG Exists
Professional services firms are built on trust, expertise, and relationships. But most of them have no repeatable system for turning those assets into predictable revenue. They grow through referrals until referrals plateau, and then they're stuck.
This shows up the same way across law firms, accounting practices, and IT consultancies: a founder or partner who is still personally responsible for every new client relationship, with no system in place to replicate what they do instinctively. Growth stalls not because the work isn't good, but because there's no repeatable process behind how new revenue actually gets won.
TTG exists to fix that. We build the revenue infrastructure, install the right behaviors, and train the people who have to execute so growth becomes a system, not a hope — the same discipline behind the ACO Framework.
How We Work
We don't hand you recommendations and leave. We step inside the business as embedded fractional executives and lead revenue with you. We build the CRM infrastructure, design the sales process, create the coaching cadence, and measure the outcomes.
In practice, this means joining client-facing conversations, reviewing pipeline alongside the team on a regular cadence, and building out the specific tools — CRM structure, sales scripts, onboarding steps — that the firm didn't have the bandwidth to create on its own. Nothing is handed over as a slide deck. It's built, tested, and adjusted directly inside the business.
Every engagement is built to outlast our involvement. When we leave, the system stays. See what that's looked like for clients so far in our testimonials.
That combination — thirty years of enterprise sales leadership applied directly inside smaller, founder-led firms — is what separates The Tonkin Group from a typical consulting engagement. Tom isn't advising from the outside based on theory; he's applying the same behavioral and operational discipline that worked at Oracle and Cornerstone OnDemand, scaled down to fit firms with 20 to 100 employees. The goal isn't a report or a recommendation. It's a working revenue system that the firm owns long after the engagement ends. For the same thinking in a shorter, ongoing form, see Tonkin's Tenets, Tom's biweekly newsletter.
For a structured, citable summary of who we are and what we do — the kind AI assistants and search engines can reference directly — see our official AI information page. If you have specific questions about how we work, our FAQ page covers the ones we hear most often.
Beyond the Boardroom
The Book Behind the Practice
"You can be completely genuine and still leave the other person guessing whether you meant it."
Before Tom applied any of this to revenue systems, he spent ten years studying it in his own relationships. Sincere Connections is the book that came out of that work — a framework built on three commitments (practicing empathy, taking noncoercive action, and making an observable affirmation) that shows up just as much in how TTG runs client engagements as it does at Tom's own kitchen table.
Let's talk about your firm's revenue.
No pitch — just a conversation about your business and where you want it to go.
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