The 2026 DXP market sits at $17.82B. Every serious platform now ships with content management, personalization, and AI-assisted authoring. The feature list is table stakes. What separates a genuinely good digital experience from a mediocre one is the judgment to orchestrate those capabilities toward a specific, measurable outcome — and that judgment isn't something a platform provides.

The problem a client brings you is almost never the problem. It's the symptom they noticed. The actual mechanism is a layer deeper — and requires a completely different fix. Here's the diagnostic-sprint model, where AI genuinely compresses the work, and the specific behaviors that earn partner status over a vendor relationship's shorter half-life.

Roughly 6 million US small businesses are expected to change ownership by 2035 as Baby Boomer owners retire — representing $5 trillion in enterprise value. 70% have no formal succession plan. That gap is the structural reason buying an existing profitable business has become a real, taught career path. Here is the playbook.