The Publisher Who Turned a Rolodex Into a Consulting Firm

There is a moment in the life of a business when its founder discovers that the thing being sold is not the thing being bought. For Scott Costello, the thing being sold was a magazine. More than one, actually: building titles, home titles, business titles, relocation guides. The thing being bought was harder to print. It was the feeling that someone could make a community legible - who mattered, what was changing, where the energy sat, and how to convene it.

CCM Consulting & Advisory Services is the business that emerged when that distinction finally got a name. Based in Naples and working across Southwest Florida, Greater Gainesville and Tampa Bay, the firm advises nonprofits, associations, chambers and small businesses. Its menu is broad because its customers' problems rarely arrive one at a time: strategic planning, fractional executives, operational design, hiring, board governance, fundraising, leadership coaching, marketing and community engagement.

The conventional consultancy begins with expertise and then hunts for clients. CCM began with clients, partners, readers, sponsors, volunteers and civic leaders accumulated across a quarter-century. The expertise was hiding in the work all along.

The magazine was a rehearsal

Costello's company history starts in the early 2000s with Advantage Publishing and a collection of building-industry publications. The portfolio widened: HOME: Living in Greater Gainesville, Business in Greater Gainesville, guides for Gainesville and Tampa Bay, and a web-design operation. CCM says the lineage produced more than 250 magazines, guides and special editions and earned 23 Florida Magazine Association Charlie Awards across two five-year periods.

A regional magazine is a surprisingly good school for consulting. Every issue requires a thesis, a deadline, a temporary coalition and an answer to the question every small organization fears: who, exactly, is going to do the work? Publishing also forces a company to live at the intersection of story and system. The cover gets attention. The production calendar keeps the promise.

The first useful rupture came outside publishing. Costello told a University of Florida student newspaper in 2019 that he had attended more than 300 events a year and grown jaded by occasions where too much money went to embellishment instead of the cause. His response was not a memo. In 2009 he created Taste of Greater Gainesville. A decade later, the annual fundraiser had generated more than half a million dollars for children's charities, with organizers expecting the cumulative total to pass $600,000.

“I started to get a little jaded by what I saw and decided to do something about it.”Scott Costello, on creating Taste of Greater Gainesville

That sentence contains the CCM temperament in miniature: notice the waste, gather the people, redesign the event, measure what reaches the mission. It also answers what changed Costello's mind. The friction was not theoretical. He had watched a familiar civic ritual spend energy in the wrong places.

Three words, in a particular order

CCM packages its work as “Clarity, Capacity, Momentum.” Consulting frameworks often function like luggage labels: neat identifiers pasted onto familiar contents. This one is more interesting because of the sequence.

Many small organizations reverse it. They chase momentum first: a campaign, a new program, an AI tool, a splashy hire. Then they discover that nobody owns the workflow, the board is not aligned and the team is already full. CCM's sequence makes the dull but essential claim that direction comes before acceleration.

In practice, that can mean facilitating a strategic plan, documenting procedures, clarifying roles, recruiting a leader, coaching a board or lending a fractional executive. The business model is flexible by design: short projects, longer advisory relationships and integrated support from specialists. The customer gets senior judgment without immediately adding a full-time C-suite salary. CCM gets to match its bench to the problem rather than pretending one consultant can be strategist, recruiter, operator, fundraiser and communications director at once.

The awards night is also a prototype

FIERCE, founded in Gainesville in 2015, is the most visible demonstration of this approach. It recognizes women whose leadership shapes the region. In 2026, nearly 300 nominations arrived - the program's highest count - and the class expanded from 20 honorees to 30. CCM plans to bring the event to Collier and Lee counties in 2027.

An awards program may look adjacent to a consulting practice. In fact, it exercises nearly every muscle the firm sells: program design, judging governance, sponsor relationships, communications, volunteer coordination, event operations and alumni engagement. It is also evidence of CCM's competitive difference. A national consultancy can import a polished framework. A solo coach can offer intimate attention. CCM sits between them, combining a cross-functional bench with the local trust earned by repeatedly putting people in the same room.

That position has limits, and the limits clarify the product. CCM is built for leaders who have a mission and some institutional base but lack time, alignment or specialist capacity. Its catalog is not a promise of proprietary software, transaction finance or a giant implementation army. Fractional leadership also works only when an internal owner will make decisions, share information and carry the habits forward. Borrowed capacity can unblock a team; it cannot care on the team's behalf.

The useful thing to copy

The obvious copy is the three-part framework. Take any stalled initiative and ask three questions in order. Do we agree on the destination? Do named people have the time, authority and systems to reach it? What visible action would prove movement in the next 30 days? If the second answer is no, another campaign is probably an expensive distraction.

The less obvious copy is Costello's path. He did not abandon publishing and events for an unrelated profession. He inspected the backstage work - aligning stakeholders, packaging stories, building routines, raising money, fixing handoffs - and made that the offer. A founder's next business is often concealed inside the unbilled labor of the current one.

CCM's formal identity is still young. Costello Communications & Marketing became CCM Consulting & Advisory Services in 2025, and the Florida LLC was filed in February 2026. The pedigree is older, but the current proposition is being tested now: can relationship capital become a repeatable advisory system without losing the personal quality that created it?

The answer will not be found in the number of slides produced. It will show up in whether a board makes a decision, whether a new executive arrives well, whether a process keeps working after the adviser leaves, and whether next year's room contains more people than this year's. In other words, the same unglamorous evidence that kept a regional magazine arriving on time.