(This is part of a regular series of technical advisor Leader Spotlights, where leading TAs share their secrets for success and goals for the future).
Ashley Rowland and Ryan Rowland are fixtures in the tech advisor world. The husband-and-wife team started Adaptiv Advisors in 2019 and created the Technology Advisor Alliance (TAA) community three years later.
Adaptiv Advisors focuses mainly on hyperscale data center projects and TAA includes more than 250 independent TAs who share experiences. This year the Rowlands wrote Hard Won, a book that captures practical lessons, patterns, and field-tested wisdom gathered from years of real-world advisor experience.
The Rowlands were both among the Channel Partners TA Thought Leaders honored at Channel Partners Conference last April, with Ryan Rowland listed among the top 20. We caught up with them for their take on the current TA landscape and advice for TAs.
What inspired you to start Adaptiv Advisors, and what is your company's mission?
Rowlands: We started Adaptiv Advisors because we wanted the freedom to build a business around our values instead of someone else's sales goals. Too often, advisors working for a provider or large organization are limited to selling a specific portfolio of solutions or are incentivized to recommend products that aren't necessarily the best fit for the customer. We wanted to be truly independent.
That independence allows us to do what we believe creates the most value: help customers make the best technology decisions, regardless of who ultimately wins the business. It also gave us the lifestyle we were looking for. Ryan and I intentionally built a company where we never have to miss our kids' important moments, we choose the work we take on, and our customers work directly with the owners every time. Our role is to help customers avoid expensive mistakes and ensure their network performs exactly as designed when it matters most.
Our mission is simple: provide technology guidance that customers can't get from a search engine, an AI chatbot, or a direct sales representative. The advice we give is based on years of experience, thousands of real-world deployments, and insights that simply aren't available publicly.
That same philosophy led us to create the TAA. TAA is a private community of more than 250 independent technology advisors across 44 states who openly share experiences, lessons learned, implementation challenges, and provider intelligence to help each other serve customers better. Our mission is to raise the standard of the technology advisor profession by making every member smarter, faster, and more effective through shared intelligence.
Our customers aren't hiring the experience of two people—they're benefiting from the collective experience of hundreds of independent technology advisors across the country.
Ryan Rowland
What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry over the next five years?
Rowlands: Artificial intelligence will be both the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge for technology advisors. As AI becomes better at summarizing public information, some organizations may believe they no longer need an advisor to help evaluate technology. The reality is that AI can only learn from information it has access to. It can't see private implementation experiences, deal outcomes, support issues, or the countless lessons advisors learn in the field every day.
That creates an incredible opportunity for advisors who have access to proprietary intelligence. The firms that thrive over the next five years won't simply know more products. They'll have access to better information than anyone else.
That's one of the reasons we built the Technology Advisor Alliance. For more than four years, our community has been capturing the real-world experiences of independent advisors across the country. Those insights represent knowledge that isn't published online and can't be scraped from vendor websites. As we continue making that intelligence more accessible to our members, we believe it will become one of the strongest competitive advantages an independent advisor can have.
How does Adaptiv Advisors use AI to stay ahead of the curve?
Rowlands: We view AI as an amplifier—not a replacement for experience. Our advantage comes from combining AI with proprietary industry intelligence. Through the TAA, we have access to years of real-world advisor discussions covering provider performance, implementation challenges, pricing trends, contract pitfalls, and customer outcomes. That collective knowledge simply isn't available through public search engines or large language models.
By combining AI's ability to organize and analyze information with the lived experiences of hundreds of independent advisors, we're able to identify risks earlier, validate recommendations more thoroughly, and help customers make better technology decisions with greater confidence.
We believe the future belongs to advisors who combine human expertise with AI—not those who rely on either one alone.
Ashley Rowland
Are there any exciting projects or initiatives you’re working on that you'd like to share with our audience?
Rowlands: On the Adaptiv Advisors side, we had the opportunity to help bring one of the nation's largest hyperscale data centers online and are now supporting several additional projects of similar scale. It's an incredibly complex niche where early planning, carrier strategy, contract negotiation, and implementation oversight can save customers millions of dollars and months of delays. That's where we believe experienced advisors create tremendous value.
We recently released Hard Won, a book that captures practical lessons, patterns, and field-tested wisdom gathered from years of real-world advisor experience. Our goal is simple: to help technology advisors avoid unnecessary mistakes and accelerate their success.
We're also launching several initiatives that reflect our long-term vision for the profession:
- Advisor Finder – A public directory that helps businesses connect with trusted technology advisors who have committed to a strong code of ethics.
- TAA Succession Network – A private network connecting advisors who are looking to buy, sell, merge, or transition their businesses, helping preserve the value they've spent decades building.
- TAA Proprietary Intelligence – Perhaps the initiative we're most excited about. For more than four years, our community has accumulated real-world knowledge that doesn't exist anywhere else—provider experiences, implementation lessons, pricing trends, customer outcomes, and countless insights shared by advisors across the country. We're transforming that collective intelligence into a competitive advantage that helps our members make better recommendations, win more business, and deliver greater value to their customers.
We believe the future of independent technology advising will be defined by shared intelligence, not isolated expertise, and we're building the tools to make that future possible.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or leaders in the tech space?
Rowlands: The first lesson is simple: obsess over acquiring customers and serving customers. Especially during your first few years, it's easy to get distracted by certifications, partnerships, conferences, vendor programs, and countless other activities that feel productive but don't generate revenue. Focus on the work that actually grows your business.
The second lesson is to find your people. Entrepreneurship can feel lonely, but it doesn't have to be. Surround yourself with peers who are willing to share what they've learned, celebrate your wins, and help you avoid costly mistakes. That's one of the reasons we built the Technology Advisor Alliance—to create the community we wish we'd had when we were getting started.
Finally, build your reputation in public. The days of being a "quiet professional" are over. Share what you're learning. Publish your ideas. Teach others. The advisors who consistently demonstrate expertise become the people partners want to work with and customers trust first.
One principle has served us well throughout our careers: say what you're going to do, then do it—quickly and visibly. It's surprising how much opportunity comes from simply being dependable.
If you were starting today, what would you do differently and what would you do exactly the same?
Rowlands: If we were starting today, we'd invest in relationships much earlier. Not just relationships with customers, but with other independent advisors. Looking back, some of our biggest breakthroughs didn't come from having the perfect sales process or the deepest technical knowledge—they came from conversations with peers who had already solved the problem we were facing.
We'd also begin building our public presence from day one. Writing, speaking, and sharing what we've learned has opened doors we never could have predicted. Visibility creates opportunities, attracts great partners, and builds trust long before the first conversation with a customer.
What would we do exactly the same is stay fiercely independent and continue putting the customer's interests first. That philosophy has shaped every decision we've made, from building Adaptiv Advisors to launching the TAA.
The future of technology advising won't belong to the advisor with the biggest portfolio. It will belong to the advisor with the best intelligence. Technology will continue to evolve. AI will become more capable. Products will change. But advisors who combine independent thinking with real-world experience and the collective intelligence of a trusted community will always be able to create value that can't be commoditized.