About The 365 Collective

We are practitioners, not vendors.

The 365 Collective is a Microsoft 365 consulting and training firm built on a straightforward belief: organizations get far more from the tools they already own when the right people help them use those tools properly. We are those people — and we have been since 2009.

Our Story

It started in a classroom in 2009. It never really left.

J. Scott Clark began teaching SharePoint in 2009 — SharePoint Server 2007, then 2010 — at a time when most organizations had deployed the platform without a clear picture of what to actually do with it. The training worked. And then something predictable happened: the professionals sitting in those classes started asking if he would come work with their organizations directly. The instructor became the trusted advisor. The classroom became the consulting practice.

That pattern repeated consistently enough that by 2015 — four years after Office 365 launched and fundamentally changed what the platform could do — it made sense to build something formal around it. The 365 Collective was founded that year with a structure designed around a realization that had become obvious over six years of training across dozens of organizations: no single consultant can be a genuine expert in everything the Microsoft 365 platform offers. It is too vast. Too deep. And it keeps growing.

The answer was in the name. A collective — not a consultancy built around one person’s full range of capabilities, but a team of specialists each owning their corner of the platform. Whatever the engagement requires, we have someone whose primary area of expertise is exactly that. Clients get genuine depth in every discipline, not a generalist stretched across all of them.

J. Scott Clark

J. Scott Clark

Founder, President & CEO · Microsoft 365 Solutions Architect

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J. Scott Clark is a Microsoft 365 solutions architect, consultant, and trainer. He’s spent over 20 years in the Microsoft ecosystem. He began teaching SharePoint in 2009 — years before Office 365 existed — and spent the next six years training professionals across industries while simultaneously building the consulting practice that would become The 365 Collective. In the eleven years since founding the firm, Scott has delivered engagements across healthcare, finance, construction, engineering, publishing, retail, wholesale, and logistics — and has trained thousands of professionals on SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

What separates Scott from most Microsoft 365 consultants is the position he operates from. He does not advise from the outside. He runs his own organizations on the same Microsoft 365 tools he recommends to clients — and has worked remotely for more than 20 years, long before distributed work became a mainstream conversation. Since founding The 365 Collective, he has managed a fully distributed remote team for over a decade. He has built the same environments, automated the same processes, and navigated the same adoption challenges his clients bring to him — not in a lab, but in businesses he actually runs. When he recommends something, it is because it is working for him right now.

In nearly 20 years of Microsoft consulting, Scott has learned that the conversations you have at different levels of an organization are not versions of the same conversation — they are fundamentally different conversations. A CEO needs to understand what changes about how the business operates and whether the investment produces the outcomes they are accountable for. An IT director needs to understand what the implementation actually looks like, where the complexity lives, and what tends to break before it gets fixed. A frontline employee needs to know one thing clearly: what is changing for them specifically, and what it means for Monday morning. Getting any one of those conversations wrong can derail an engagement that is technically sound. Scott has learned — over thousands of sessions, across every level of every kind of organization — what each audience actually needs to hear, and why.

Beyond his consulting work, Scott is also the founder of a Microsoft-native software product company — applying the same platform expertise to building commercial tools that run inside clients’ own Microsoft 365 tenants.

J. Scott Clark is also the author of The CEO’s Handbook For Microsoft 365, available for presale now.

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How We Work

One point of contact. The whole team behind it.

Every client who works with The 365 Collective has one point of contact: Scott. Not an account manager. Not a project coordinator. The founder and CEO — directly accessible throughout every engagement, from the first conversation to the final delivery.

That is a deliberate design decision, not an accident of firm size. When an engagement requires specialists from the team — a Power Platform developer, a SharePoint architect, a training designer — they come in alongside Scott, not instead of him. The client never manages relationships across multiple contacts or wonders who to call when they have a question. They call Scott. Scott knows the answer, or he gets it.

This model works because it separates two things that get conflated in most consulting firms: client relationship management and delivery execution. Scott manages the relationship, orchestrates the engagement, applies his own expertise where it is most needed, and ensures the standard is maintained across everything his team produces. The specialists focus entirely on the work. Neither function competes with the other.

The result is a white-glove experience that most firms this size cannot offer — and most firms ten times this size choose not to. Clients get the CEO on the phone, direct answers about their project, and a single person who is accountable for the whole engagement.

Why Consulting and Training Together

In the IT world, consulting and training are two separate businesses. We think that is the problem.

Most Microsoft 365 consulting firms do not train. Most Microsoft 365 training companies do not consult. The two lines of business are typically separate — different firms, different business models, different relationships with the client. And the gap between them is where most Microsoft 365 investments quietly fail.

A consultant deploys a solution and moves on. Six months later, the client’s team is not using it the way it was designed because nobody showed them how. A training company delivers a course on SharePoint. The client’s team learns features in the abstract and returns to their desks to find an environment that looks nothing like what they practiced on. The training did not land because the training was not built for their environment.

The 365 Collective was deliberately built to do both — not as an add-on service, but as an integrated model. Advise, Build, and Train are three distinct service offerings, but they are designed to work as a complete system. We assess what is broken, build what needs to be built, and make sure the people who have to use it every day actually know how. For clients who engage us across all three, it is an end-to-end solution. For clients who only need one, it stands alone. Either way, no one falls through the gap between consultant and trainer — because we are both.

The Client Journey

Most clients start needing us a lot. Most end up needing us occasionally. That’s exactly how it should work.

A new client engagement typically follows a natural arc. An organization reaches out because something is not working — they are not getting value from their Microsoft 365 investment, they have a specific problem they cannot solve, or they are about to make a significant technology decision and want to get it right. We start where they are.

Over the course of an engagement — sometimes months, sometimes a year — something predictable happens. The client’s team gets more capable. The environment stabilizes. The questions become less frequent and more specific. Most clients move from needing us heavily at the start to only occasionally. We consider that a successful engagement. The goal was never to create dependency. It was to leave the client more capable than we found them.

But that does not mean the relationship ends. Most clients who reach that level of capability stay with The 365 Collective for the long term — not because they need us every week, but because they know we are there when something genuinely new comes up. A strategic question about a Microsoft 365 initiative before they build it. A significant platform update from Microsoft that needs a clear-eyed assessment. A new team that needs training. A wall they have hit that calls for an outside expert.

Industries We Serve

Microsoft 365 looks different in every industry. We have worked in most of them.

A construction firm managing field crews and subcontractor documentation operates differently than a healthcare practice navigating compliance requirements — even when both are running the same Microsoft 365 subscription. Industry context shapes how we design every solution and every training program. We serve clients across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia.

What Our Clients Say

Clients across every industry. The same standard throughout.

From healthcare to construction, finance to logistics — the standard stays the same.

Ready to work with us?

Tell us what you are trying to solve. You will hear back from J. Scott Clark directly.