Unleashed - How To Thrive As An Independent Professional

Our guest today is Roger Lee, the owner of F1 Consulting. Roger provides remote IT support for independent professionals, home offices, and small businesses. He helps his clients with network design and installation, cloud services migration, remote monitoring, and offsite data backup and disaster recovery. One of the tools that Roger mentions in this episode is LastPass, a password manager. After Roger and I spoke I adopted LastPass myself and I strongly recommend it. Roger asked me to point out that he misspoke on the cost of LastPass – the monthly fee is two dollars, not one dollar. If you are an independent professional, you ought to have an IT professional like Roger on your virtual team.  I picked up a ton of useful tips in this discussion and I hope you find it helpful.

Our guest today is Jennifer Hartz, a McKinsey alum and the founder of Corporate Hartz. Jennifer has several focus areas including business-driven community relations strategies, nonprofit strategic planning, and personal philanthropy. Her philosophy is that generosity and profitability can, and should, go hand-in-hand. Her lessons learned from helping families take a strategic approach to philanthropy can be useful to all of us – you don’t need to have a $100 million fund to start a family conversation about giving. With the holidays coming up, and the tax year coming to a close, after listening to this episode you might be motivated to set up your own donor-advised fund. With a donor advised fund, you get the charitable deduction off your income taxes today when you contribute money to the account.  Then you can disburse the funds over time to approved charities.  You can start a fund at Fidelity with a minimum $5,000 contribution, and over at Vanguard with a minimum contribution of $25,000. In our discussio

Our guest today is John Dranow, the CEO of Smart Revenue. John’s firm has hundreds of trained, vetted field researchers available around the world, and his firm can help you fill in the data white spaces. Big data can help us analyze in exquisite detail what is happening, but it is hard to know from the data what isn’t happening. How many people walk by a store but don’t look at the window display? How many people look at the window display but don’t enter the store? How many people enter the store but don’t walk down the center aisle? How many people walk down the center aisle but don’t buy your client’s product? John’s team has a range of tools to help fill in these white spaces.  In our discussion we discuss field interviews, vision tracking goggles, how Panera might study a customer standing in line to order, and much more. John’s firm does regularly work with boutique consulting firms as well as independent professionals – so if you have an upcoming project where this type of anthropological field work w

In this in-between-isode, Will Bachman shares four tools useful for any independent professional: 1) DocuSign - to avoid the need to print/sign/scan/email 2) Expensify - to keep track of your expenses.  3) ScannerPro - to create multipage PDFs with your phone 4) Rev.com - quick and affordable transcripts

Sinisa Slijepcevic studied with Stephen Hawking, among other professors, while earning his PhD in applied mathematics at Cambridge University.  Sinisa is a McK alum and independent consultant and runs a firm called Cantab Analytica, which is based in the UK and Croatia. Sinisa’s firm leverages machine learning to help clients make better decisions and to focus energy on the right decisions. In our discussion, Sinisa provides several case examples to illustrate how machine learning can help make decisions in three ways: First: decisions that may be subject to unconscious bias, such as the investment decisions made by venture capital firms Second: decisions that are complex and also occur very frequently, such as dynamic pricing of hotel rooms. Third: focusing management attention on the most important decisions, such as figuring out which purchasing decisions are the most critical in a supply chain. You can learn more about Sinisa’s firm on the website: cantab analytica.com

Our guest today is Karen McGrath, who runs a firm of virtual assistants called Awan’s Assisting. If you are an independent professional and feel crunched for time, this episode is for you. Karen and I discuss why an independent professional should consider hiring a virtual assistant (a VA), the types of tasks that VAs are most commonly asked to do, how to find and screen a VA, and some tips on how to build an effective working relationship with a VA. Karen clearly knows her business, and you can find her firm at http://awansassisting.com/

Our guest today is Kenny Jahng, the founder of Big Click Syndicate LLC, a strategic positioning agency offering content marketing consulting & advisory to nonprofit, cause-driven & faith-based organizations and churches across the country. Kenny has an amazing list of clients that includes the Princeton Theological Seminary, California Baptist University, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, The United Methodist Church, & Wesleyan Investment Foundation, among many others. In our discussion, Kenny educates me on what content marketing is all about. The core of what he does starts with helping clients on their strategic positioning, building internal alignment on the mission and the vision of the organization. Often, this exercise has implications beyond communications and informs strategic decisions the client makes. We also discuss lead generation, and how Kenny helps clients build thirty or more custom landing pages that each focus on a niche audience, providing something of value to earn the right to c

Sri Kaza, a former McKinsey partner who specializes in sales and service, left the firm to put his sales expertise to work as the SVP of Commercial Operations at Viking Cruises, and subsequently led sales for a company offering a SaaS-based solution to obtaining tax credits. Sri is now running his own independent consulting practice while also developing two separate SaaS startups. One of them is a tool to help companies hire the employees most likely to perform well and stick around, based on academic research and testing that looks at 70 personality traits. The other one helps companies optimize their incoming leads by routing that lead to the right sales person. Sri’s consulting is focusing on these areas, allowing him to better understand unmet needs.  So while he serves clients he is also doing market research for his startups. In our discussion we explore in some detail the concept of how to optimize incoming leads, and Sri shares some initial steps that you can help your clients with. Sri also mentions

Our guest today is Jason Korman, who entered the world of consulting via the wine industry. Jason is the founder of Stormhoek Winery, a South African wine label. While running that label, he retained Hugh MacLeod to blog and draw for Stormhoek, creating one of the the web’s earlier social media campaigns. Even if you don’t recognize the name Hugh MacLeod, you have probably seen his cartoons, which are absolutely distinctive. Hugh’s cartoons are generally about the world of work and marketing, and the drawings are beautiful and abstract, often resembling a cross between Rube Goldberg and Pablo Picasso. I've been subscribing to his daily blog for years and years – check it out at GapingVoid.com My hero Seth Godin is a huge fan of Hugh, and I think that’s how I first discovered him.  Hugh is also the author of the book Ignore Everybody, which I highly recommend. So Jason hired Hugh, and the campaign that Hugh developed was widely successful and won all sorts of awards – while the work helped sell wine, they foun

Our guest today is Ahmad Munawar, who helps boutique professional services firms build actionable marketing plans that generate more leads so they can win more business. He’s got a podcast that I encourage you to check out called “Forecast – Marketing for Boutique Professional Services & Consulting Firms” He’s also got a free video course on lead generation that you can take at fiveleadgen.com In our discussion, Ahmad walks me through the five steps that he suggests we take to build a marketing plan, namely: identifying our target market; developing our positioning; establishing what solution we’ll offer; building a marketing funnel; and creating an action plan. While those may sound like phases that our common to any marketing plan, we dive into what each step means for a boutique consulting firm. You can learn more about Ahmad’s firm at boutiquegrowth.com

On today’s episode, the tables are turned, and our guest, Sophia Dai, interviews Will Bachman. Sophia received her MBA from Kellogg and then spent the past two years at Boston Consulting Group. Now a Senior Associate, she’s decided to leave BCG, and independent consulting is one path that she is considering. Two or three or four times a week Will Bachman has a conversation with a top tier management consultant considering this option. This episode captures one such discussion.  In today’s episode , Will does his best to answer her questions  - including among others: why people decide to pursue the independent path, the first steps to take to start generating project opportunities, and the biggest mistakes people make when they start out.

Our guest today is Lisa Overton, a McKinsey alum and an expert on market research. Today Lisa is an independent consultant working on a range of strategy, marketing, and communications issues.  Previously, Lisa ran a boutique qualitative market research firm that offered traditional services such as focus groups as well as more innovative services including customer intercept interviews. In our discussion today we focus in on how to do those customer intercept interviews, and Lisa shares a range of lessons learned that you and I can apply in our practice. We discuss the incentives you need to offer the customer, how to approach customers, the best time of day to get a good interview, how to record responses, how much it will cost to hire capable interviewers, how many they can do per hour, and the types of questions you might want to ask to elicit surprising insights. We also do a role play in which I play a grocery shopper and Lisa interviews me about my grocery shopping habits.

Our guest today is Geoff Wilson, a McKinsey alum who subsequently served as the SVP of Corporate Strategy and Development at Milliken & Company, a privately-held, diversified manufacturing company headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina with 7,000 employees worldwide. Geoff left Millikin in 2014 and started his own consulting firm. Geoff wanted to keep living in South Carolina and keep long-distance travel to a minimum, so he has taken an intentionally geographically-focused approach to building his practice. In this episode, Geoff shares some tips on building a geographically-focused firm, and we also discuss his work on corporate strategy and business unit strategy. Geoff has been a good friend of mine for several years. We’ve worked together, he has given training at events I’ve organized, and he is one of the most capable consultants I know. You can read more about Geoff and read his blog at WilsonGrowthPartners.com

Our guest today is Umbrex member Amanda Setili, and we discuss her new book that is being published today: Fearless Growth: The New Rules to Stay Competitive, Foster Innovation, and Dominate Your Markets Amanda has been a guest on the show before, on episode 8, when we spoke about the Strategic Agility Think Tank which she established, and her first book, The Agility Advantage. In today’s discussion we dive deep into the content of her new book. In the first half of the show we discuss five strategic dilemmas that companies face. These dilemmas include tough choices such as: To what extent should we develop a carefully thought out plan vs plunging in and trying something new? and When new capabilities are needed, should we build them internally, acquire, or partner? Amanda’s book suggests that these five dilemmas require seven new rules, and we touch on each one of those in the second half of the show. If you work on strategy projects, this book is full of fresh thinking and well worth reading. You can read

Our guest today is Alexander Petersen. He is a McKinsey alum and a successful entrepreneur, having started a pet care business called Wagly. After starting Wagly, he was able to attract private equity funding to grow the company and hire a strong full time leadership team. He is now the owner of a boutique consulting firm focused on animal health, which I learned in this episode is a $50 billion dollar industry. Alexander has built a thriving firm by tightly focusing on an industry where he’s been able to get to know all the top players and build lasting relationships that continue on beyond individual projects. You can learn more about his practice at www.danashift.com

Larry Oglesby has been a close friend and mentor of mine for over a decade. I first got to know Larry when he was my Engagement Manager at McKinsey on a manufacturing lean operations project back in 2005, and we bonded over our shared service in the U.S. submarine force. Larry is a deep expert on operational transformation – after spending time in the Ops practice at McKinsey he joined the George Group – a boutique consulting firm focused on operations. After the George Group was purchased by Accenture, Larry stayed on and ended up as the Managing Director for North American Process and Innovation Performance Service Line. Larry has now started his own consulting practice, 440 partners – and we start our discussion with Larry explaining the name of his firm. A cliché in operational transformation is: To go fast, go slow. Larry has a different approach: To go fast, go fast.  In our discussion, Larry talks about the importance of speed in a successful transformation; he also shares how he incorporated into the

Our guest today is Mike Figliuolo, a McKinsey alum and West Point graduate. Mike is the founder and Managing Director of ThoughtLeadersLLC, which provides training to corporations that is inspired by the types of internal training that consultants receive at McKinsey and other top firms. He is also the author of three books One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership  The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, and Get it Approved Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results, which Mike co-authored with Victor Prince. I heard about Mike’s firm from several Umbrex members, who have helped deliver some training sessions for Mike, and I recognized his name because Mike was the very first person to interview me when I applied to McKinsey, seventeen years ago.  So it was nice to reconnect. In this episode, Mike gives an overview of his most popular courses and talks through lessons learned he has had in building a train

Our guest today is Ravi Rao, a McKinsey alum and neuroscientist who is the author of Emotional Business. Ravi has led sessions at several professional development events for consultants that I’ve organized, and he always gets fantastic reviews. Ravi was my guest on the second episode of this show, and it remains one of the most downloaded episodes, so if you like this episode, go back and check out Episode 2. In this episode, we talk about one really creative framework that Ravi has developed that helps you think about customer experience in a new way. I used this framework on one of my own projects right after I learned about it from Ravi, and the client loved it. I was really pleased that Ravi agreed to come back on the show to walk us through it. Check out the show notes for a link to download the framework. Please do use the framework, and please do include a source line that credits the book Emotional Business by Ravi Rao. 

Our guest today is Vivek Soman, a former McKinsey Engagement Manager who is the founder and Managing Director of The Ananya Group, which has completed over 300 projects since it was founded in 2008. Ananya is a Bengali word meaning “unparalled.” Vivek’s firm has a very clear focus: the client focus is large $1 billion revenue and up tech, media, telecom, and professional services companies  The service offering includes three types of projects: 1) competitive intelligence 2) customer intelligence 3) focused strategy projects Vivek has worked to standardize the process of doing competitive intelligence, and we discuss that as well as a couple practices I found interesting: 1) found that obscure tech journals in the Middle East and Europe – executives of large tech companies sometimes talk more openly about their product strategy that you can find in the US 2) developed a process to source 80-100 interviews, with very specific questions, just 3-4, You can read more about Vivek’s firm at www.TheAnanyaGroup.com V

Lauren Cole runs a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategy and operations for media-related businesses. Lauren got her start in consulting at Bain & Co. After getting her MBA at Stanford she entered the world of media and entertainment with a strategy role at Warner Brothers, where she worked for Umbrex member Steven Koltai, who has also been a guest on this show.  She had an impressive career in the media world, which included launching, investing in, and/or overseeing 35 cable networks around the world.  Then in 2002, she started her own consulting practice and has been a successful independent professional for the last 15 years, serving over 150 clients, covering everything from Broadway to sports to virtual reality. You can read more about Lauren’s firm, Cole Media, at www.ColeMediaLA.com