Consulting as Startup Preparation Ground

Experience as a consultant can develop useful transferrable skills for leading a high-potential startup. Yet, by itself, it is seldom enough. Here are some reflections on both sides of the coin. 

Commonly aggregated into a specialty workforce in a consulting firm, consultants typically migrate from client to client, solving particular problems that are usually outside the normal workflow of a business with specialized skill sets. The limited-term, project-based orientation of consulting work tends to develop some beneficial skills that can be applied to startup leadership roles, including:

• The ability to come up to speed quickly on the important aspects of a new client situation is a crucial consulting skill. Getting up the learning curve and identifying the more important dimensions in a given set of circumstances rapidly is essential because the nature of the work is to jump into a new situation, contribute, and complete the project effectively and efficiently so that the client perceives great value and often aggressive timelines are achieved.  This translates well into a startup that is constantly engaging a new and evolving set of circumstances, requiring leaders who learn quickly, can discern what is critical, and solve the problems before rapidly moving on to tackle the next hill.
  
  
• Consulting teams are typically assembled from an available set of individuals for each new project. Each project involves a different group of consultants leveraging a common culture and set of foundational skills working together to accomplish a specific objective. Successful consultants must adapt and work well with a variety of other people, both on the consulting team and at the client, to succeed. This environment demands quickly establishing effective working relationships, inspiring the confidence in others that one is competent to do the work, and figuring out how to use others’ complementary skills and resources to get the job done. While startups typically do not have the revolving project team dynamic, there are still many demands to quickly connect with others in or around the startup in a dynamic and evolving environment, adapt to different work styles, and be flexible enough to work with others not like you.
  
  
• The project-based nature of consulting work typically demands strong project management skills, including figuring out how to break down the work into sequenced tasks, assign responsibility, track progress, and drive a critical path forward. Discerning and communicating the relevant context to set someone (often a client’s resource) up for successful completion of a task and effectively managing expectations and progress reports are additional essential layers of project management skills that consultants develop into strengths. A startup can be thought of as an often-giant project, demanding that the startup leaders act as effective project managers in organizing and tracking the work, communicating context to team members, driving to accomplish the next set of objectives, and reporting progress to investors. Those consulting-honed project management skills can be pivotal in the high-stakes world of startup execution.

While I definitely look for and appreciate the strong skill sets that a former consultant can bring to a startup team, as a former consultant, I am also aware of the limitations of a consulting career and the gaps that someone who has only done consulting needs to fill out. Here are a few common areas where consultants should look to expand or deepen their skills before embarking on leading a startup:

• Working in a fully developed company provides the opportunity to build expertise in one of the critical functional disciplines in a company.  Learning the disciplines of marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing, product development are valuable skills that are unlikely to be fully developed in consulting projects. Learning to build a go-to-market plan, write a press release, manage a supply chain, handle customer service, collect receivables, close sales, run a manufacturing operation, and all the other myriad functional disciplines is invaluable. The full suite of skills required in a functional discipline takes real-world time and experience to realize and is often what startups look for as they build out their team. Having those skills from real-world experience, especially in the industry of your startup, is incredibly valuable because startups often have little functional depth to rely on so they make use of every ounce of functional experience a team member can bring. Even better is developing cross-functional depth in multiple disciplines.
  
  
• General business management skills such as recruiting, people management, and financial management skills are often different in a service business like a consulting company versus a more traditional product-based business.  Experience building a budget, forecasting demand, managing inventory, producing financial statements, managing cash, writing a job description, evaluating candidates, establishing and managing payroll, benefits, taxes, and innumerable other back-office and staff functions are wonderful to have when launching a new startup. The more, the better. Especially considering that running a business unit with profit and loss responsibility is probably the closest analog to running a startup available in an established business. Remember that building a startup often means building a diverse and complementary team, securing and carefully managing financial resources, and handling all of these “behind the scenes” issues while still focusing on realizing the potential of whatever the “big idea” is.
  
  
• Before entering the world of startups, I spent years as a successful management consultant. I remember being baffled when sometimes a client would reject the compelling business case for change from a consulting operations improvement project. After I transitioned into leading startups, I realized that running a business, with its entire web of constraints and complex mix of interlocking priorities, made decisions about where to invest limited time, mindshare, resources, and opportunity costs much more complicated than the more serial yes/no decisions proposed by a particular consulting project. Developing the skills to navigate the more comprehensive and complex landscape of the full scope of a profit and loss-based company is an excellent grounding for handling the challenges of building a startup, which ultimately must grapple with all the functions of a full-fledged business as it grows towards success.

While there are doubtless a few other dimensions on both sides of this coin, hopefully, this gets you thinking about how to take advantage of learning opportunities using both paths and highlights opportunities to seek to expand your skills to prepare to be a successful startup leader.