Start and Run a successful consulting business (Udemy.com)

What is the aim of this course?

No matter what you do at some point you will be fed up with your boss, your work, and corporate life. Most likely you will start thinking about having your own business - something that you can put your effort into and make great as well as profitable. Maybe, a small restaurant? Maybe, a startup?  If you are working in professional services one of the options you should seriously consider is to start and run a consulting firm. It can be a very profitable business and help you build other businesses on top of that, especially technological startups.     

In this course, I will show you how to start and run a consulting company fast and efficiently.

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as the owner of a small consulting company (the last 7 years). I have been also a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from the Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. Thanks to my versatile experience I know the subject from all sides including the customers of consulting firms. 

I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion in additional EBITDA. Based on what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who now are Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COOs, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 275 000 students including people working in EY, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses, and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excels as well as additional presentations, and materials shown in the lectures so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you or your team in your work.

I do not like to overcomplicate things so in every lecture I will be quite straightforward. Most lectures will have also a lot of additional resources: templates, examples, procedures, list of tools. The idea is that you have everything that you need to start and run a consulting business in one place. If you don’t find something that you need let me know - I will try to prepare something and I will add it to the course.    

Why have I decided to create this course?   

For our teams, we have created courses that help us improve the consultant onboarding and the teaching process. We have started to use them extensively also with customers that we work with and their teams. Since we made them available to a wider public we got many requests, especially on Quora, on how to run a consulting business. We try to minimize repetitive work so we decided to take this course in order to cut down on the questions we are getting.   

This course is based on our extensive experience in working and running consulting companies. In many cases, we use also a lot of clever solutions from other service companies that we helped set up and improve.   

In what way will you benefit from this course?   

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of, tricks, hints, and examples that will significantly speed up your process of starting the company and afterward scaling to a sensible size. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. We intend that thanks to the course you will know:   

1. Where to find ideas for consulting business, consulting firm?

2. How to analyze in Excel whether the business makes sense or not?

3. How to get the first customers?

4. What to concentrate on if you are a 1-man show, a freelancer?

5. What kind of tools you should have?

6. How and in what way you can set up pricing for your services?

7. How to prepare for scaling, and expanding?

8. What kind of business you can build based on a consulting firm?   

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.     

How is the course organized?   

The course is divided into the following sections:   

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course  and consulting

• Where you can get ideas for your consulting businesses. In the second section, we show where you can find ideas on how you can build a consulting business.

• The business model of a service company. In the third section, I will show you how to calculate whether your consulting business will make money. We start with a general service company and show how to put it in Excel, and how to draw conclusions from this.

• 1-man show. The next section will show you what you should concentrate on if you are running a 1-man show, you are forced to be a jack of all trades. This is also very good for freelancers and coaches.

• Getting first customers. In the fifth section, you will learn how to sell your services, where you can get the first customers for your consulting services. For the time being, we show 8 ways but we will constantly update with new ideas

• Tools you need in a consulting company. To be successful in consulting you need a lot of tools created in a proper manner. We will show you what you should use and in what way to be successful in your business

• Pricing. One of the most important things in the consulting business is pricing. I will show you how you can set your price, what should be your pricing positioning and how you calculate the price and margins of a specific project. We will talk also about dynamic pricing and how to sell cheap projects to your customers with high margins for you

• Managing a consulting company. We have a separate section on the organization of the consulting company. We talk here about the structure of the company and the role of specific positions.

• Preparation for scaling of consulting company. In this section, we talk about things that have to be properly set up before scaling them to significant sizes. If you have already a functioning consulting business this section is for you.