Question about whether consulting can lead to entrepreneurship

[NOTE: I originally started typing this on Sunday night after the Super Bowl, but got caught up on the phone before I finished. I just now wrapped it up, so that’s why the intro paragraph seems like it came from a few days ago.]

What’s good, fam. So, I probably should be settling in to get some sleep in preparation for my Monday at work, but I’m still wired from that Super Bowl game. That was seriously one of the most exciting football games I’ve seen in ages. I was pulling for the Cardinals to pull through and shock the world, but they didn’t do enough scoring in the first half…or it could have been that interception that Kurt Warner threw at the end of the first half. Despite the outcome, I was still amped up to watch it with a good group of people who were as excited about it as I was. Wow, I don’t know if we’ll see another one like that any time soon.

Whew, let me try to get my mind right so I can get to this entry. OK, the email below is from a reader who wants to start business school in the next 1.5 years, but is wondering whether consulting will be the route to help him reach his long-term goals. And, by the way, it doesn’t really seem like he’s got his long-term goal worked out well either. In other words, he knows that he wants an MBA, but has a lot more thinking to do before applying in the Fall. In my response, I’ve answered his questions and gave him some unsolicited feedback/advice that should prove helpful as he makes the move toward B-school.

——-
JK wrote:

“Dear Marquis,

I am glad i came across your blog. I want to begin my MBA by 2010. I have been working in supply chain management in an aviation firm. Over the last four years my interests have changed a lot. and i am very interested in pursuing consulting in the immediate term or as soon as a i graduate from the MBA program. I love problem solving and i am always getting involved in some of the most exciting projects at work. But i do not see myself in consulting for long. i want some how consulting to lead me to identifying a start up opportunity.

Eventually I want to start a venture of my own which serves to create employment opportunities for the less fortunate people or in some way impact the society in a great way. i want this venture to be profitable and the people who are employed should be able to earn enough to bring up their families out of poverty. I am not sure what business model and what industry or which economy can this business be actually successful. I am rather impressed by the likes of Grahmeen bank, SK micro finance.

I am unable to piece my short term and long term plans all together. At this point i lack business exposure beyond aviation industry, i lack understanding of global economies, i lack financial skills and i do not have much understanding of start ups so i think MBA will fit in well because i surely want to branch out of aviation and i want to pursue business. But the transition of my short term goals to the long term goal seems to lack a link. Some where i am convinced that consulting will give me the edge of viewing a broader set of industries, work with broader economies and therefore make a wiser choice about my start up. in time my start up can incorporate strong CSR policies and it can give back a lot to society. Since you have been in the consulting arena for long, can you share with me if i am getting the picture right ? will consulting actually take me to the point of starting up my own firm ?

– jk”

——-
My response:

JK,

I hope this message finds you doing well. Thanks for thinking of me as a resource for your question. As I read your email, I realized that you are still very early in thinking through your goals and future path, so I’m happy to help you in fleshing it all out. I want to warn you in advance that I may make some statements or ask some questions below that may sound like I’m being harsh, but that isn’t my intention. Rather, I’m going to be saying the hard things that you should be saying internally because you’ll need to get used to that as you approach B-school. Pursuing an MBA isn’t something that should be taken lightly and this is the perfect time for you to mentally prepare yourself for the rigors of what lies ahead. Cool?…good, now let’s get started…

It looks like your big question is whether consulting can take you to the point of starting your own firm…and the short answer is that you can certainly pick up some skills to aid you along your entrepreneurial path, but it really depends on how you focus your time and attention during your time as a consultant. After some time in consulting, you will develop a set of fundamental skills, including structured problem solving, people/client leadership, effective and high-level communication, analytics, and frameworks to think about problems and solutions, that some people refer to as the “Consulting Toolkit”. Those basics of the consulting game can be useful in many contexts outside of the industry and can prepare you for any number of post-consulting career paths, including starting a business of your own one day. Then, there are some other abilities that you’ll likely pick up that I’d refer to as the “finishing school for business” benefits of consulting, including analyzing and understanding an industry with both breadth and depth, identifying the opportunities and challenges in different industry/geographic/organizational contexts, developing the soft skills that will enable you to rally people around a common aim, and recognizing what “good” and “bad” look like in a business/organization. I haven’t given you an exhaustive list here, but I hope you’re getting the point that one can learn a lot in the industry. By the way, not all projects will offer the kind of learning opportunities you will want and need, so you’ll have to do some due diligence on staffing options when the time comes. If you really do want to start a company, make sure you’re thoughtful about the projects you choose to ensure that you’re collecting the skills that’ll be useful in doing so.

OK, now is where we get to the harder words…Are you certain that you’re ready to make the move toward business school yet? For you to start in 2010, you’d have to apply in the next application cycle and you seem to be WAAAAAY behind the curve in figuring out your MBA story from beginning to end. In your email, you said that you’re unable to piece together your short-term and long-term goals, but I would say that you don’t even have a long-term goal yet. You’ve said that you want to start a company that will create employment opportunities or have social impact, but that’s too general of a long-term goal to be anywhere close to useful. You admit that you don’t know what industry, business model, or geography/economy your company would play in and that’s simply not good enough for your MBA story to be taken seriously. I understand that this may be due to your heavy focus on the aviation industry, but that isn’t really a valid excuse for not being able to put some specifics around your very “pie in the sky” vision for the future. You don’t need to know anything about business, global economies, finance skills, or starting a company in order to figure out your areas of interest and relate those to the purpose/mission/direction for the company you plan to launch. Granted, I’ve worked in a B-school admissions office, but I KNOW that the Adcoms are expecting you to have put at least some sort of structure around your goals, both short-term and long-term. I would recommend that you take some time to think long and hard about the kind of organization that you’d like to start in the future. To be honest, as close as you are to applying, you should have thought this through MANY times over and have developed at least a rough idea of your entrepreneurial future. I hope my words haven’t upset you, but, if they have, then that’s cool because it’s better for you to hear this now than at the end of the application cycle if things don’t work out. Don’t think of it as me being mean…think of it as me giving you some advice that will turn out to be very useful in the near future.

Wow, this turned into a much longer email than I anticipated when I started it. I hope that you’ve found everything I’ve said here to be helpful. Good luck on your business school applications and the eventual launch of your company…just make sure you figure out what kind of company that will be between now and then 🙂

-M