Our new consulting adventure

Those who know me probably wonder why I have left my previous job to jump into the adventure of starting a similar company from scratch. Although I felt fulfilled at my previous position and surrounded by an exceptional team, I wanted to experience if there was a better way to model a consulting company.

Talent and knowledge are key ingredients of a consulting business. The consulting activity is very attractive itself: meeting new people and new organizations, facing new challenges, reading and learning novelties to stay ahead and be valuable to clients. So, why is there a high turnover in this activity? Why are there so many consultants who don’t feel fulfilled at their job? Why are there so many professionals who speak in a derogatory manner about consultants?

I don’t know the answers, but I hope to build a workplace where collaborators feel owners and we built together a magic environment first for us and then for clients, vendors, partners.

We followed a design thinking approach, facilitated by Esteban Meléndez that allowed us to combine my personal “whys” to state common values that ground our project. My deep insights were four:

1. I’m passionate about supply chain, technology and business transformation.
2. I’m not the smartest one. Colleagues come out with solutions I never thought of.
3. I don’t want to be a freelance. I want to be a team player.
4. I enjoy developing people and learning from others.

We want to be happy people at work, we want to grow our personal reputation, which is our treasure and we think we will achieve it following these principles:

• We like to be treated as humans, so we will treat everyone as a human. Every organization is composed by individuals.
• We love people, working in network, in teams. Good-heart will be mandatory to stay with us.
• We consider us honest people. We tell clients what we know and what we don’t know.
• We enjoy our work. We won’t accept alienating work.
• We like learning, challenges, looking for excellence.
• We want to be owners of our destiny, so we will share financial information, financial perspectives and benefits with all collaborators.
• Our culture is work in progress This is the starting point and everyone can improve it, everyone is responsible of what we become.

We realised that these values could make a difference with the big consulting firms and we hope it will make a difference for our collaborators. We don’t understand projects with an army of junior consultants. We emphasize business experience. We can understand clients better because we have worn their shoes and we are ready to walk in our client’s shoes. Finally, we think we can be a platform for experienced professionals. We will try to make them fall in love with our model so a temporary collaboration becomes a permanent one.

We are just starting our story and we can only share our dreams. Our name reflects our aspirations. I hope some years ahead we will have succeeded. Facts and collaborators will speak loud about our success or failure. I also hope that if we were not smart enough, other companies will have been successful with similar approaches, placing people in the centre and caring for them above anything else. If I fail, I only aspire to keep trying.

Author: Eduardo de Porras
Publication date: 19 November 2017