05/01/14 - Masterclasses - How to be a Consultant

I attended a two hour workshop on consultancy, run by world renowned international business consultant and start up mentor, Chris Walker. I intend to become an ecological consultant in the future, and so thought this masterclass would teach me some useful transferable skills. 

Chris began the session by introducing himself, and his impressive CV, and then introduced the idea of consultancy. Although he was mainly talking about business consultancy, I could see how the skills he described could be transferred to an ecological business. He introduced the two forms of consultancy - Expert and Process - and then told us how these were different. I will probably become an ornithological expert consultant in future, but it was good to know about process consultancy also.

We then had a quick exercise to try and suggest how you'd go about fulfilling a clients wishes, from the moment you make first contact, to when the contract was completed. This exercise was fun and informative, but Chris never actually confirmed whether our ideas were correct, in the right order or practically applicable. 

We were then introduced to a "client" (Chris' new eBuyGreen project manager) and told that she wanted us to consult on how to set up her new business. Although this seemed like a good practical way to test what being a consultant is, it turned into a focus group coming up with ideas for their new company. I appreciate how shrewd and clever this move was, getting free advice from students with a range of technical backgrounds and expertise to help their new company. However, I thought it was highly inappropriate to have lured us all there on the pretence of being taught about consultancy, to then use us to produce free ideas. Between the group of 30+ of us we gave them free advice on finance, law, marketing, product range and design, among other things. Both Chris and the project manager were writing all the ideas down and will plainly use them to develop their new company - not just a fake company for the purposes of this workshop.

I feel like some consultancy skills were learnt during this "masterclass", but it was plain that it had been set up as an opportunity for the eBuyGreen team to get free advice. There is another 2 hour session in 2 weeks and I hope this will have a more consultancy based angle than this session did. 

[Due to other university work, and the poor impression made by the first session, I did not attend the second one. Apparently it was more of the same and taught no more consultancy skills that the first workshop did]