TEACHING & LEARNING
Consulting
to Growth Businesses
Opening the Doors to Private Equity
OUTREACH
Wharton
West: Back to School
Q&A with The Newly Appointed Director of The Wharton Small Business Development Center
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Inside The "War Room"
Tracking Digital Transformation
Teaching
Consulting to Growth Businesses
When Wharton undergraduates Alan Cook and Will Spearing teamed up to work on their first consulting engagement in Wharton's Consulting to Growth Businesses course (MGMT 251) in the mid 1990s, they had no idea where the project would lead.
In the applied consulting course, which is offered as part of an undergraduate concentration in entrepreneurship, Cook and Spearing were charged with helping to develop a marketing strategy for a company that made video monitoring systems for buses. The Philadelphia-based company, with just four employees, manufactured an on-board "flight recorder" for city transit systems to aid in insurance and risk management. During the Wharton course, the two students helped the company develop a marketing plan — identifying the needs and approaches to three distinct customer segments for the business.
"I kept in touch with the company over the next two years and every time I came into the office, the client would pull out the report and said that, of all the consultants they've hired over the years, this is the report we still use," Cook said. "That was a good feeling. It became a blueprint for their sales strategy." Today, that video surveillance company has grown from a tiny start-up to a multi-million dollar business.
Cook, who used to arrive in the Wharton class on rollerblades, now consults with companies on commercializing or licensing new technological products through his company 726 Ventures in Chicago. "The course did several things for me," Cook said. "It gave me exposure to the world of consulting. It gave me an opportunity to work with a local start-up and a taste of what it is like to work inside a growing technology company."
The major themes of his work in the course — consulting, starting up technology-based ventures and collaborating with Spearing — have continued to run through Cook's career since his graduation from Wharton in 1995. After working for a consulting firm, Cook returned to the video surveillance company to help launch a new Internet-based video monitoring product. He and Spearing then teamed up again to start a new company, ActivityOne, a community information center and ticket broker for local activities such as the YMCA or dance studios. They launched the service right as the dot com bubble burst in 2000. Since shutting down, Spearing and Cook have worked together on other consulting projects.
"I always had a sense that I wanted to build my own company, something to do with technology," said Cook, who started a business stringing tennis rackets as a freshman in high school. "I've always had an entrepreneurial bent. I knew I wanted to start a business and knew consulting would provide me with tools that would be relevant to that challenge."
"Life Is Not A Case Study"
As it did for Cook
and Spearing, the Wharton MGMT 251 course exposes undergraduates directly
to the ambiguous and incomplete problems of the world of consulting and
start-up ventures. There are no theoretical questions or detailed case
studies. This is real life.
Lecturer Eric Siegel, who has taught the program for nearly two decades,
offers students the kind of messy problems he meets in his own consulting
company — which he founded in 1982. "Life is not a Harvard case
study," he said. "In real live business situations, you have
to formulate the right questions and figure out what is going on. There
is conflicting information. When I role play clients in class, I speak
for 10 or 15 minutes and then there is two hours of questioning. Sometimes
I inform, misinform, give conflicting answers and students have to pick
up on the conflicts. I give evasive and fuzzy answers. They need to ask
questions and deal with clients who are a little prickly."
The course challenges students to develop creative solutions and think about the way they approach problems. "In the cases, we learned from the professor's experiences," said Jennifer Timmerman, a junior economics major at Penn and president of the Wharton Undergraduate Consulting Club, who recently completed the course. "He came up with some surprising stuff you would never think of unless you had experienced it."
Timmerman and classmates worked on a marketing project for online retailer Half.com, focusing on the college market. "There is only so much you can learn out of textbooks," she said. "I found that there is so much more to consulting than the knowledge part. There is also the people part, learning how to set up meetings, keeping people updated and putting in the final report and presentation to the client. You don't get that in other courses. It is very real world. We've been students for the past 15 years, so we are not used to that."
More Than a Grade
Although Timmerman and her teammates got an early start on the project and worked diligently through the semester, developing the 50-page report for the client was still a crunch at deadline. "It was incredibly intense," she said. "Just about everyone in the class pulled an all-nighter before it was due. It was a lot more like an internship than a course. You are actually doing real-world consulting. The only difference is you are getting graded at the end."
In most courses, students
are worried primarily about their own grade. Here, there is a client company's
progress at stake. "It is really much more than a course," Siegel
said. "It is an opportunity to break through the classroom wall.
When students come to class, I tell them they are joining a class and
also joining a small consulting firm. Students work very hard to deliver.
There is more at stake than the grade they receive. They have to deliver
some valuable resource to a living, breathing Philadelphia company. My
objective is to make sure students get a top-drawer learning experience
and produce from good to great work for the client."
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