Before we get in the thick of it next week, I just wanted to welcome you to this limited-edition program we'll be involved in together for the next few weeks.

You don't have anything to prepare; simply take some time when the first newsletter arrives next week and use it as a prompt to probe how you could eventually frame a consulting business (or refine a current one). The work we will do together is not mechanical, as you will not unlock perfect answers a week at a time, and eventually, everything will work perfectly. Growing a business is an organic thing with genuine unpredictability and even messiness.

In that sense, the weekly prompt will help you push your mental picture of a consulting business in various directions that might not appear to be precisely linked together but that, by the end of the process, will (hopefully) start to all click together. I will also encourage you to get things done in real life if you can because nothing beats the hard, cold contact with reality and taking the risk of having amazingly good surprises along the way!

To help you warm up, I will share a few articles I previously wrote that might help you get into the best mindset possible about consulting.

First, to start to prepare for key elements of designing and growing any business, I'd encourage you to start asking yourself these simple questions:

  1. What problem do I solve for my customers (and who would be the one with the most significant problem to solve)?
  2. How much value do I bring them (and how do I explain it to them)?
  3. What should be the leanest and most efficient way to do it (also known as 'your product')?

There is no need to answer these... (again, don't prepare anything yet), but keep these three questions in mind as an overarching framework for future discussions. And yes, this is our usual business framework:

The Innovation Framework – Innovation Copilots
The effective and no-nonsense innovation framework we use to design new business models for startups and multinationals alike.
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

Secondly, here are a few things about consulting I wrote very recently or a few years ago that might also help you get preliminary ideas:

🟢 Are you a Plumber or an Alchemist?
For many years, I have pondered how to nudge organizations most effectively through troubled waters or, quite often, sheer storms, and in doing so, I always asked myself the core qualities involved to get there. How to be an efficient ‘copilot’. And if you’re reading this newsletter, you might not
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA
How to pick an expert
Being an expert at something is sometimes difficult to discuss, prove, or even validate from your perspective – not to mention from a potential customer’s perspective! There are usually two ways to pick an expert: social proof and some seniority—someone recommended by others who has accumulated enou…
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA
On consulting and being paid like a plumber...
Today’s a concise post to share an amazing business pitch that reminds you what opposability means when talking about added value. It’s not about AirBnB or the usual startup suspects but from a rock-star sound engineer named Steve Albini. We were in 1992, and it’s a letter explaining his work
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

I'm saving this fourth article as a perfect way to encourage you onto the consulting path (it starts with 1. You don’t need a personal network to start consulting):

12 Things we learned in 10 years of consulting – Innovation Copilots
My good friend Stéphane (and sometimes partner in crime) has made a remarkable two-part blog [http://15marches.fr/business/post-mortem] about his “post-mortem” of four years of consulting. This is only in French, though, but hurry up and Google-translate it. I don’t think we would change a word to
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

Lastly, I would ask you a simple thing as you are only 30 in this first version of the program: if you have any specific questions you'd like to see addressed in the coming weeks, please let me know directly, whether by email or by a LinkedIn DM.

All ready?

See you next week ❤️

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