My Consulting Journey: $0 to $685K in 6 months - Issue 232

An honest story of the highs, lows, and hard lessons from running an analytics consultancy.

Six months ago, I left MyFitnessPal, hoping to take a year off to focus on building the best data app and redefining analytics as we know it today.

Soon after, my ex-colleagues invited me to join his consultancy to help set up event data analytics for a Series C client who had just launched a new app. I expected to complete the project quickly and move on from consulting.

Well, what was supposed to be a quick stint turned into a completely new journey I wasn’t prepared for. Now, I work with 18 companies, have a team of rockstar analysts, am looking for more, and constantly question my own sanity.

Today, I’ll share my consulting journey: my clients, my team, the valuable (and painful) lessons on scaling a consultancy, recruiting top talent, and balancing client demands of "need-this-done-yesterday" with analysts' "I’m-out-sick-for-the-week."

If you are considering consulting, I hope my story will give you the highs and lows and help you avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way. I’ve added a few memes - this journey gets long and a bit dark!

A different mindset

To be fair, consulting isn’t new to me. I was fortunate to work with Primitive Logic, a premier consulting agency serving more than 200 Fortune 500 clients. We consistently ranked on lists of Best Places to Work, Top Women-Owned Businesses, and fastest-growing private companies in the Bay Area. I met some amazing people there, from whom I learned a lot, and I am still in touch with them today. Our boutique consultancy was acquired by Logic20/20, a Seattle-based firm with over 180 people.

These weren’t typical consulting agencies offering overpriced hourly rates for mediocre talent focused on pushing their “partner” enterprise tools (pun intended for Brooklyn Data or McKinsey). We invested in learning and mentorship, ensuring we were upskilled above industry standards. We supported companies like Adobe, Google, T-Mobile, Salesforce, Expedia, First Republic Bank, Wells Fargo, Visa, Genentech, and many more. I had the opportunity to learn from the best: how to talk to a customers, scope multi-step project into deliverables, automate reporting, and accelerate analytics efficiently and cost-effectively.

Working there trained me to think like a consultant, focused on end-product delivery milestones.  Later, this mindset became a challenge when I found myself as an employee under unqualified analytics leadership with no experience in successful data product execution, where the “strategy” boiled down to running analyses in Tableau and a roadmap that led to redundant CDP. Meanwhile, millions were burned on marketing that couldn’t be measured, redundant A/B testing tools that added no value, and entry-level hires needing coaching.

Only after going through that experience can I truly emphasize how essential consulting is - because, frankly, many analytics leaders out there have no idea what they’re doing.

Getting started - how I got my first customers.

Many consultants say the hardest part is landing the first 3 projects. Scaling after that supposedly gets easier. But my story was opposite.