You can take advantage of my experience managing and growing businesses by hiring me as a consultant. For more information about my consulting practice, visit www.secondstageconsulting.com. Following is a quick overview of the services I provide.
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Q: Who are your consulting clients?
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My clients fall into two different categories: 1) Owners, partners and senior managers at small to mid-size professional and service businesses; and 2) business intelligence functions in data-intensive larger companies.
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Q: What problems do you help smaller businesses solve?
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For smaller businesses, I focus on problems that fall into three categories: 1) organizational challenges that arise as the business grows or shrinks; 2) financial management challenges, especially cash-flow challenges; and 3) strategy development.
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Q: What problems do you help larger businesses solve?
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For data-intensive larger businesses (e.g., financial service, insurance, or marketing companies) I help bridge the gap between data and decision-making. The challenge for these companies is that they possess huge amounts of data, but are too often unable to effectively bring that data to bear on the day-to-day decisions that significantly affect financial performance.
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Q: I have a small business and it's been growing quite nicely, so I don't think I really need any help.
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Congratulations! That's quite an accomplishment, particularly in the current economic environment.
Growth, however, can be the riskiest phase of a business's life cycle.
I imagine that for the past few years your business has been like a teenager -- a bit wild and crazy, impulsive, and shooting upward -- getting bigger by the day. A lot of your success has been the result of good intuitions, seat of the pants steering, and roll-up-your sleeves, pitch in and just do it attitude on everyone's part, from you all the way down.
All that is great, and has really worked for you. But have you noticed any of the following trouble signs?
Welcome to the challenge of becoming a grown-up business!
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Making the turn from adolescent to grown-up company is likely to be the most serious challenge you have yet encountered. When a promising and successful business suddenly fails, it usually fails right here.
Guidance and advice from someone who's been through the growing pains can help you keep growing, reduce the pain and make the business fun again. Get in touch with me, we'll sit down and talk. I'll collect some information, then get back to you very quickly with some specifics on how I might help.
And just in case you were wondering:
No, things will never be the same.
And no, things won't ever be fun in the way they used to be.
But yes, you'll have a different kind of fun -- grown-up fun.
And believe me, grown-up fun is a whole lot better than teenage fun.
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In Depth
See below for my Consulting Credentials
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| Context
I grew a business information and analytical consulting firm from start-up to a multi-million dollar business. I started and grew a high-profile not-for-profit arts organization. In the course of this work, I've consulted to some of the nation's largest financial service firms, as well as start-ups and growoing small businesses.
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Principal and Founder, Second Stage Consulting
Second Stage Consulting helps small and medium size businesses deal with the challenges of transforming themselves from early stage "adolescent" to disciplined, productive, professionally-managed "grown-up" businesses -- fully-fledge ongoing enterprises. We help companies re-design their organizational structures, production and service delivery processes, marketing, HR policies, financial management, and I/T infrastructure to meet the demands of the "second stage" of their life cycle.
Chief Operating Officer, MarketStance
In addition to developing information resources, MarketStance is a boutique consulting firm. The firm specializes in engagements that deliver analytical solutions for concrete business problems to clients: market opportunity and positioning, distribution management, underwriting and product development. MarketStance has built a reputation as a firm that provides objective, unbiased, fact-based, but most importantly actionable business intelligence.
Developing this company over 10+ years provided me with extensive, real-world insight into the challenges of starting and growing a successful business. Unlike many consultants, my advice, analyses and insights are grounded in a powerful combination of primary real world experience growing a business, consulting expertise, and a top-notch business education.
Consultant, Center for Applied Research (CFAR)
The Center for Applied Research (www.cfar.com) is one of the most respected management, strategy and organizational change consulting firms in the country. Working at CFAR gave me my first exposure to consulting from the inside. During my time there, I conducted strategic industry analyses for clients; managed primary data collection, research, data analysis and report writing.
MBA, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
Wharton is one of the most esteemed business schools in the world, and provides its graduates a rigorous grounding in the fundamentals of business management. My experience at Wharton was enhanced by the fact that I attended Wharton only after several years in the business world, enabling me to connect theory to practice that much more effectively.
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