About I've made multiple career transitions so far 1) Engineering and software development for a Fortune 100 firm 2) MBA and IB 3) IB to corp dev 4) Corp Dev to business transformation (COO) role 5) Independent strategic advisory for small to medium businesses Not everything was planned on Day 1, and different paths opened up at each stage. Happy to answer questions. Mentoring Want to work with me? Click here

Thanks for doing this. Quick questions for you: How did you build a book of business to consult for small/medium sized companies? I've been lately considering contracting on my own someday because the idea of avoiding the politics/bureaucracy of mega companies in corporate America is pretty appealing to me. The thing that always stumps me is how I'd go about winning business, so what steps did you take to do this? You touched on this briefly in another response, but do you have good resources for learning python/R in a way that's actually helpful for corp fin?

It took me about 4 months to find a corp dev role. It was not easy though. In IB, I had a list of recruiters I could call and could land 2-3 interview within a couple of weeks (whether or not I could convert them was a different matter). But for corp dev, the process of finding out which places had open roles was all from networking.. none of the jobs I applied to online for corp dev yielded any call-backs. I was able to convert the first corp dev interview I had, fortunately (but this is not common).

I found the analysis and the "flow" of the modeling to be fascinating and I really loved making the the numbers all work (not just making the three statements balance but really seeing that the modeling was just plain and simple math). Once I got the concepts, I knew I could build any kind of model.

1) I started with my network - ex-bosses, ex-colleagues, close friends, and asked them to consider me for projects or to tell people they knew. There are other ways like working with project consulting companies who can send business your way for a (big) cut of the top line. Its very much a work in progress, and I spend about 50% of time in biz dev, instead of executing, so be prepared to hit the road, make calls and follow-up.

Q&A: Career Transitions - Corporate to IB to Corp Dev to Independent Consulting

Lester Freamon

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Thanks for doing this. Quick questions for you:

How did you build a book of business to consult for small/medium sized companies? I've been lately considering contracting on my own someday because the idea of avoiding the politics/bureaucracy of mega companies in corporate America is pretty appealing to me. The thing that always stumps me is how I'd go about winning business, so what steps did you take to do this?
You touched on this briefly in another response, but do you have good resources for learning python/R in a way that's actually helpful for corp fin? There's plenty of free resources to understand what a dictionary/tuple is and some information about doing basic things in pandas. That said, I find it very hard to apply these tools to most of the finance/accounting work I've done so far. I feel like SQL is more useful so far, since I can create smaller datasets by filtering from larger databases that excel can't handle. Can't say the same for Python thus far, so what am I missing and where can I inform myself?

Thanks!

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