Our guest today is Umbrex member Ian Tidswell. Ian has a PhD in physics from Harvard. He did science for a few years but missed the human element and ended up as a management consultant at McKinsey. After McKinsey he worked at Vendavo, a software firm, and that is where he fell in love with pricing, which for Ian is the perfect mixture of the analytical and the human element. In this episode, Ian shares his perspective on pricing, including Why pricing is so important signs that a company has an...
Jul 02, 2018•58 min
Our guest today is Neil Booth. In our discussion, Neil shares how he became a deep expert in how to build a really well designed model – he followed what could be termed the Benjamin Franklin method. Neil then turned that skill into a career. Neil also shares some modeling best practices – such as splitting up your formulas – do one step at a time – cells are cheap. We also geek out on cell styles, how to define constants, and whether you should include macros in your model. Neil is currently wo...
Jun 25, 2018•51 min
Our guest today is Scott Skibell. I’ve heard from several people that video is the new thing, that video on LinkedIn gets much higher engagement, and that if you want to work on getting your message out, you need to learn how to do video. I took Scott Skibell’s course, LinkedIn Video Marketing, and I thought it was great, and so asked Scott to be a guest on this show, to discuss video in an old-school audio format. What I really liked about Scott’s course is his message: keep it simple, your vid...
Jun 18, 2018•54 min
Our guest today is Tim DeRoche, a McKinsey alum and independent consultant who is also the author of The Ballad of Huck & Miguel , a novel published in February 2018 by Redtail Press. The Ballad of Huck and Miguel is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Tim imagines that Huck is alive today and instead of traveling on the Mississippi with an escaped slave, Huck is living in Los Angeles and travels along the Los Angeles River with an undocumented immigrant. ...
Jun 11, 2018•52 min
Our guest today is Umbrex member Susan Drumm, a CEO Advisor and Leadership Coach with over 20 years of experience coaching entrepreneurs and executives. Susan got her start in consulting at BCG, and she is the only person I know who has graduated from both Harvard Law School and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Susan often facilitates off-site sessions for her clients, and in this episode she shares with me a set of best practices for making off-sites successful – including how to p...
Jun 05, 2018•49 min
Sunny Bates is a legend and one of the master connectors of the 21st century. She is one of my heroes and it was really a privilege to have the chance to meet with her at her offices in Midtown Manhattan. Sunny is on the Board of Directors of Kickstarter, an Advisory Board Member at the MIT Media Lab, a Brain Trust Member for the TED Conferences, and an Advisory Board Member for the American Theatre Wing, which means she gets to vote for the winners of the Tony Awards. Sunny operates wherever ex...
May 21, 2018•39 min
Our guest today is my good friend, Umbrex member Celine Teoh an independent strategy and marketing consultant in the Bay Area whose functional specialties include data-driven marketing strategy and execution, strategic planning and business planning. On this episode, we discuss steps firms can take to improve customer retention. We also discuss the benefits you can derive from journaling – in terms of productivity, creativity, happiness, and centeredness. Celine has been journaling actively for ...
May 07, 2018•42 min
Our guest today is a good friend of mine, Umbrex member Paul Millerd. Paul has experience at McKinsey and BCG as well as the Board & CEO Advisory Group at Russell Reynolds Associates, one of the top executive recruiting firms in the world. He currently has a wide portfolio of activities – he is a real Renaissance talent. He is currently an independent strategy consultant, a career coach, the host of a podcast, Boundless, an active writer who puts out great posts several times a week. He host...
Apr 30, 2018•40 min
Our guest today is Umbrex member Whit Pidot, an independent consultant who was formerly a Partner in the Travel practice at McKinsey. His clients include the CEOs of some of the top travel companies in the world including airlines, rental cars, and hotels. Whit has been fascinated by the world of travel from an early age. As a hobby, he has been running a travel agency on the side since college. In today’s episode, we first explore some of Whit’s favorite travel hacks for business travelers, suc...
Apr 23, 2018•49 min
Our guest today is Joachim Fischer, a mentor and good friend of mine who was an Expert in the Operations Practice at McKinsey when I got to know him a dozen years ago Joachim is the only McKinsey alum that I know who started his career as an apprentice cabinetmaker. As he explains on the show, the training he received as a cabinetmaker has been incredibly relevant to his career, probably more important than anything he learned in college. He still spends a lot of his free time building beautiful...
Apr 16, 2018•50 min
Our guest today is Tsavo Neal, who has thought hard about how consultants can generate more client leads with their website. Tsavo has written dozens and dozens of posts on this topic and you can find all his work on his website, tsavoneal.com , which is a valuable resource. He’s got examples of best-practice consulting websites, dozens of specific ideas on how to raise your visibility, tips on how to convert website visitors into leads, and much more. Tsavo has many valuable insights on marketi...
Apr 09, 2018•45 min
Our guest today is Aner Ravon, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Zirra, a technology company focused on market analysis, using big data and artificial intelligence. Aner and his co-founder recognized a real pain point for investors and anyone else doing research on smaller companies: it is very time intensive to search the universe of sources and pull together a basic set of facts. They thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could use artificial intelligence to scan public sources and pull tog...
Apr 02, 2018•46 min
Our guest today is David Topus, who helps his clients turn reputation into revenue. I think that’s a pretty great positioning, encapsulating what David does in four words. And that’s what you’d expect from a professional who has been running a strategic sales messaging firm for over twenty-eight years. In the first half of our discussion, we cover personal branding, with a focus on how to enhance your LinkedIn profile. In the second half of the episode, we discuss David’s most recent book, Talk ...
Mar 26, 2018•50 min
Our guest today is Jonah Gruda, a Tax Partner at the accounting firm Mazars USA, LLP. In this episode, we discuss a wide range of tax-related topics relevant to independent professionals. We cover differences between various structures including LLC, S-corp, and C-corp. Before our conversation, I thought LLC was the obvious choice for most independent professionals, but Jonah made me realize that there are many factors that go into the equation and you really want to sit down with a professional...
Mar 19, 2018•58 min
Our guest today is Rak Chugh, the Founder of Byte Academy and the Architect of edChain. We met in his office in Midtown Manhattan. Byte Academy provides training in python development, FinTech, Data Science, Quant Algorithms, and Blockchain. They have a full-time program with modules that last 14 weeks, and a part-time program designed for working professionals. Their students include recent college graduates – even some with Computer Science degrees – as well as mid-career professionals who wan...
Mar 12, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Our guest today is Molly Leeds, a benefits account manager at Brown & Brown of New York. Molly helps small and medium sized businesses to obtain the best package of employee benefits to fit their needs. In our discussion, we focus on healthcare benefits. If you are a solo, independent professional with no employees and no partners in the United States, your main option for getting health insurance is Obamacare, via healthcare.gov. But if you have at least one employee, or you band together w...
Mar 06, 2018•50 min
Our guest today is Johnny Warström, the CEO of Mentimeter, which is a tool that can help you make presentations, workshops, and meetings more interactive. Here's a link: https://www.mentimeter.com/ The tool lets you take a live poll of your audience, and the results get updated real-time in your presentation. The audience doesn’t need any special hardware – just a phone or any other device connected to the Internet. When I interviewed Johnny, I had not yet used the tool. I just got back from fac...
Feb 28, 2018•33 min
Our guest today is Josh Boltuch, the CEO of Fancy Hands and its subsidiary, On Demand Ops, and in this episode we talk about both firms. Fancy Hands is a network of thousands of U.S. based virtual assistants. You sign up for a set number of requests per month and pay a fixed monthly fee. Each request can be pretty much anything that can be done on the Internet or by phone – whether that is calling your utility company to complain about a charge on your bill, or researching the best BBQ joint to ...
Feb 19, 2018•41 min
Outsourcing research tasks via Upwork is a superpower that every independent professional ought to master. In this episode, I provide a range of examples that illustrate the types of tasks that I have outsourced to freelancers on Upwork, and then I discuss tips and tricks on how to use the platform effectively.
Feb 12, 2018•19 min
For many independent consultants, staffing firms are an important channel for getting connected to project opportunities. This episode presents 45 tips for independent consultants on how to work effectively with staffing firms and become their go-to resource.
Feb 05, 2018•28 min
On the show today Julia Bunte-Mein is back. Julia, a brilliant and accomplished sophomore at Harvard College, spent a day with me on a Winternship. On our last episode, Julia interviewed me about the advice I’d give to my college-age self, and related topics. On today’s episode, I share the tips that I’ve learned on Getting (Some) Things Done. I loved David Allen’s classic book titled Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. His system was a bit too complex for me, and I’ll be s...
Jan 30, 2018•26 min
On the show today our guest is Julia Bunte-Mein, a sophomore at Harvard College, who spent one day with me over her winter break on a Winternship. I’m pretty sure that I learned more from Julia than she did from me over the course of the day. One of the things I learned was that if I were applying to Harvard today, I would have had a lot less chance of getting in, as the bar has been raised over the past couple decades. Julia added real value on Day One. Little did I know, but she has deep graph...
Jan 24, 2018•57 min
Our guest today is Chris Doig, who has thought more about enterprise software selection than anyone else I know. I’d like to thank David A. Fields for introducing me to Chris. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Wayferry, a boutique consulting firm with a very tight focus: their entire focus is on helping enterprise clients select software. The firm has developed its own proprietary software and processes to support enterprise software selecton. Chris is also the author of a book that was publish...
Jan 01, 2018•55 min
Our guest today is Diane Mulcahy, a McKinsey alum and the author of The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want. Her book grew out of the MBA course at Babson that she developed titled “Entrepreneurship and the Gig Economy,” which was names by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Business School Classes in the U.S. Diane’s book is structured around her ten rules to succeed in the gig economy, and in this episode we disc...
Dec 28, 2017•45 min
Our guest today is Roger Lee, the owner of F1 Consulting. Roger provides remote IT support for independent professionals, home offices, and small businesses. He helps his clients with network design and installation, cloud services migration, remote monitoring, and offsite data backup and disaster recovery. One of the tools that Roger mentions in this episode is LastPass, a password manager. After Roger and I spoke I adopted LastPass myself and I strongly recommend it. Roger asked me to point ou...
Dec 21, 2017•34 min
Our guest today is Jennifer Hartz, a McKinsey alum and the founder of Corporate Hartz. Jennifer has several focus areas including business-driven community relations strategies, nonprofit strategic planning, and personal philanthropy. Her philosophy is that generosity and profitability can, and should, go hand-in-hand. Her lessons learned from helping families take a strategic approach to philanthropy can be useful to all of us – you don’t need to have a $100 million fund to start a family conve...
Dec 11, 2017•43 min
Our guest today is John Dranow, the CEO of Smart Revenue. John’s firm has hundreds of trained, vetted field researchers available around the world, and his firm can help you fill in the data white spaces. Big data can help us analyze in exquisite detail what is happening, but it is hard to know from the data what isn’t happening. How many people walk by a store but don’t look at the window display? How many people look at the window display but don’t enter the store? How many people enter the st...
Dec 04, 2017•49 min
In this in-between-isode, Will Bachman shares four tools useful for any independent professional: 1) DocuSign - to avoid the need to print/sign/scan/email 2) Expensify - to keep track of your expenses. 3) ScannerPro - to create multipage PDFs with your phone 4) Rev.com - quick and affordable transcripts
Nov 27, 2017•9 min
Sinisa Slijepcevic studied with Stephen Hawking, among other professors, while earning his PhD in applied mathematics at Cambridge University. Sinisa is a McK alum and independent consultant and runs a firm called Cantab Analytica, which is based in the UK and Croatia. Sinisa’s firm leverages machine learning to help clients make better decisions and to focus energy on the right decisions. In our discussion, Sinisa provides several case examples to illustrate how machine learning can help make d...
Nov 20, 2017•54 min
Our guest today is Karen McGrath, who runs a firm of virtual assistants called Awan’s Assisting. If you are an independent professional and feel crunched for time, this episode is for you. Karen and I discuss why an independent professional should consider hiring a virtual assistant (a VA), the types of tasks that VAs are most commonly asked to do, how to find and screen a VA, and some tips on how to build an effective working relationship with a VA. Karen clearly knows her business, and you can...
Nov 13, 2017•45 min
