A Call To Consulting
A Hero’s Journey for Those Who Advise
While I had many fits and starts throughout the 1990s writing business plans for a living, my real consulting journey begins in the late nineties, when I teamed up with a group of talented individuals who aspired to do big things during the dot com boom. While they had prior success building websites and software applications for MTV, The New York Times, and other high-profile clients through their respective employers, they were struggling to land new business on their own. Well-funded competitors like Razorfish, US Web, and Sapient dominated the industry, using their capital to recruit top talent and outfit lavish, high-tech offices.
The downside was that, in order to appease their investors and pay for those big salaries and luxurious offices, they charged exorbitant hourly rates as they engaged legions of staff to produce even simple websites. For me, together with my new creative colleagues, I saw a great opportunity – an opportunity I would later embrace as a calling: We could produce exactly what they produced in less time for less money if we focused on outcomes over hours.
The First Pitch
When the opportunity arose to bid on a large project for a major fashion brand, my new partners balked. The largest job they had previously won came in at a mere $5,000. But I knew that those much larger competitors would be seeking big fees because they had big bills to pay. So undeterred, I prepared a detailed proposal that sought $192,000 - what I believed would be a fraction of competing bids - for the development of a commerce-enabled website that had to be built from scratch, as there was no Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify back then.
And against all odds, we prevailed.
More importantly, I embraced a truth that has motivated me throughout my career: Always show up.
Big doesn’t matter. Better funded doesn’t matter. What matters is the courage to be original and to show up.
We were lean and hungry. Our prospective clients surely knew that our competitors’ inflated fees were subsidizing their expensive offices and “$1,400 Herman Miller Aeron Chairs that we provide for every employee,” as one competing executive boasted. We had furniture from Ikea we assembled one Saturday afternoon – with lots of pizza and beer, as I recall.
We extended our successes, getting repeat work from that initial client, and adding W Hotels, Chick-fil-A, the BBC, and Deutsche Bank to our client roster. Six of us, crammed into a little 12x20 office in Lower Manhattan, were cranking out millions in work.
Building a Practice
Yearning for a larger canvas, I jumped at the chance to join the consulting firm Perr&Knight where, in 2004, I saw a similar but grander opportunity. While firmly entrenched in the insurance industry as a top-tier provider of actuarial and regulatory compliance services, their CEO, Tim Perr, was determined to leverage the firm’s stellar reputation to capture a share of the massive insurance technology market. And it was for that task I was recruited.
Armed with my prior experience, I confidently competed against the likes of Deloitte, PwC, and Gartner – massive organizations with tens of thousands of employees worldwide – and prevailed. My pitch? We were smaller, more nimble, and we’d always bring our “A” game. And there was one more thing: I always looked for an angle that would be unique to our organization. Something no other firm would bring. And that required creativity and innovative thinking – the very qualities I had honed working at that little internet consultancy that did big things.
Those innovations included designing a statistical reporting solution that helped us capture a three-year contract with Great American – a client that has been with the firm since 2006. Using discrete event simulation to support a cost-benefit analysis at Citizens Property Insurance – which led to three additional winning bids for seven figures’ worth of work that lasted from 2008 through 2014. Creating a proprietary requirements framework that tied strategic objectives to business processes to use cases to functional requirements that landed us several years of work at Texas Municipal League (another seven-figure client). And developing a unique, templated approach to vendor selection that made predictable the vendor selection process and helped us to win thirty-plus such engagements. Over time, that practice grew to represent roughly a third of the firm’s revenue, demonstrating that our unique approach worked.
Paying It Forward
A major part of that success came from the people I had the privilege of working with. I saw potential in many – potential that was often buried under overwhelm, burnout, or the politics of consulting life. With genuine intent, I helped them identify their strengths, navigate uncertainty, and rise into roles they hadn’t imagined for themselves. Several became partners. Many surpassed their own income expectations. Most importantly, they became consultants – true advisors – instead of just resources.
That experience changed me. And it’s precisely why I created Supren Advisors. To help others do the same: to stop trading time for value, and start becoming the kind of advisor clients trust – not just for answers, but for the earned value of a relationship that pays dividends for years.