A few years ago, I left my job as a McKinsey consultant. I had always wanted to work at a startup so I joined LetsGetChecked, a health-tech startup in Dublin.

I fell in love with startup-land straight away. I just found it so exciting and fun - and as cliché as it is, wearing shorts to work instead of a suit was a game changer!

But, for a few months, I struggled to transition from being a consultant to working at a 30 person startup. I mean, they are completely different ball games. I realised that a lot of the things that made me a good consultant weren’t that helpful to me in startup-land. In fact, some of them actually made me worse at my startup job - there are few things a founder hates more than the consulting jargon I used to spew!

A few years later, I’m still in startup-land, now working at Wayflyer.

Over these years, I’ve learned what it takes to go from being a good consultant, to a great startup employee. And I wanted to share those learnings.

If you are making the move from consulting-land to startup-land, these tips should be helpful. You’d probably figure these out by yourself eventually, but if you’re interested in fast-forwarding that learning process a few years, read on.

1. Focus on Outcomes, not Output.

In consulting-land, success usually meant giving the client a nice, big powerpoint deck. When I was a consultant, I would focus on how many pages I could create or how much analysis I could complete each day. This was my Output. If I delivered a lot of high quality output, my manager was happy and I was successful. Happy days.

In startup-land, this is no longer the case. Success != Output. Instead, Success = Outcomes.

Not sure what I mean? Let’s look at an example.

At a start-up, you might be asked to increase user retention. Your job is not to “find out how to increase user retention”. Your job is to actually increase user retention. This means that your job is only done when you have achieved that outcome - e.g. user retention has increased. 

Creating the plan for how you will achieve the outcome is a useful step, but is not the same as delivering the outcome. Honestly, as long as you deliver the outcome, noone will care what nice plan you had to get there.

2. Become self-sufficient.

Every startups has a resourcing problem. Teams are stretched and their backlogs are massive. If you are always relying on another team to create something that you need, you will be waiting a while. The more you can deliver YOURSELF, the more successful you will be.

Right now, you may not have many hard skills. You mightn't be able to code, design or use SQL. In your new role, you will need to deliver Outcomes that require hard skills like these. If you want to deliver these Outcomes, you can't always rely on other teams to provide these skills. 

So, what can you do? 

First, figure out the tasks that you need completed most often. Are you always waiting on landing pages? Is there a piece of analysis you need but can never get?

Then, look at which ones you can learn yourself.

Finally, go learn them. If you are in a Growth or Marketing role, learn SQL, learn to design landing pages, learn to write great copy and learn whatever no-code tools you need to run campaigns (Zapier, Airtable, Webflow, Bubble are all great examples). 

This will take time, but these skills will compound quickly. Soon, your ability to deliver outcomes will increase significantly. You’ll be able to deliver end-to end initiatives by yourself and noone will be able to figure out how you did it so fast.

There are two extra benefits to this. First, you might find a new area you really like! Second, you’ll learn enough about these skills to help you better manage people in these areas in the future.

3. Build long term relationships.

When I was a consultant, most of my projects only lasted for a few months. I was usually working with client teams and would make a genuine effort to build good relationships with them.

But ultimately, I knew that I could burn a few relationships along the way if I had too. In a few weeks, I would leave the project and never see them again. They weren’t the ones evaluating my performance or deciding my bonus. So if they hated me, who really cared. As long as my manager liked me, happy days. 

It was often more important to get the output I needed from people (e.g., some dataset) than to maintain a good relationship. I’m not saying that is an objectively bad thing, it was just the reality of the role. 

This is no longer the case. In startup-land, you need to build long term, trusted relationships across your organisation. 

Again, time for a quick example to bring this to life. 

Let’s say you’ve been given the task of launching some new partnership at your startup. It was a last minute thing so you have a super short deadline. You need a landing page for this partnership so you go to your design team and ask them to help. They tell you they have no spare capacity and a long backlog of things to get through. You hear them, but you don’t really care. You need your landing page and you need it now.

So, you demand they drop what they are doing and get your landing page created that week. You shout loud enough and they give you what you want. You get your landing page, thank them and move on. Job done.

In the short term, sure, you’ve got what you wanted. But this will DEFINITELY come back to bite you. You’ve pissed them off and have damaged an important relationship. This will not be the last time you need to work with these people. How do you think they will react the next time you need to work with them? 

You have to treat every team in your organisation as partners, not someone to fulfil your demands. At times, this will mean not getting what you want. That will suck, but, I guarantee you it is better than ruining your relationships. 

Hopefully, you will be working with these people for years. DO NOT sacrifice long term relationships for short-term gains.

In consulting-land, the rules of the game meant that this trade-off was usually worth it for you. But you’re a player in a different game now. Act accordingly. 

4. Cheat.... really, I mean it.

In consulting-land, I had a defined set of tools I could use to solve problems. Overtime, I acquired more tools and added them to my toolbox. I became great at building excel models and learned how to find the best internal experts to help on my projects. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the potential size of my toolbox was extremely limited. Not because I didn’t want to learn more skills, but because consulting-land limits the amount of tools you can use.

In start-up land, you have exponentially more tools available to you. Instead of having just your own toolbox that you can carry with you, you are basically living in a giant hardware store FULL of tools! Realising this is so powerful that it will feel like cheating.

Why do you have so many more tools available in start-up land? Well, because in start-up land there are way less rules. Let me show you some of the new tools you can use and how powerful they can be. 

Firstly, you can just ask someone who has done it before. I have literally looked people up on LinkedIn, dm’d them, jumped on a call and asked them for their advice. Better yet, hire these people (either full time or as a contractor) to actually do the thing you want. You don’t need to figure out everything on your own. Just find the right people and get them to help you. You can’t do this in consulting-land. When you do it, it feels like magic. You can’t really do this as a consultant.

Secondly, just Google it! A lot of the problems you’ll face have been faced before. There is so much great information out there for start-ups. Find the blogs, podcasts, Slack groups, that are relevant to your new role and mine them for answers. Engage with these communities, contribute to them and make friends. They will give you answers to some of your toughest problems. I've done this more times than I can remember.

Test it. Got an idea? Not sure if it will work? Don't waste time debating, just test it. In consulting it takes a long time to get stuff done and there are lots of rules about what you can and can’t do. In startup-land, you have the gift of speed. Figure out the MVP of your idea, don’t worry about asking for too much permission and just go and run it. Instead of debating internally for weeks about whether it would work or not, you can let the real world tell you whether it will work or not, often in days.

Talk to customers! This is such a no-brainer. In consulting-land you never get to talk to your client’s customers. In startups, this is so much easier and it is SO POWERFUL. Your customers will give you useful information to help you solve your problem. For example, I was recently thinking about how to best describe one of our products. I was going back and forth with different ideas but wasn't cracking it. So, I just had a chat with some of our customers and asked how they would describe it, in their own words. I got an answer that was 10X better than what I had. Again, cheating!

Lastly, find a course that will teach what you need to know.There are so many great courses out there, everything from 4 week copywriting courses, to memberships, to cohort based courses like Reforge. These are run by experts and they will just give you answers to many of your toughest problems. 

All this will literally feel like cheating. But guess what, this kind of cheating is allowed!

5. Get great at implementation.

Startups are 5% strategy, 95% implementation! In consulting-land, this wasn’t the case. It was mostly about strategy, finding out what to do and creating the plans to do it. The night before the final steer-co, we might throw in an “Implementation” section at the end of our deck. A beautiful “Win hearts and minds” slide and a nice Gannt chart. Job done.

Well, not really.

If you ever worked on an implementation or Ops project as a consultant, you know just how hard it is to actually implement things. Like, it’s really, really, REALLY hard!

What does this mean for you? Firstly, you need to spend most of your time and effort on implementation. Strategy is sexy but it doesn’t deliver Outcomes. Get great at implementation. It will be a super power for you.

Secondly, if you are ever developing a strategy, you have to think about implementation from the start, not as an add-on. The question; “how are we actually going to do this?” should be top of your mind at all times. 

You’re an “operator” now. Great operators are great implementers and I have 5 tips for being great at implementing; (1) Keep it simple (2) Focus on process (3) Over-communicate (4) Do what you say you will do (5) Be ruthless about just getting stuff done.

6. Make your own opportunities

Startup-land is FULL of opportunity. You can massively accelerate your career if you create these opportunities and take advantage of them. 

Here’s the playbook for finding and taking advantage of opportunities; 

1. Find some part of your company that is broken (it’s a startup, this won’t be hard).

2. Ask around to see if anyone is already working on fixing it.

3. If the answer to is no, go fix the problem yourself. It may have nothing to do with your responsibilities but noone is going to stop you from fixing a problem. The only reason it hasn’t been fixed before is because nobody bothered.

4. Implement your solution and deliver the Outcome.

5. Start small and continue to do this for bigger and bigger problems. Soon, you’ll have a reputation as an impactful leader. Someone who solves important problems for the company. Then, when a new (more senior role) comes up at your company - which happens frequently at fast-growing start-ups, you are already a great candidate.

For example, your company decides they need to hire someone in Demand Generation. They think to themselves “is there anyone internally who could do this?”. They remember you just fixed a big problem in one of the email nurturing campaigns that is the biggest demand generator for the company. They reach out to you for a chat about the new role and you take it from there. It is SO much easier for your bosses to promote internally than hire externally. Make it easy for them to do so and you’ll land yourself some awesome opportunities. I’ve seen this over and over in startups and it’s definitely one of the biggest benefits of working in startup-land.

If you made it this far, fair play! I really hope this was helpful. If you have any feedback, let me know.

Considering migrating from consulting-land to startup-land? Shoot me a DM or email if you want to have a chat; stephenduke8@gmail.com.

*I define startup-land as the set of companies that display the main characteristics of fast-growing technology companies - This definition therefore includes large public companies (like Uber) down to small seed-stage companies with a handful of employees.

**This is probably relevant to people moving from Investment Banking (banking-land) too. I’ve never been a banker myself but I imagine a lot of the points are applicable.