In the Community: “Fostering” Future Consultants

You may be familiar with our previous work and support for the UW Foster School of Business - but this year marks a new exciting endeavor! The UW Consulting and Business Development Center (CBDC) is holding a Business Management Consulting Program all via Zoom, and RedCloud is excited to help out by providing a team of mentors. 

Four RedCloud mentors: Marie, Sophia, Mary Anne and Scott are tasked with guiding and advising the small student teams (4-6 members each) as they navigate a real-life client challenge scenario, devising their own plan for solving it with their business school knowledge thus far. The projects kicked off in January and the student teams each completed their client presentations late March.  From here through the end of May final meetings will occur with the clients to guide the implementation of the student team recommendations.

As our mentors work through feedback sessions with their teams, they each work through the clients’ provided situation.  Here is an example:

-Situation: Client A fabricates their own products and is struggling to attract new, large opportunity customers. Their audience is from a generation that likes routine and regularity.

-Key Questions from Client A: How can we attract new and larger customer audiences? How can we use technology to differentiate ourselves from our competition?

In working through challenges faced by each client, the student groups will recommend a solution. The solutions are backed by hours of market research and competitive analysis. The students spend significant time and effort diving into the client’s industry wholeheartedly to recommend the most effective next steps to give the clients a competitive advantage.  So far, these groups of eager future consultants have done an excellent job and our mentors are really impressed! Check out what UW Consulting’s Instagram post had to say about the progress.

After hearing the recommendations from their student team, one client has already committed to hiring the team on for the summer to continue their consultation and execute on their recommendations. 

“It's been invigorating!  I so appreciate the energy and the climate of learning and applying academic techniques to real world clients and situation” said Marie, one of our RedCloud employee volunteers.
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We commend each of the student groups for a job well done and look forward to your entry into our industry in the near future. Well done all and thanks again to our RedCloud volunteers for providing such critical feedback and guidance to these students!