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Career ROI

Building your career is an investment

We focus on your career ROI

Monday Morning 8am, our weekly podcast is on iTunes & Android

Financial Value Created for Employer

Working with members around the world, like Andrew, Richard, Tati, Peter and more, we have found that significant and enduring career ROI occurs when significant measurable financial value is created for employers / clients.

Financial Reward Recognition

Your salary and bonus is typically a function of the value you create for your employer, provided you position yourself to humbly receive the recognition you deserve.

Promotion

Promotions signal your movement into leadership roles. Without promotions you will reach a ceiling in the salary band for your level, and you will not have opportunities to develop management skills.

Followship

This is the principle where employees want to work for you, even if they organizationally report to you. With strong followship you will have the most motivated teams and create the best results.

ROI =

Subscription to FIRMSconsulting

Investment in your career.

ROI = 20x to 50x
for members who put in the required effort

ROI calculated through the change in salary and bonuses for subscribers over a 5-year period, divided by FIRMSconsulting subscription costs. All salaries are self reported. Based on members who cited their FIRMSconsulting subscriptions as the primary reason for their career success. Excludes non-financial and non-quantifiable benefits like promotions without salary increases, new titles, better personal relationship, better ability to guide your loved ones etc., which would raise the ROI.

When mapping the performance of members who self report their change in income, we find the best performers generate a 20X – 50X return because they focus on a few critical levers.


1. It’s not about them

They push aside their needs and ask themselves what their employer needs to excel. They look at their team, product, division and office, and help them succeed. They understand that by lifting everyone they will naturally benefit as well.

During performance reviews they can clearly enumerate the value they created for their employers.

2. They do the work

They listen to the advice, follow the programs diligently and implement the advice in their careers. They adjust the advice to their circumstances. They often report positive results within a few months but are usually chasing big goals that deliver significant career ROI over 12 to 24 months.

They pursue big assignments that solve tough problems for their employers / customers.

3. They execute

While they are learning from exceptional ex-McKinsey, BCG et al. partners, they heed the advice of the partners. In consulting, promotions are given for analysis, insights and reports that drive change at a client.

 

In business success comes from implementing what you promised. Implementation matters. If you can cannot deliver what you promised, you will not create value for your employee and there is no additional financial profits to flow to you.

They are relentless about banking the value they identify, through their teams / peers.

4. They apply the skills to their jobs

Members who generate a 5X or 10X ROI tend to spend most of the time learning the skills in the comfort of their homes and doing homework on sample exercises. They wait to be confident before applying the skills.

 

20X – 50X members directly apply the lessons to an important assignment they are leading at the office. They minimize the practice time at home to free up energy to apply the lessons to an actual project.

They learn in real time on the job.

Is this your Monday morning?
Reading the latest article in management

You arrive at the office and open an article from a leading business journal or consulting firm.
The article lists the 5 reasons why the leading companies in your field excel.
You note these points down and realize you cannot go forward. You know the what, but what about the how?

You have three options.

Option 1

You call up the consulting partner or author of the article. You like what they say and invite them for an in-person meeting. They are well on their way to advising you and doing the work.

 

You will not know how they did it and it will cost you millions. You cannot repeat what they did. You are dependent on them.

Option 2

You type up an email to your team, list the 5 reasons and press send.

 

Not much happens. Like you, they also don’t know how to achieve those results. The article makes a good conversation piece in your meetings and fades away with no discernible impact on your business.

Option 3

We will teach you both what to do and how to do it

As you learn these skills you will improve as a leader, your career will accelerate, and you will be able to pass on those skills to your teams.

 

Change is enduring when everyone knows what is happening and their skills improve. Change is enduring when you can lead the implementation.

Take back your career

You can do the work, build a remarkable team and deliver meaningful results

Hi there! If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me —spending most of your days in your office trying to deliver on a critical business goal in strategy, operations, implementation, pricing and so on and on.

 

You are also leading a team under stressful conditions, and possibly with some health issues.

 

Kris Safarova

Presiding Partner

You probably have 15 tabs open. One for Google, one for the McKinsey Quarterly, one for BCG Perspectives and on, and on.

 

Your team has a goal to deliver but you literally don’t know how to guide them in solving the problem.

 

So you read many sites hoping to piece together that one framework or tool you need. Google is your best friend. Yet, Google cannot help you implement anything.

You waste a lot of time. You have to repeat this needle-in-a-haystack approach every time for every problem. You don’t know if you are right. Your manager and team are not happy. You download consulting studies from Google hoping it helps.

 

You don’t know if that study solves your problem. You hope it solves your problem. You hope you can implement it.

You may even earn an MBA hoping to learn the skills to solve business problems and lead effectively..

 

Now you are 2 years behind in your career and $200K behind in your savings.

 

You soon realize the MBA is not enough.

Maybe you join a consulting firm. Maybe you join a bank. Once you leave you realize you are still in the same place. You know the language of business. You picked up some clever tools. But you don’t know how to lead your team to deliver on complex business goals. You are struggling to get colleagues to listen to you.

 

You have the credentials, but your career is not where you want it to be.

This is why we created FIRMSconsulting. We work with the most eminent ex-McKinsey, BCG et al. partners to help leaders create bankable benefits. We will teach you how to solve complex business problems from first principles, without having to join a consulting firm or study for an MBA. We will teach you to be a leader.

Until we came along there was no place to learn how to solve a complex business problem with a just a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

 

We will teach you that solving a problem is part paper-planning and mostly the hard work of seeing through the changes. We will guide you.

We teach you the most effective and advanced ways to solve complex business problems and how to lead a team to deliver on significant goals.

 

We walk you through each step of the analysis, and teach you how to select the analysis needed to solve each type of problem. We also focus on the soft skills.

 

You no longer have to read cryptic strategy articles hoping to reverse engineer the process.

We stream our >6,300 videos through Apps and websites so you can take your learning with you. We publish books and journals. Our journals often replace the planning documents you currently use. Use all our curated and edited slides and proposals.

 

Forget about having to waste time figuring out what to do on Monday morning 8 am. We’ve got your back.

Solving business problems is not hard. Leading should not be cryptic. These are skills that do not require spending hours sifting through vague articles to figure out an approach.

We make it easy for you. We do the teaching and training and you focus on your career, clients and customers.

Identity & Honor

“Our members see leadership as an identity. It is an honor for them to accept the responsibility of leadership. They don’t seek the title but accept the role when they are the only one’s who can make the necessary tough choices.

 

Leadership is their moral responsibility. What greater calling can they answer than the privilege of helping their colleagues and clients have better, more fulfilling lives?”

 

Kris Safarova
Presiding Partner

Leadership is a matter of choice

With deliberate and dedicated effort, you can be as influential as the people you admire and as capable as the people you aspire to emulate. 12 months of dedicated development and learning will yield a significant measurable ROI.

3 approaches

Which is right for you?

There are 3 different ways to become a leader. All of them work but they teach you different things and give you different skills. It’s a good idea to take out a sheet of paper and using the examples below think about what you want to achieve.

 

1 Conversational knowledge.

 

This is a method if you only want to understand the concept being taught in leadership. If you like reading business journals and books to improve your conversational business knowledge, this is probably what you are doing. You are not much interested in learning how to do the analysis, implement the recommendations or lead your team.

 

For example, you could read Bill’s memoir and learn about the concept of marketing spaces and new dimensions of value but you are not interested in understanding how Bill developed the concept so you can use the same approach to develop your own unique concepts. You are not interested in how Bill implemented this concept at McKinsey. You would only understand Bill’s ideas, offer examples and discuss it with colleagues.

 

You are fine knowing just a little about the ideas but will leave it to your team and/or consultants to do the heavy lifting.

 

2 Using the insight.

 

Some of us are pressed for time and we want the answers immediately. Rather than watching all of the Competitive Strategy program, all the Q&A videos and all +20 video sessions, you just want to know the approach used and a simple explanation for each part of the framework.

 

That’s good enough for you to do the work you need. In this approach you are taking the insight but not learning how to produce an original insight nor understand how to lead a team to implement the findings and generate banked savings.

 

You are fine being dependent on someone else to give you insights to use.

 

3 Produce the insight AND generate banked results

 

In a nutshell, this is what we teach. You want to be able to solve problems with just a clean sheet of paper and a pencil and lead your team to generate measurable results. You want to be an independent thinker who is not solely dependent on advisors. You do not just want the framework on Building an Electric Car Start-Up. You do not just want to do the analyses. You understand your career progresses as you produce measurable financial value and you can lead a team effectively.

 

You want to know how an insight was developed and how to bank the benefit. You know it is about more than insights and you want to learn the soft skills to influence, communicate, speak, lead and motivate teams to generate big results.

 

You understand the insight will not get you promoted. You need to generate measurable financial results that exceed competitors.

You do not want to rely on someone else to produce insights and create the results! You will lead your team.
Our focus

And what you can expect

We want to offer you the maximum ROI for your career. To do that, we need to decide whom we will serve as members and whom we will not serve. We focus all our resources on giving the members we choose to serve the tools they need to be successful. This is a good thing for everyone.

 

We choose to work with members who are good, ethical people who want to bring about positive change.

 

In addition, we have focused on the 3rd group above. People who want to learn how to produce deep and enduring insights, yet know they are measured on the benefits to their employers / clients. Members who are focused on results. That means our content tends to be longer since we explain both how and why we did things. We not only provide answers but teach you how to arrive at answers by yourself and implement the findings while leading teams.

 

If you just want us to get to the point / answer / insight / tool / framework without understanding the thinking and learning the soft-skills for implementation, it’s not going to help you be successful in the long-term.

 

We are choosing not to serve some potential members. That is okay. We cannot be everything to everyone and its better for everyone, especially you, if we clearly define our ideal client.

 

When building our programs these are members we are trying to serve.

 

You are a leader. You are not an analyst.

 

You are mature enough to understand that at a certain point in your career it is no longer a badge of honor to produce dazzling insights on PowerPoint. You must be the person taking those insights and embedding them in the organization.

 

You want to learn how to develop insights versus merely using an interesting insight.

 

You are someone who wants to have the skill to produce the level of thinking our partners produce but do it independently. In time you want to think like Kevin, Michael, Bill, Mark etc., and not be dependent on their ideas and approach to solving problems. Your eventual goal is to produce your own insights, analyses structures and solve complex business problems.

 

While there is always a need for a good list of the top-10 things to have, you understand a list is not a plan.

 

You have seen how many companies struggle and how many talented executives fail. Lists and short courses rarely work in a complex world. So you know a proper plan is not a list of ten things that you need to follow nor is it a set of fancy frameworks.

 

You know your analyses must look good and be well communicated, but you also know that it must work. It is always about implementation.

 

It must be something that will lead to success when it is put into place. A strategy is not a report to you. A strategy is giving advice that will truly make a difference.

 

You are not looking for shortcuts.

 

If it takes 10 to 15 years to become a senior partner/senior executive, you know anyone offering to teach you all those skills in just one course cannot be sincere. We do not make that promise. It will take time, but you will start seeing results quickly if you follow the plan.

Test your resolve

Are you ready to take on a challenging career role?

Most members who struggle to start and fall into the 5X ROI category or below, believe they cannot take on a challenging assignment at work and succeed. They don’t think they are worthy of career success. Or they focus too much on the analytics and forget about the soft skills like influence, followship and communication.

 

This free iTunes podcast channel is a simpler version of the Corporate Strategy & Transformation Program. See how we break down challenging career assignments into manageable work.

 

If you want to see all these skills in action that we teach follow this program. Doing exciting things should not be scary. It should be invigorating. All you must do is commit the time to listen to a few episodes and I am sure you will enjoy it. As soon as you start enjoying learning, it becomes easier. That should be the first goal.

 

In Phase 1, a 3.5-month study, follow us as we work with a client going through a difficult transition to recommend that Empire International refocus on the core business of Designing-Building-Operating-Maintaining (DBOM) Gx-Tx-Dx infrastructure.

 

Empire International is a power company created to invest in non-regulated businesses. All these investment markets exist outside of the parent company’s local market.

 

Since Empire Int.’s founding, that core/local market has undergone a shift where there is a renewed focus on expanding and maintaining the crumbling and outdated infrastructure base to meet surging electricity demand.

 

Unless Empire Energy, Empire International’s parent company, focuses on meeting rapidly growing energy demand, electricity blackouts remain a real threat that will impact the countries productivity and attractiveness for FDI.

 

Yet Empire Energy does not have the skills to do all the DBOM work and does see the urgency of rebuilding the infrastructure.

 

Therefore, Empire Int. Is recommended to become the in-house construction arm of Empire Energy to build new power stations and transmission lines, and prepare for a smart-grid increasingly powered by wind, solar and other renewables, while the parent company does not endorse the plan – yet.