My take on building a consultancy firm in the venture capital space
Some time ago, I made a decision that probably raised a few of my colleague’s and friend’s eyebrows — I decided to leave a great job at the company that I had been part of since the early and gritty days, and put my mind to founding a venture capital-focussed consultancy firm with Trustventure.
Regarding the technical aspect of my work, the change wasn’t as drastic as I described in the opening sentence — after all, I did have comprehensive experience as a consultant in restructuring, financing and M&A processes. However, at the time, I was resigning from a comfortable position and that meant giving up the opportunity to have a very tangible and clear career path lined up in front of me.
Generally speaking, I am not one to decide impulsively, and my decision to start Trustventure was well though-through — at least this is what I was thinking back then. I invested a lot of hours to do my homework: I knew my strengths and, more importantly, I knew that there would be almost nothing in the world that gives me more joy and more thrill than working with awesome, fast-paced companies that solve real problems. So, before starting and during the early days of Trustventure, I held this romantic idea and vision of my future in consulting up-high, ready to change the way consulting could have an impact on growth companies.
During the first few weeks, the challenges of running a freshly-founded consultancy really hit me. All the tasks like setting up an IT-structure, acquiring clients, hiring employees and just generally setting up the firm competed with the day-to-day workload of projects with clients. When you are working in a larger consultancy, you don’t necessarily notice all the work that happens around you, so that you can fully focus on your clients and respective projects. So even though, I considered myself a pretty decent consultant who knew to structure transaction processes and drive customer success, most part of my day had little to nothing to do with actual consulting. Suddenly I didn’t feel like an experienced expert in my field who was now focussing exciting new projects under my own direction, but like a complete amateur in a field that had been completely new to me up to that point.
From that point on, my perspective towards entrepreneurship hasn’t been the same. From the outside, you get a lot of success stories and glossy reports of financing rounds, large deals and fantastic growth curves. From the inside, many founders, including me, see the struggle first and foremost. The struggle to find, train and retain great people. The struggle to acquire interesting projects and then execute them successfully (while already worrying about the acquisition of the next project). The struggle, of chasing bold visions on one side and on the other side having to manage the hassle of the daily business (managing IT structures, regulations and taxes suddenly does not seem so glamourous anymore).
Looking at this, the question arises why people take it upon themselves to found and build up companies. And although I have recognized the struggle as an eye-opening pain that keeps me from my beloved work as a consultant, I often realize that the work I struggle with the most leads to the best results in retrospective. By dealing with new topics about which we knew little before, we expand our comfort zone and our spectrum of knowledge, and even though we as founders may rarely find the most efficient way to solve a problem in similar situations, we permanently train our ability to find new solutions to unknown challenges. Today, I have a strong belief that the ability to solve the struggle also makes for a better consultant, because it means to be able to better understand and identify more strongly with the problems of the founders we work with.
Moral of the story, I strongly embrace everyone to embrace the struggle.
Happy Friday!
