Business Idea Generation for Management Consultants

What is the aim of this course?

To build a business you need a good idea that you can explore and develop. Unfortunately, coming up with a good business idea is not easy. Most firms and universities don’t show how to come up with business ideas. They concentrate on teaching you how to run existing businesses. Luckily, there are a lot of proven methods to find interesting business ideas. If you are a Management Consultant you can use them during consulting projects to help your customers grow their business. If you are a manager or startup founder they will prove priceless in your quest to discover new business opportunities. In this course, I will show you different methods to come up with killer business ideas. In the course you will learn the following things:

1. How to come up with business ideas by improving existing products, solving existing problems

2. When specific methods of business idea generation can be applied

3. How specific business method should be applied

4. How to find ways to 10x existing solutions

5. How to innovate your product and your business model

6. How to build an add-on business using your current business

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated in total 2 billion of additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who now are Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 124 000 students including people working in EY, McKinsey, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses, tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excels as well as additional presentations, materials shown in the lectures so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modification, be applied by you or your team in your work.

Why I have decided to create this course?

Most firms and universities don’t show how to come up with business ideas. They concentrate on teaching you how to run existing businesses. However, coming up with new business ideas is required if you want to grow the business. At some point, the small improvements and organic growth will not suffice. New business ideas not only help you grow the business but also help you make it more durable and sustainable. New business ideas will help you come up with new ways to change your business model and adjust to new trends.

This course will help you become an expert in business idea generation. This skill will prove very useful not only in consulting but also later on when you become a director or you move on to build your own business. By giving you exposure to real-life cases and analyses I want to improve your skills in business ide generation. Thanks to this course, you will know what and how to do it during strategic consulting projects devoted to creating new businesses. We want to provide you with frameworks that will open your eyes to new opportunities.

To sum it up, the course will help you become an expert in business idea generation on the level of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, PwC, Deloitte, EY, and other top consulting firms. That is why, I highly recommend this course to Managers, Management Consultants as well as Investment Directors working for PE, Directors, owners/founders of businesses.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tones of analyses, tricks, hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you generate new business ideas. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will learn:

1. How to come up with business ideas by improving existing products, solving existing problems

2. When specific methods of business idea generation can be applied

3. How specific business method should be applied

4. How to find ways to 10x existing solutions

5. How to build an add-on business using your current business

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You can also ask me any questions either through the discussion field or by messaging me directly.

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently into 4 sections. Currently, you will find the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course as well as some general info on how the course is organized

• Improving existing things. In the second section, I will show how to come up with business ideas if you don’t have an existing business and you want to improve something already existing. In this section, we will discuss methods like: Solve your own problem, Carve out existing business, Clone businesses, and ideas, Blue Ocean, 10 x current solution using first principals, From Free to Paid, Ride a trend, Disrupt others

• Jobs to be done. In this section, I will show a powerful framework that can be used to understand the role which the product plays in the life of a customer. This will help you innovate, find new business ideas and most of all identify the right competitor landscape from the point of view of the customers.

• Build on existing business. In the 4th section, I discuss a situation when you already have an existing business and you want to build an add-on business using your current business as a starting point. We will discuss numerous methods in this section as well: Go up or down the Value Chain, Vertical Consolidation via M&As, Build add-on business, Build entirely new businesses, Enabling Investments, Expand the brand into new categories, Disrupt yourself, Use existing assets in a new way, Experiment with different sales channels & revenue streams, Turn failure into success, Repurpose a product / Find the new application to a product

You will be able also to download many additional resources

1. Useful frameworks and techniques

2. Selected analyses shown in the course

3. Links to additional presentations, articles, and movies

4. Links to books worth reading

   
   

At the end of my course, students will learn to…

• How to come up with a killer idea

• Innovate your product and business model

• Find ways to create a product 10x better than the current solutions

• Build a new business on top of existing businesses

• Disrupt others

• Apply Blue Ocean framework

Who should take this course? Who should not?

• Management Consultants and Business Analysts

• Managers

• Analysts working in Strategic Departments

• Startup Founders

• Investment Directors

What will students need to know or do before starting this course?

• Basic or intermediate Excel

• Basic knowledge of economics or finance