Should You Hire a Management Consultant? with Carrie Osman @ Cruxy - Escape Velocity Show #35

About this video

In this Escape Velocity interview, Carrie Osman, founder of Cruxy, explains her consultancy on pricing, strategy, and execution for high-growth B2B tech and fintech companies. She came from Mars, Incorporated, where she ran a large P&L — starting with about a $50 million revenue segment of canned Pedigree dog food — and grew frustrated with consultants from firms like Bain and McKinsey who largely told the time using the client’s own watch and left 200 slides in a drawer. She quit, sold her sports car and shoes, moved in with her parents, and signed a first client in payments that exited nine months later to Barclay Card. Cruxy’s difference, she says, is emotional intelligence: befriend clients, understand their fears, and tell them what they do not want to hear, organizing strategy around why, how, and what, and asking ‘what are you not doing?’ She stresses the void between strategy and execution, audited through a weekly meeting reviewing what was expected versus what happened and whether the next two weeks’ calendar matches stated priorities. On hiring consultants, she advises early companies not to: at around $1 million ARR, do the first layer yourself using data and templates she will share. Hire help when an important project is being endlessly deferred — ‘frogging’ — and the opportunity cost of tying up your team exceeds the fee, because a consultant delivers to a process in a set timeframe. She also discusses output-driven leadership, personal one-on-ones, coaching for her team, resilience through the brutal and glorious founder journey, relationship-building by doing favors, and staying focused on complex tech, pricing, and new markets, saying Cruxy worked with 60 clients, expected close to a million in revenue that year, and aimed to double revenue the following year.

Key takeaways

• Good consultants should not just consolidate what you already know into slides — the hard part is executing, so judge them on delivery, not decks
• Test strategy by asking ‘what are you not doing?’ and auditing whether time and resources actually align with stated play-to-win markets
• Do not hire a consultant at early scale for work you can do yourself with data and templates; hire one when an important, deferred project (‘frogging’) costs more in team time than the fee
• Run a weekly audit of expected versus actual outcomes and review the coming two weeks’ calendar for meetings to cancel
• Build buy-in with emotional intelligence: befriend the team, understand the real problem and people’s fears, and use why-how-what clarity instead of strategy documents no one can draw

Episode details: published August 27, 2020 · 45:39 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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