Exploring Fortune 500 Consulting: Going from Startups to the Big Leagues

Can you work with larger companies without any experience working with them?

Dive headfirst into the world of Fortune 500 consulting with me as I break down the journey from micro-startups to the corporate world. I'll be peeling back the layers on the hiring process of big companies, debunking common misconceptions, and discussing why credentials aren't the be-all and end-all. I'll also be sharing my personal journey, providing tips on how one can present their value proposition, and advising on how to navigate this seemingly daunting field.

Now, imagine having fair pay, reasonable work hours and even scoring bigger contracts. Too good to be true? Well, think again. 

I'll be discussing the rewards of consulting for large companies, sharing tips on pricing oneself appropriately and making your services irresistible to large organizations. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale up, this episode is a gold mine of encouragement and advice, aimed at empowering you to reach higher. So, strap in and join me as we explore the thrill of winning over the big leagues!

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Chapters

• 0:41 Working With Big Companies
• 8:57 Benefits of Working With Larger Companies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

Hey everyone. It's your business bestie, laura Kalil, and I wanna ask you this can you work with big companies if you have no experience with them? That is exactly the question I am going to answer for you today. I hear this a lot from people who come to work with me who think well, you know, I could never work with a Fortune 500 company. I have no experience working at that level. My background, for those of you who don't know, is actually consulting with Fortune 500 companies, so I love to peel back the onion, so to speak, on what is and is not possible and how you can think about this Now. First I wanna say whether or not you wanna work with companies of that size or you just wanna work with companies that are bigger than the ones you work with today. This advice can be applied, okay.

Speaker 1: 1:37

So when I started my consulting career, some of you know I started because I was in the startup world. I worked with really, really small tech companies in Silicon Valley and I had this uncanny habit of getting laid off repeatedly, often because I was told I was too much, I wasn't smiling enough, I wasn't nice enough to men, I was intimidating them and all kinds of other bullshit. So when I started my company, I actually did not have any Fortune 500 experience. I had only worked with startups. I think the biggest company hmm, the last company I was at had maybe like 15 or 20 people. Maybe the biggest one I had was that had like 200 people, but most of them were pretty small. Most of them were under, I'd say, 20 to 30 people. So, no, I didn't have the experience to go into Fortune 500. But let me tell you why it worked out for me and where some of these misconceptions about working with larger companies come from. So I knew I wanted to work with larger companies after I'd left the startup world, primarily because I never wanted to feel like I was constantly singing for my supper, and by that I mean I felt that I constantly had to prove myself as a marketer in the tech world, and especially in the micro startup world.

Speaker 1: 3:10

And the reason for that was, at least in my experience, a lot of the startups that I worked for. They would have investors or venture capitalists or advisors who would tell the founder and the founder was typically someone in their 20s who was from an engineering background so their advice would be you've got to get someone to do marketing for you. But developers that I worked with often came from the mindset that if the product was good enough, it would sell itself, and so marketing was bullshit. And this happened to me repeatedly. So I would go into these companies and they'd say, well, our advisors or our venture capitalists say we need to have marketers here, so like that's why you're here, but we just think a good product sells itself First of all. A good product does not sell itself. So let's be really clear A lot of the companies that I worked for and this is very, very common among startups a lot of them went under.

Speaker 1: 4:13

A lot of them were acquired because they were about to go under. I'm trying to think if there were there's one company I worked for that had a very successful exit, but most of them crash and burn or sort of crash into an acquisition before they burn up. So if that's considered successful because their product should have just brought in legions of people, it obviously did not work. And so I was in a position where I was constantly working for these companies, having to prove the value of marketing. And if you are working with clients, where you constantly have to prove the value of what you do or constantly educate the client on why they need you. One, that's really fricking hard and not very fun. And two, if people don't truly value you, they're not going to pay you what it's truly worth. And so I knew. When I left the startup world, I was like these people don't value me, they have endless issues with my personality, they never comment on my work mainly because there's nothing wrong with my work but they also don't understand my work, and I'm really tired of working with people like that. So my drive into working with larger companies was because I knew that they already had marketing teams. I knew that they already had budgets for the type of work that I did. I knew I didn't have to prove the value of what I did. They understood it implicitly and that meant that they would pay me fairly. And that is exactly what happened.

Speaker 1: 5:53

It makes a lot of sense, if you have been working in the full-time world or if you've come out of the full-time world, why you would think you can't work with larger companies, and that's because there is, in many cases, a very specific track that people take from college into working into a Fortune 500 or larger organization. Typically, people graduate from a specific college and they get opportunities to work at some of these bigger companies and they will go through a program at that organization that kind of ramps them up into sort of like the culture and philosophy and way they work in that organization. And those folks come very often not always very often from certain pedigrees. And if you have spent most of your career, like I did, working in smaller companies, if you try to apply as a full-time employee to a larger organization, they may look at your resume and say, oh, they have no experience working at companies of this size and so no, they're just not a good fit for us. And that's what happened to me when I was working full-time and I was in the startup world.

Speaker 1: 7:08

It was almost impossible for me to get a job at a Google or Facebook as a marketer because they were like, well, she's only had experience at this small companies. Does she actually know how to work at a company of our size? Probably not. We have better candidates. Keep it moving. So that can be the case. I don't want to say it's true 100% of the time, but that is definitely a reality that full-time employees have to deal with, especially if you are in the sales or marketing or more creative side of work. Obviously, it was different for developers because they were really, really, really in demand, but this is actually not even remotely true in consulting and take my experience with it to heart when you start consulting, there's nobody who says well, can you actually show me your resume? What college did you go to? There is no grilling of you in an interview process in the way that it exists within the full-time world, like that stuff doesn't exist.

Speaker 1: 8:18

As a consultant working with those larger companies, the most important thing you need to understand if you want to work with bigger companies is understanding what problem they need solved and providing solutions to solve it. That's what they're actually looking for. Period, end of story. Nobody is looking at your transcript. Nobody is looking at your past experience to see if you've worked at companies of this size. They're just saying do they have experience solving this problem? Yes, okay, we're interested in talking more to you about helping us.

Speaker 1: 8:57

I mean, seriously, it's amazing to me how much easier it is to work with larger companies as a consultant than to work for them full-time, which is kind of crazy to me. At the end of the day, why I love working with larger companies is because they pay well. Especially if you know how to price your services. That's pretty critical. The work hours are typically not insane, because they're not working insane working hours, which is unlike small business owners who are typically running around with their heads cut off. It's a pretty great life.

Speaker 1: 9:36

So if that's something that you're interested in or you want to learn more about, grab my free download. It is in the show notes about how I gained my first $100,000 contract within six weeks and if you'd like my help making your business attractive to larger organizations, larger than what you work with today, knowing how to package your services, price yourself, improve your messaging and, especially, how to reach them. That is exactly what I do, both in my mastermind and during VIP days with my clients. So if you are interested in either of those options, reach out to me and I would love to talk more. All right, this is today's episode. I hope you have the confidence to go after those bigger contracts and those bigger clients, because you're going to be able to do that, and I hope you have the confidence to go after those bigger clients because you are so worth it.