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Friuch Consulting v.2

By crooky | November 30, 2007

It has been an embarrassingly long time since the last post on this blog and a lot has happened in the last six months. Friuch Consulting has, as you may have noticed, a new look and feel. This re-branding effort was spearheaded by myself and Marta Ekert (who did an excellent job on the website). I started this business in my living room with my wife (Parminder) after quitting my job with the BC Government, right before moving into my first mortgage and right after finding out that we were expecting our first child.

Needless to say, people thought I’d lost my mind. Four and a half years later, I’m getting ready to hire my first full-time employee and business is booming (hence the need for an employee). When I started out I was mostly sub-contracting for other, more senior consultants that I had met through the BC Government. I was focussed almost exclusively and Innovation and Commercialization research - the work that I had done while I was with the BC Science Council. For the first four years - that’s what I did. I got to work on some very interesting projects but I was having trouble growing my business beyond the half dozen or so repeat customers that I’d had for years (bless them). In late 2006, I was invited to join Rocket Builders as a Consulting Partner and working with these very successful consultants inspired me to take my business to a new level.

As a result, I’ve spent the last six months re-positioning Friuch Consulting in the market and re-branding my company. Rather than a Science and Technology/Innovation/Technology Commercialization firm, Friuch Consulting is now an “ideas realization” firm. I polled my current clients and colleagues and it became clear that the real value Friuch Consulting was bringing to the market was expertise in refining ideas, validating those ideas through research and then working with clients to develop implementation strategies. Our new motto is “Ideas. Validation. Action.” That’s the process I take every one of my clients through whether they are a young high tech company, a government agency, a non-profit or a traditional business.

Going forward, you will see three things new at Friuch Consulting in 2008:

1. The Blog.

I have committed to an editorial schedule for Friuch.com. Repeat visitors to this blog will see three engaging articles per week. Mondays will cover Science and Technology issues in Canada. Wednesdays will see a series of ProTips on Research and Intelligence methodologies. Fridays will be for discussing the business of consulting. To more easily enjoy the content on this site, please subscribe to our RSS feed.

2. A new company

In 2008, Friuch Consulting will be spinning off a new social enterprise that will focus on delivering business education to adults who would like to advance in their chosen career but can’t afford to go back to school to do their MBA. This “peer-to-peer” learning model will see cohorts of 15-20 adults commit to a two-year program that will give them the equivalent knowledge of an MBA at a major university but at a fraction of the cost while minimizing the amount of time that students need to take away from their families and jobs.

Right now, we’re in the process of putting together the business plan and want to start running cohorts in British Columbia by late March, 2008. I’ll be posting more details on this new venture on this site in January. If you’re interested in getting involved in any capacity, please contact us. We’ve already started a wait list for the program.

3. Alliance Partners

Also in 2008, Friuch Consulting will be partnering with other small consulting firms and sole proprietors to form a new umbrella brand. This BC-based consulting organization will combine the agility and low overhead of sole proprietors with the branding and capacity to tackle larger jobs that medium-sized firms enjoy.

If you’re a consultant and you’re interesting in getting involved in a co-operative consulting brand, contact us.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to come to my site and I hope we’ll have some interesting conversations on this blog over the next few years. If you have any sugestions for topics we can cover in this blog or if you’d like to guest-write an article, contact me.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Technology |

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