Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional

Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional

Unleashed explores how to thrive as an independent professional. Each week we interview an experienced independent professional to discuss the types of projects they do, how they win business, and tips and tricks for how they thrive in business and life. Keywords: management consulting, independent consultant, business development, career, McKinsey, Bain, BCG

Episodes

June 2, 2025 43 mins

Show Notes:

Alex Lugosch and Ilya Druzhnikov, founders of True PMF, explain that True PMF is a rapid prototyping and discovery service for startups and established companies who are releasing a new product or testing a new market and don’t have the tools or six to eight months to try new experiments for product market fit. The firm uses c...

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Show Notes:

Vanessa Liu, co-founder and CEO of Sugarwork, talks about how this tool helps enterprises capture tacit knowledge by acting as a guide. Sugarwork helps companies capture specific information at scale and enables sharing, and guides companies to ask specific questions to elicit the required insights. 

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Show Notes:

Ami Parekh discusses the business model and services of Included Health, a company that provides personalized healthcare. Included Health partners with self-insured employers and health plans to improve the way working Americans and their families receive healthcare. 

Included...

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Show Notes:

Sarah Dobson, founder and creative director at Design of Brand, discusses their niche in helping founders of companies establish their brand identity. They offer a process that includes brand strategy, naming, and creating a visual identity system for launch or relaunch. She explains what a brand identity entails and prov...

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Chad Oakley,  CEO of  Charles Aris, a second-generation executive search firm, discusses their 55-year history and their focus on four areas. Charles Aris specializes in strategy and go-to-market practice, which places individuals into corporations, private equity firms, and portfolio companies. Chad explains their areas of expertise and mentions that the firm has a team of over 100 and h...

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Show Notes:

Joe O’Mahoney is a part-time professor of consulting at Cardiff University and  a leading authority on the growth and sale of boutiques and small consultancies. He has spent 20 years researching consultancies and interviewing hundreds of owners and senior leaders. He has developed a growth drivers model, which includes factors...

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Show Notes:

Chris Freeberg is the co-founder of deck.support, a company that brings some of the best tools for PowerPoint into Google Slides. Chris and cofounder Dimitri Limberopoulos recognized the need for increased functionality in Google Slides as more companies were switching from PowerPoint to Google Slides but wanted a larger varie...

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Show Notes:

Stephan Meier, a professor at Columbia Business School, is the author of the book "Employee Advantage." He teaches the business strategy core class, which is required for all MBA students. Stephan also teaches an elective on the future of work, focusing on how treating employees and labor interacts with technology and business...

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Show Notes:

Dori Yona, founder of Simple Closure, explains the process of shutting down a company. The process is painful, manual, and bureaucratic, with an average time of nine to 12 months. It can cost companies thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. Many companies end up doing it incorrectly, leading to ...

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Show Notes

Jacob Bank, founder and CEO of Relay.App, talks about the rise of AI agents, a type of chatbot that can work on your behalf in the background. He explains that AI agents can perform tasks similar to junior-level employees or interns. 

How AI Agents Work

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Nikola Lazarov is the co-founder and CEO of Eilla AI, a tool that provides AI workers for private market intelligence. Nikola is an AI engineer who started his career at a London-based hedge fund, Marble Bar Asset Management, where he worked as a quant. He realized the value of AI in structuring unstructured data for private companies and decided to start a company almost three years ago....

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Jeff Sinclair, a senior global leader at McKinsey, discusses the history of operations at the firm. The firm was initially known as a strategy firm and did some organization and marketing work. However, in the 1980s, clients began to draw more attention to operations, particularly in the automotive industry in Europe and North America. Operations became a strategic function for automotive...

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Show Notes:

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments and founder of Ness Labs, shares her approach to understanding her own life and why she does things the way she does. Anne-Laure explains that self anthropology is a powerful tool for problem-solvers and doers to understand their own lives and prioritize their priorities. By embr...

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February 3, 2025 49 mins

Show Notes:

In this episode of Unleashed, Will Bachman interviews Harsh Sahai, CEO and co-founder of Bridgetown Research, a company that has built an AI tool and he talks about it in this episode. Harsh previously worked at McKinsey, where he focused on commercial due diligence. He also ran a machine learning lab at Amazon, where they res...

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Show Notes:

Jim Ettamarna, a renowned expert in commercial excellence, defines it as incorporating commercial efficacy and efficiency. He believes that there are two key branches to drive down in this area, and it holds tremendous potential for clients and organizations. Jim's framework for commercial excellence is value creation, which i...

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Show Notes:

In this episode of Unleashed, Will Bachman interviews Bart Sayer, an expert on the beauty industry. Bart worked for nine years at the Estée Lauder Companies, most recently as the International General Manager for one of its largest brands, Clinique, managing the $1B P&L. Previously, Bart w...

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Rob Garmaise, VP of AI research at Info-tech Research Group, is at the forefront of Info-tech research, helping clients identify best practices across their IT operations. They conduct extensive primary and secondary research, speaking with industry experts and other clients to understand the drivers of value and proof that a given practice leads to better results.

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January 6, 2025 28 mins

Show Notes:

Marilyn Lin, a customer support thought leader with over two decades of experience, discusses the importance of customer support in driving business success in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. She has led global Technical Support Teams that not only resolve issues but also foster customer loyalty, drive renewals, and...

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Show Notes:

Scott Markman, founder of MonogramGroup, discusses his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faces in the private equity sector. Scott kicks off the conversation with a quick introduction to his podcast, "Beer Stories for Private Equity," which focuses on issues related to the firms, companies they own, and consulta...

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Show Notes:

Matthew Hunt talks about Demandii, a firm that helps busy B2B executives create snackable content for LinkedIn from a single monthly interview. Matthew explains that most clients struggle with time, and they don't know how to create content or want to do it. Demandii offers a structured approach where they interview executives...

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