“Do you know exactly how much a coffe capsule costs you?”

With this questions I approached a local coffee producer in Naples to convince him to have me walking around his plant for 3 months with the promise of coming up with an answer.

At that time I was a student and just started a ‘Cost Management’ class – I couldn’t help myself looking at the slides without seeing them in practice. I engaged my study mate and we started bringing those methodologies to life for ‘Intenso’, a Napoli-based coffee production company.

By the end of the three months we had our 50-page report and a super heavy excel model ready and presented to the CEO all our analyses. I’m a management consultant now, and something like this is a day-to-day activity, but doing it at the age of 19 with no prior working experience, no partner screaming at you, no intellectual capital in the field and a self-procured engagement, makes this a worth-mentioning achievement in my early career.

We went forward. Shared sanitized results with the professors and got the prize (and 30L). We also tried to replicate the same project for other firms (maybe compensating us in a more tangible way): we built a brochure and our business cards, imagining a roadshow across Neapolitan firms which in our view wanted nothing but our service. That never happened.

Lessons learned

1. Things are not as they look like in theory
2. There is a solution for every problem you face in a project – just make assumptions! (and then test it, maybe)
3. Demand for your services is not something that just comes from the sky