When Brandon Li was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, he was dismayed to learn that underprivileged students often lacked appropriate attire for interviews that could lead to good jobs and summer internships.
So in 2012 Brandon launched a nonprofit that organized suit drives at professional firms around the city. Suits U sorts and cleans the gently used apparel, then sells it on campuses at student-friendly prices, donating proceeds to local charities. The group has flourished, expanding across Canada to help thousands of students make good first impressions.
Brandon kept his entrepreneurial flame burning when he joined the Firm in 2015. While assigned to a diverse set of studies, he co-founded a startup club in the Toronto office and kept his ears open. That’s how he heard about Fuel by McKinsey (then known as Fast Growth Tech), the Firm's practice that advises pre-IPO clients and their investors. The group was looking for BAs to do a one-year rotation, so Brandon applied, got the job, and moved to San Francisco last summer.
“We are here to help these companies accelerate their growth,” says Brandon. “Our practice knows how to do that for every stage of a company’s growth cycle, whether it’s evaluating a new market or improving go-to-market performance. If we do our jobs properly, we can become trusted advisors for these companies and deliver impact in a way only McKinsey can.”
Upon joining the Fuel team, Brandon quickly latched on to an interesting idea his new colleagues were tossing around—a novel way to expose the Firm’s experts to clients in the startup space, a novel way to help clients doing important work who we might not otherwise have the opportunity to serve.
“They had this concept for a hotline, so to speak,” Brandon says. “It would be a sort of mini-engagement over the phone, delivering clients a quick dose of our Firm’s expertise matched to the budget and pace of a fast-growing startup with some burning questions.”
So Brandon took hold of the idea and ran with it, sketching out how the model could work. Last November, his team began seeking out clients for a pilot program, and today Fuel Access is here: a new service that offers clients a one-hour problem solving session with an expert from our Firm. The arrangement is custom-tailored for the unique needs of startup leaders who might not think they could have the opportunity to work with us.
Here’s how it works: Each call is preceded by a discovery process that refines the client’s question and helps us pair them with the perfect expert. The session itself takes one hour, facilitated by a member of the Fuel Access team. Clients come away with some proprietary research materials, and a powerful first impression of the Firm.
Senior Partner Chandra Gnanasambandam says what’s really exciting is that the practice is innovating on traditional engagement models.
“If we want to work with the pre-IPO community, we’ll have to rethink our client service approach,” he says, “and Fuel Access is just one of these models we’re exploring.”
Colleagues who have participated in Fuel Access pilot programs report that the experience is quite different from a typical engagement.
“It’s fun when you have multiple founders and management on the phone at once and you can start to hear them hashing out their own disagreements and fundamental assumptions,” says Marc Brodherson, a Partner in New York. “It was very similar to a lot of the private equity calls we do, except the questions went beyond broad market structure and performance issues to focus on short-term objectives too.”
Toronto AP Alex Yeo was pleasantly surprised by the type of questions posed to him during a different Fuel Access call.
“It was refreshing to experience first-hand how these fintech start-ups are thinking about the market,” says Alex. “We talked a lot more about go-to-market and market-entry strategies, which are less common topics with a more established client.”
Fuel by McKinsey is a New Ventures scale-up built to serve clients across the startup ecosystem—not only pre-IPO companies but also their funders, venture capitalists, and private-equity growth funds. Clients are finding the Fuel Access service through a new website that invites potential clients to provide basic details about their company and market.
“These are clients who have a need for specific industry insights and trends,” says Brandon. “They’re looking for guidance on strategy without necessarily wanting decimal-point precision. Maybe it’s pricing, maybe it’s entering a new market. Our Firm has invested tons into research and is full of people with expertise who could be incredibly helpful to these startups.”
The Fuel Access team is continuing to refine the model based on feedback from clients, hoping to further automate the system. There is currently a spectrum of ways for clients to use the service, from a single phone call to a series of calls over a few weeks.
For Brandon, the experience has given him an exciting view of how quickly our colleagues can digest a new client’s business and share their relevant expertise in a meaningful way.
“The practice has given me so much autonomy to run with this idea,” he says. “It’s a really nontraditional BA experience. It was a pleasant surprise, but so empowering. And I’ve been able to witness how good our colleagues are at really shaping a conversation, with clients coming back to us and saying ‘wow, that was very valuable, thank you.’”
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To find out more about Fuel, send an email to fuelfirstalert@mckinsey.com