Marcin Jasinski operates an independent consulting firm in Luxembourg.

Tell us about your consulting business

There are main two parts to the business: One is CEO Advisory and the other is interim management. In a nutshell, I help CEOs scale their businesses, focusing on growth, marketing and business strategy. Startups and big companies are very different. Entrepreneurs and CEOs of startups often are looking to “clone” themselves and need someone who can act as a kind of “right-hand,” someone to bounce ideas off of and to help them focus on strategic parts of their business. They also need help in areas where they themselves are not expert.

One project I have been working in Luxembourg is the implementation of a performance management system, which is something that the CEO wanted to do for years but did not have any experience with. My clients also have different needs depending on their geographical scope, as a client in Singapore, New York or in Abu Dhabi will be looking at business expansion completely differently.

Why did you decide to work with interns from MUDEC? And why did you end up taking two?

Both of them were great and they helped me scale my business. I initially wanted one intern to help me with social media and in looking for consulting jobs. Serena Lanum did a brilliant job, especially with the social media part. Later in the semester, I had such confidence in her that I didn’t even need to sign off on the posts, and let her go ahead and do them on her own. I got very positive real-time feedback and reached people in ways I had not been reaching them before, especially those that didn’t know me.

Jake McCorkle was my second intern and completely complementary to Serena, since he was a finance major. I hired him because of his hunger, as during the interview he made it clear that consulting was what he really wanted to do. I thought I could delegate some parts of my own projects to him. For example, I didn’t have a website, and Jake’s experience in building websites made it a perfect project to give to him. We used Wix for it instead of Wordpress, and Wix was more design-friendly. His experience in finance and interning in a private equity firm meant that he understood my target audience. He just killed it with the website (MJ-The Consultant), so I was really happy.

How did working with these interns help your business, even with the impact from COVID, and what would you say to other companies that are considering taking interns from MUDEC?

There was actually no impact from COVID, as my interns continued to work remotely.

Working with the MUDEC interns made me realize that I love having a team, as being an entrepreneur is sometimes a bit of a lonely existence. I loved serving as a mentor and sharing with them too.

A longer-term impact is that I have now hired a full-time assistant whom I delegate things to. This is a result of having worked with Serena and Jake this semester.

What I would say to other companies is that you are hiring the hunger that these students have. Down the road, this really paid dividends, as the students made a lot of progress. I saw it in ways that they may not have seen themselves. That hunger shows potential employers that they really wanted the job and didn’t just want another internship to add to their résumés.