
Applied mathematics in business consulting - SandB0x
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/applied-mathematics-in-business-consulting.html
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mahmud
Mathematical maturity + Excel + Perl + R = consulting moolah.

I know a few people who do nothing but crunch numbers on social media,
political campaigns, and online marketing and advertising.

~~~
starkfist
Who hires them and how do they find clients? (on their own or are they working
for McKinsey or similar group?)

And if you have details, how much can they charge?

Edit: in my experience it is not very easy to get paid to just crunch numbers.
Even if you can find a job that is supposed to be analytics, 90% of the work
is data munging.

~~~
mahmud
I am in the online-advertising business, and I know them from the "scene";
usually what you wanna look out for are "analyst" titles advertised by
marketing and PR agencies. Wherever you see an ad for programmer, ring up the
hiring person and inquire about analyst positions (you might actually have to
explain the need and create your own position, possibly starting as a
consultant.)

I know these guys, like I said, from the "scene", but two of them I ran into
responding to their ad; it was a badly phrased ad for a "developer" position,
but after a 30 minute conversation it was apparent they wanted someone with
machine-learning and distributed computing background who could scale their
spreadsheets :-)

If there is demand, I am more than happy to get into the head-hunting business
as a side-gig ;-)

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DanielBMarkham
_As a part of my continuous moral degradation and the resulting increasing
alignment with the forces of Evil_

It is really hard to dis an article that has consulting and math and starts
off like this. Very nicely done.

The rest of the article was rather mundane, sadly.

True consulting is just having a paid smart friend. Why do you need paid smart
friends? Are you not smart enough? Don't you have enough friends where you
work? Sure, but a _real_ friend will tell you things that are glaringly
obvious yet could get them fired. A real friend will take on your problems as
their own and worry about them along with you. A really smart person (in this
context) probably has seen many more types of business models than the full-
timers at your place have. A really smart person (in this context) probably
has ways of working with people that you either haven't tried or tried and
didn't understand (because you were busy doing your regular work)

It sounds trivial, but a paid smart friend (business consultant) can mean the
difference between kicking ass and becoming mediocre.

Of course, I have fully become part of the dark side, taking the secret oath,
learning the handshake, and swearing my allegiance to the forces of darkness
and chaos, so all of this just may be misinformation on my part. :)

~~~
count
I wonder how many of us are on HN sometimes...

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Don't know, but I know that even if I never have a successful startup,
learning and watching startups has done more for my business consulting career
than a thousand college degrees ever would. (wink)

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ableal
Good writing, interesting topic, can't resist a couple of quotes and notes:

 _As a part of my continuous moral degradation and the resulting increasing
alignment with the forces of Evil_

Nice opening hook. By coincidence, I'm reading Norman Mailer's The Castle in
the Forest. Feels like a supplement.

 _While the general concept was impressive on many levels, the details were
unclear._

That sounds like C.N. Parkinson. Perhaps crossed with "Nothing yields meaty
problems like starting with the wrong assumptions."
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html>, via a comment in the 'gist' linked in
yesterday's All Code is Ugly <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343883> )

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ableal
(mahmud, dejv)

> scale their spreadsheets

The other day, I bumped into this Excelsior tool: "Safe spreadsheets fast:
generating and reverse-engineering" - through here, please
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281593>, or direct to
<http://www.j-paine.org/index.html>

Anyone has used it, or something similar, and feel like commenting ?

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nsoonhui
For this kind of business, Math is easy. But finding clients who are willing
to pay is hard, VERY hard.

~~~
dejv
It is VERY hard, but doable. I am trying to make living doing machine learning
freelancing, although this part of "business" makes me just about 10 - 20% of
income.

As someone wrote on this forum: most clients want to just scale their Excel
spreadsheets and models. There are plenty of similar jobs aroud, so VBA should
be your friend.

I then trying to educate my customers on machine learning related topics and
sometimes I've got another ML-related projects.

If you choose this, be prepare to spend a lot of time doing nonbillable work,
so pay will not be so great at start, but I hope that it will pays in long
term.

