When Mwangi Ndirangu, 26, started building his consulting empire, part of his capital was a vision, one to put his name on the dynamic consulting landscape, considered an orbit for people in blue-chip companies.
The other part of the capital was Sh120,000. Ndirangu says his mother taught him how to dream. “She was my mentor and she still is,” he says. He also picked vital lessons from the late evangelist, Myles Monroe. Before starting off, he worked for a UK-based company ForWriters.com as a contributing researcher.
Despite being a newcomer in the multifaceted and complex consulting industry in Kenya, Ndirangu was undeterred and purposed to go for the spoils. His journey up the corporate ladder started over two-and-a-half years ago when he graduated with a degree in Economics and Finance from Kenyatta University.
Ndirangu is now pursuing Masters in Economics (Policy and Management) at the same institution. “I was always looking for that something that made me happy to wake up everyday. I did not envision sitting behind a desk.
Consequently, I picked consulting,” he shared. Then a management consultant aged 23, in an industry deemed a preserve of the advanced, preferably executives exiting high-level corporate jobs, Ndirangu defied the odds, subsequently gaining approval of the National Industrial Training Authority (NITA) as a key resource person and also be certified by the Professional Trainers Association of Kenya (PTAK).
The sky was the limit for Ndirangu, who is also a Mandela Washington Fellow Class of 2015 and alumni of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, Atlanta.
Only two years into the game, Ndirangu’s Itop Consultant Limited has trained over 6,000 employees and developed over 15 strategic and master plans. He hires people to work for him on a needs basis. He has consulted for the big and small companies, government corporations and the Retail, Health, Banking and Fast-moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industries.
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He has also worked with Reglee East Africa, Kenyatta National Hospital, Coca Cola, Gulf African Bank, Nakuru and Laikipia counties and Public Service Commission on their communication strategy among many others. And although he refuses to how much he is worth, he earns a handsome six figure with every assignment, which could range from one to two in a fortnight.
Erstwhile McKinsey consultant Victor Chen’s saying: “I cannot control my natural endowment, but I can out-study and outwork everyone else,” remains his anchor lesson. To rise above hurdles, he opted to read and research more on the industry, “aware that if I stood before people and did not have my act together they would think I was a neophyte.”
This is what nourishes him. “My mind is my employer, my product is as good as the quality of thought I invest in it, as such I must be able to deduce lessons from my professional engagements that lead to further opportunities for myself and others,” he says.
The inescapable detail he has gathered from 50 per cent time spent training has been the staggering amount of resources that organisations dedicate to post-employment training especially when doing impact analysis.
“While my training programmes are effective, one thing was clear from the participants, no matter the amount spent, an organisation can never create the star employees they always want with the wrong candidates. Employees spend 50 per cent of office time on Internet applying for other jobs.
That is why consultants like me that have the privilege of being part of an organisation’s growth plans without being too absorbed to miss the details,” he says. Consequently, he started The Bridge initiative. He compares that human resources like natural resources are buried deep in some form of crust; our work is to create conditions that bring them to the surface.
“Lecturers meet employees branded as comrades while employers meet them branded as staff. The Bridge Project encourages employers to meet their employees early on. Its goal is to reduce the number of half-baked graduates by 10 per cent,” he says.
It focuses on graduate-specific factors such as lack of soft skill and market contacts while creating a dialogue platform to address market and policy failures that disproportionately affect graduate entry to work.
While in the USA for the Mandela fellowship, he met US president Barack Obama, who is one of the leaders he admires. “The fellows are selected across three tracks namely public management, civic leadership and business and entrepreneurship,” he says.