Consultant Spotlight: Olamide Komolafe Interview

07 November 2019 3 min read

Olamide Komolafe is a management consultant and business professional, who won the 2018 TBCA consultant of the year award. He tells us about himself and the TBCA experience in this interview.

Tell us a bit about Lamide and what inspired you to venture into Consulting?

I am a Management Consultant and Business Professional who has been in consulting for about 10 years. Growing up I always had an interest in business (thought) influenced by my parents; that were dad — a business consultant and mum — an entrepreneur.

Started off by chance on my own after my first degree, when a group of us friends couldn’t find a business plan done ‘cheap’ and that journey went through the route of independent consulting, work in and leading teams in a Big 4 firm and now leading my own practice.

What type of challenges do you solve for your clients?

To put it simply, I advice, support implementation and train with the end objective being to help the client grow or operate better.

If I were to delve into specific areas, then my handy bouquet of expertise area buzzwords is — innovation, strategy, business (model) design, transformation, and performance management.

How does winning the 2018 Consultant of the Year award affect your work?

It feels good to get critical acclaim and that motivates one to pursue a higher level of professional competence.

To a lesser extent, there are the bragging rights to be leveraged for more work and more opportunity to add value.

What made you explore the TBCA platform in the first place?

Referral from a friend fuelled by a healthy FOMO led to signing up and here we are.

Prior to TBCA, what process did you go through to bid on projects and get new business?

On other freelance platforms/switchboards as on TBCA.co, the process involved signing up, scanning, bidding (submitting proposals) and …waiting for something to happen.

The difference with TBCA is the engagement process is more professional and transparent, and the user experience much more enjoyable (and I wasn’t paid to say this)

How do you currently get business from local/global clients and how has leveraging TBCA been able to help?

Because I run a fulltime offline consulting practice outside of online gigs such as the ones I take up on TBCA, I mostly get clients via the traditional Business Development route.

But I have through TBCA gotten follow on assignments and referrals from clients I engaged on the platform and most assuredly look forward to leveraging the platform to a greater extent.

What has been your experience with TBCA?

Wonderful! Their operations are well thought through, the caliber of clients are top-notch and the team (and interactions with) are exceptional.

What are the greatest challenges you see for the future of consulting?

There is a mighty good article on this by Clayton Christensen on consulting being ripe for disruption but I’ll say the top challenges are:

• gig economy platforms that threaten traditional consulting service delivery models
• democratization of knowledge and the proliferation of generalist talent within organizations
• the demand for greater ownership of outcomes/implementation and skin in the game from consultants who are usually paid a ton of money for a mostly intangible product.

What are the few consulting best practices that you can share with other Consultants and Experts on the TBCA Network?

Embrace the machine, and what may be for the uninitiated, the strangeness of facilitating an assignment and delivering the same remotely.

And yes, aim for excellence. Nothing else counts as a professional.

Tell us something fun that we don’t know about you yet?

I enjoy bingeing on Fashion TV and World War 2 Documentaries. Weird.

TBCA : The Best Consultant Anytime Anywhere