Potty Trained Consultant: Hailing from Indonesia to Help a Local Seattle Business Thrive

My first quarter as a freshman at the University of Washington has been quite the trip.

While classes have certainly been quite the challenge & experience, but it is my engagement as a pro-bono management consultant at Business Impact Group (BIG), a student-consulting firm under Michael G. Foster School of Business, that really made the past six-weeks quite the exuberating endeavour.

As a freshman consultant alongside four other senior core consultants, our team & I were assigned a rather unique company to work with, namely Super Potty Mommy. A one-woman-show LLC spearheaded by Kimberly Storment, mother SPM herself, who provides personalized, creative potty training and consulting services to children. Donned in purple spandex and a black cape as well as eye mask, SPM flies door-to-door to foster meaningful relationships with children she helps to get them to ditch the diaper & become professional potty poopers for life. She was just really getting started when Covid-19 hit; so it was up to us to devise her a game plan against all odds.

From the start, I sympathized deeply with Mrs Kimberly herself. She had a lot of faith in her business & I know for a fact that she wanted this endeavour of hers to be the only thing she pursued full-time. It dawned upon my team & I then at the start that we were responsible in not just devising a business strategy from scratch, but really taking the time to clearly define her brand’s offerings & identity in this vertical. Split into three (3) main sections, our proposal for SPM focused on laying out its future-proof operations, marketing, & finance architecture. For the purpose of this blog,

I will focus on the specific section I was in charge of helming, which is the financial plan for SPM.

Through diagnosing SPM’s specific circumstances & needs, I have learned to apply my conceptual knowledge on economics & finance for a legitimate operating business. To arrive at SPM’s pricing strategy, I mapped out Seattle’s population demographic, drilling down on the city’s population of children within the potential market’s relevant age range, as well as household income statistics and expenditure on diapers. By accounting for behaviours of parents with younger & older children, we decided to move forward with recommending a variable cost mechanism, charging less & more for parents with older & younger children under the age of five respectively, in order to entice parents to invest on SPM’s consulting service at a price that matches their opportunity cost of remaining amount of time left they must spend on diapers to service their children. As a newcomer in the potty training industry, SPM’s pricing strategy is crucial in being able to maximize their market acquisition, & needless to say, we are thrilled in being able to render a sensical pricing plan for her suite of service.

Needless to say, nosediving firsthand into practicing management consulting work to help SPM was both an eye-opener & exciting venture, as I benefitted in being able to stress-test my business acumen by doing meaningful work to help a local Seattle business thrive.

I came out of BIG thoroughly convinced that this will definitely not be my last involvement in management consulting, as I really look forward to being able to continue to put my knowledge in business to bettering the livelihood of others.

And I have Foster Consulting Program to thank for opening its door for me, an Indonesian student living his dream to learn & do meaningful work in the sphere of commerce in Washington.

Aktsa Efendy, ’24