Hicham Ratnani used his time at Deloitte's consulting group as a bridge to entrepreneurship, learning to solve problems across industries. He says startups are constant problem-solving: Wi-Fi outages one day, legal issues the next. Engineers thrive here because they already think like problem-solvers.
Basically, the interesting thing about Deloitte is that I didn't work in accounting, I worked in the management consulting group. There you have a lot of different industries, a lot of different companies, a lot of different smart folks that work into solving people's problems. And it taught me a lot, a lot about entrepreneurship, mainly because first of all, I knew I was going to quit before I even started. Why? I like the guys and I love the team, but I just knew it was the perfect bridge and a perfect step for me before my entrepreneurship career. And second of all, it's all about solving problems. When you are an entrepreneur, all you do is solve problems. I mean, the problems are very wide and very deep. Sometimes not that deep, sometimes not that wide, but they're multifaceted. It could be something like, hey, Sean, the Wi-Fi is down. or hey Sham, the lawyer is calling you because you have some lawsuit, or hey Sham, you know, we have run out of toilet paper. These are the typical questions you'll get every hour when you're in an early startup. And it's great if you think about it, how wide and varied it is. And that's the whole idea behind solving problems. That's why I think there's a lot also of engineers that are entrepreneurs, because engineers are wired to solve things all the time because they think about formula ABC X. So that was actually the jump when I started from studying to employee, and now I lead everything that's ops, tech, BI, and HR at Frank&Owl.
