Answering my own question
I wrote a post in October 2021 about starting an MBA nine months into building a consulting practice. I laid out my reasoning, listed the costs I could see, and said to ask me again in 2023 whether the arithmetic worked.
I finished last month. This is the answer, and I've tried to write it before enough time passes that I retrofit a tidier story.
Did it do what I hoped?
I started with one specific claim: that I could diagnose a demand engine but was pattern-matching rather than reasoning from a framework in conversations about unit economics, board expectations, and financial structure.
That gap is closed. Not fully — but I read a client's numbers differently now, and the difference is concrete rather than a feeling.
The clearest example: I no longer recommend growth investment without understanding how the company is funded and what its cash position implies about acceptable payback periods. Previously I'd have proposed the marketing-optimal answer and been surprised when it didn't get approved. Now I know why it wouldn't, and I propose the version that can actually happen.
That single change has probably made me more useful to clients than everything else combined.
What was worth it, ranked honestly
1. Finance and accounting. By a distance. It reframed how I read a business, and it's the module I'd have benefited from most at any point in the previous eight years.
2. The cohort. As I suspected a month in, and more so over two years. Being regularly challenged by people from operations, finance, and product — none of whom accept marketing framing as a starting point — was the sharpest ongoing input I had.
3. Strategy, but not how I expected. The frameworks themselves were mostly familiar. What was valuable was being made to apply them to industries I knew nothing about, where I couldn't fall back on intuition and had to actually use the method.
4. Operations and supply chain. Genuinely surprising. Constraint theory and process bottleneck thinking translate almost directly to funnel analysis, and I now use that language with clients more than I use marketing language.
5. Marketing modules. Lowest value, for the obvious reason. Some structure I hadn't articulated, nothing new.
The cost, stated plainly
Revenue. My 2022 was materially flatter than 2021 or what 2023 is turning out to be. I turned down work. That's a real number and I'm not going to characterise it as an investment to make it sound better — it was income I didn't earn.
Business development, exactly as I predicted. In the 2021 post I identified outreach and writing as the things that would suffer, because their consequences are delayed. They did suffer. I published less in 2022 than in any year since I started, and I can see the effect in inbound enquiries roughly nine months behind.
The narrowing I didn't expect. I read almost nothing outside the syllabus for two years. Structured education crowds out unstructured curiosity, and unstructured curiosity is where a reasonable share of my better ideas came from.
The risk I was watching
In 2021 I wrote that I was watching for one specific failure: using structured study as a comfortable substitute for the harder, less legible work of building a client base.
I did do this, and I'd say for about two quarters of the two years. Coursework has deadlines and visible progress; business development has neither. There were weeks where I chose the assignment because it was the thing I could finish, and I'd have been better served making three uncomfortable calls.
Naming it in advance helped. It didn't prevent it.
Would I do it again?
Yes, with one change: I'd have done it earlier or later, not at the eighteen-month mark of a new practice.
Months nine to thirty-six are when a consulting business is most fragile and most responsive to effort. Slowing down through exactly that window cost more than it would have at almost any other point. Either year one — when I had no client base to neglect — or year five would have been cheaper.
What I'd tell someone deciding now
The test I proposed in 2021 still holds, and two years of evidence hasn't changed it: worth it if you have a specific, named gap that keeps appearing in your work, and what you're missing is structure rather than information.
I could have read finance textbooks for four years. I demonstrably hadn't.
What I'd add now: be honest about the timing. Not whether you can find the hours — you can, they come out of things you'll stop noticing — but whether the thing you're slowing down can afford to be slowed at this particular point.
That's the calculation I got slightly wrong, and it's the only one I'd change.
Hilal Tasdan
B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO. Partner in Growth.