An objectively bad time to add anything
I started an MBA last month. Nine months into building an independent practice, with an unpredictable client load and no salary underneath it.
Several people told me this was the wrong order — establish the business first, study later. That's reasonable advice and I didn't take it. This is my attempt to explain why, honestly enough that you can decide whether the same reasoning applies to you.
Why now rather than later
The gap I kept hitting was structural, not tactical.
Nine months of client work made something clear. I can diagnose a demand engine, rebuild a funnel, and defend a channel decision with data. What I was less confident about were the conversations one level up: unit economics under different pricing structures, how a board actually evaluates a growth investment, what a CFO means when they push back on payback period.
I was operating in those rooms already. I was doing it by pattern-matching rather than from a framework, and I could feel the difference between the two.
Consulting rewards breadth, and breadth decays without input.
In a job, you learn from the organisation around you — other functions, senior people, decisions you watch get made. Independent work removes almost all of that. You get very good at the thing you're repeatedly hired for and quietly stop developing everywhere else.
Nine months in, I could see that trajectory. The MBA was partly a deliberate correction.
"Later" was not a real plan.
The version of "later" I was imagining involved a stable practice and free time, which is a state I have no evidence I will ever reach. There is no quiet year coming.
What the first month actually costs
Concretely, because the brochure version is useless:
Roughly 15 hours a week, unevenly distributed. Some weeks are five, some are twenty-five, and the twenty-five-hour weeks have never once coincided with a light client period.
Every buffer you had. I used to have slack in the schedule for the unexpected — a client emergency, a proposal that took longer than planned. That slack is now coursework. When something goes wrong, it comes directly out of sleep, and I don't have a better answer for that yet.
Business development, first. This is the real cost and the one to be honest about. The activity that suffers is the least urgent one: outreach, writing, conversations with no immediate purpose. Those things have delayed consequences, so cutting them feels free for about a quarter and then very much isn't.
I've partly mitigated this by making outreach a fixed calendar block rather than something I do when there's time, because there is now never time.
What's been more useful than expected
Finance, immediately. The first module reframed how I read a client's numbers within weeks. I'd been analysing marketing efficiency in isolation from how the business is actually capitalised, which meant some of my recommendations were technically sound and financially irrelevant.
The cohort. I expected the coursework to be the value and the people to be networking. It's the reverse. Being in regular structured conversation with people from operations, finance, and product — none of whom are impressed by marketing frameworks — has been the sharpest input I've had all year.
Having to defend positions to non-marketers. Closely related, and genuinely uncomfortable. A lot of accepted growth-marketing wisdom does not survive a direct question from someone with no stake in believing it.
The honest case against
I'd be misrepresenting this if I only listed benefits.
My revenue is flatter this quarter than it should be. I've turned down two pieces of work I'd have taken in June. I'm reading less that's outside the syllabus, which is a narrowing I didn't anticipate. And there's a real risk that I'm using structured study as a comfortable substitute for the harder, less legible work of building a client base.
I'm watching that last one carefully. Coursework has clear deadlines and visible progress. Business development has neither, which makes it very easy to feel productive while avoiding it.
Who I'd actually recommend this to
Not everyone, and the split is fairly clean.
Worth it if you have a specific, named gap that keeps appearing in your work, and the structure is what you're missing rather than the information. I could have read finance textbooks. I hadn't, for four years.
Not worth it if you're hoping it resolves an unclear direction. It won't. It's an expensive way to postpone that question, and the postponement is comfortable enough to last two years.
Ask me again in 2023 whether the arithmetic worked out. Right now I only know the cost is real and the first month was worth paying it.
Hilal Tasdan
B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO. Partner in Growth.