Real Clients, Real Challenges for Fuqua Students

When Wendy Gu entered the Executive MBA program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, she was already an accomplished scientist working in research and development. What she didn’t yet know was whether a career in consulting might be the right next step.

Through the Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP), she got the chance to find out.

This experiential learning program pairs small teams of students with established companies, startups and nonprofits to solve real business challenges. Students define a scope of work, conduct research and analysis, collaborate and present strategic recommendations. About 400 students a year take part in the for-credit course. 

For Gu, the experience helped launch a new career path in consulting.

“I got an offer from McKinsey to join as an associate, and I’m just so excited,” she says. “FCCP helped a lot — both with the consulting experience and how I talked about it in interviews.”

Learning by Solving Real Client Problems

Gu’s team worked with Viewflow Medical, a startup developing a device that measures blood flow during surgery.

“They hadn’t gotten it used in humans yet,” Gu explains. “We helped them prioritize which types of surgical specialties would most benefit from this technology. We also connected them with two surgeons at Duke who were interested in piloting it.”

Gu says her favorite part was “tackling a real business problem and learning by doing. It also gave me a real taste of consulting and leadership.” 

The project also pushed her to step outside her comfort zone. Gu volunteered to serve as the team’s project lead — her first experience managing a group.

“Before Fuqua, I didn’t really see myself as a leader,” she says. “FCCP felt like a safe space to try.”

The experience boosted her confidence while helping her build practical business skills.

“Working with this startup in a consulting role was very different [from my job as a scientist],” she says. “It focused more on the business side. That’s why I came to Fuqua — to move into a business role.”

What Clients Gain from the Program

Each year, more than 100 clients apply to the FCCP program, and around 60 are matched with student teams.

Matthew Johnson, MD, is a Fuqua alum who serves as senior vice president and chief operating officer of McLeod Health. During his previous position at Centra Health, he engaged with FCCP as a client.

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Johnson asked the students to tackle a difficult challenge — understanding how to reduce the number of patients who were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days.

“Patients need better medication management. They need a primary care physician follow-up. They need 100 different things, and all those things do have an impact,” says Johnson. “But what we were learning is that it’s not any one thing that will make a difference. It’s an array of those things.” 

The organization deployed a system of navigators, typically nurses, who were assigned to learn the patient’s unique story and follow up within 48 hours to help address barriers to staying well.

The challenge was determining whether the program was working and how to improve it.

“Were we having an impact? Johnson wondered. “Did it drive meaningful results, and what were other health systems doing? We wanted to try and dissect that, so that we could utilize this very important — but expensive — resource to improve readmissions.”

Embracing the challenge, the Fuqua team sought to gain a deep understanding of what worked and why.

“They spent time on our campus, they shadowed, they saw what happened in a patient interaction, they interacted with patients to get their feedback, they were on phone calls, they went to the clinical floors, they interacted with the staff, they did everything,” Johnson recalls. “They really worked to understand the mechanics of the program and our proposed countermeasures.” 

At the end, “they generated an outstanding report that was so professional,” he adds. “It allowed us to understand what was working. It allowed us to tell a better story and create a better business plan, so that when we went to the organization that was already constrained for resources, [we could show why] we needed these navigators.”

Learning That Extends Beyond the Classroom

For Johnson, the project also provided an opportunity to mentor future leaders who were interested in learning about the complexities of the healthcare industry. “I have no doubt that as a consequence of [their future efforts], healthcare is going to be better.”

Johnson says that approach reflects a broader philosophy at Duke.

“Healthcare is getting more complex,” he says. “It’s not just the clinical aspect that we need to focus on, or the business aspect, or innovation or venture capital. It’s about bringing all those elements together in ways that make healthcare better.” 

Programs like FCCP give students the opportunity to begin doing exactly that.

The Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum works with a diverse set of clients, reflecting the wide range of industries Fuqua students pursue after business school — such as energy, entertainment, sports, sustainability and nonprofit work. See this case study and read other case studies about collaborative, project-based learning in higher education.

Main image: Executive MBA student Wendy Gu, second from left, celebrates with her Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum team members Flávio Dotti Toni, Roopa Byadagi and Vasanth Srinivasan.