Purdue Northwest ‘Small Business Consulting’ Students Seeking Employer Clients

Purdue-Northwest-colorLocal small business owners can receive free consulting services this fall from Purdue University Northwest business students.

As part of the university’s experiential learning initiative, groups of three to five senior students enrolled in the “Small Business Consulting” course will be grouped with faculty members and business owner advisors to form consulting teams intent on helping individual client companies enhance success.

Strategies & recommendations
Each consulting team will interact throughout the upcoming fall semester—late August through early December—with its client to learn, understand and address key issues, problems and other challenges the client is facing.

Climaxing the semester-long experience, each student team will produce and present a formal report that offers strategies and recommendations to benefit its client.

The consulting is offered at no charge to client employers.

Contact information
More information is available by contacting Purdue Northwest Professor of Entrepreneurship Jamaluddin Husain at jhhusain@pnw.edu or by phoning or texting him at 773/531-4000.

Qualified clients must be located within reasonable driving distance of Purdue Northwest’s Hammond campus and have operated as an employer of full time employees at a physical location for at least two to three years. Client owners also must commit to working openly and diligently with their consulting team throughout the fall semester.

Clients, students benefit
“The quality and usefulness of the final consulting findings and recommendations depend largely on the cooperation, involvement and support of the client business owners,” Husain said. “For business clients to benefit from our service, it is extremely important that they willingly share information with our consulting teams.”

In addition to the free consulting benefit derived by small business owners, the opportunity allows students to learn experientially by applying classroom and textbook knowledge in a real world environment. Experiential learning is a graduation requirement of all baccalaureate degree-seeking Purdue Northwest students.

More than 100 small businesses have utilized this student consulting service.