Providing the Right Advice: Getting to Know KLU's Consultancy Club
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Advisupply is not your average student club. A fully independent, legal entity, it consults with companies and institutions on topics such as logistics and marketing benchmarking. Advisupply’s also completely run by KLU students, explains Bachelor of Business Administration student and club President Laurids Nittka, endowing its members with invaluable knowledge and experience in the consulting industry.
What makes Advisupply unique compared to other KLU clubs?
What's special about us is that we are a student consultancy organization fully independent from the KLU. We are our own legal entity, have our own finance, and write our own contracts. Our focus as a consultancy at KLU, of course, is on logistics and specifically on benchmarking and competition analyses. We have also worked on marketing topics for KLU, carrying out website and competitor analyses, but as we are independent and student-run, there's no official involvement from any KLU or faculty at advisupply. KLU staff support us, but we make all our own final decisions.
What made you join the club?
I’m interested in becoming a consultant at some point, so I thought joining a student consultancy would be the obvious move to get experience and see how consultancy works in a friendly and environment that supports learning new skills. Also, if you are really motivated to do stuff, you can have a lot of impact and help push the club forward.
Isn’t it difficult juggling advisupply work with academic commitments?
The good thing about advisupply is that, of course, when you’re working as a consultant on a project there can be a lot to do, but if you’re not, the additional workload is manageable.
I like to be really involved, so I joined advisupply in January 2022 as a student consultant and then in October 2022 I joined the board as head of legal and finance. In May last year, I became president. Since becoming part of the board, my involvement has increased dramatically because there are weekly meetings where we discuss what we want to do with the club, such as new projects and growing our client base. The whole club meets together every two weeks.
What are you most proud of achieving at advisupply so far?
In my role as head of legal and finance I helped register advisupply as an independent legal entity. The club was founded 2020, but it was only last year that we became a registered association, and there were a lot of things we had to do. Working on this process, thinking OK, we need to do that, we need to talk to these guys, we need to get these documents ready by that time, this procedural work is something really valuable because it's basically like running a small company.
This is the best experience I got from being in advisupply because you don't really get the chance elsewhere to experience this curve of starting and growing a business in a relatively low-pressure environment. We have five people on the board in total and about 18 other club members, so there a lot of people supporting each other and we can also ask our professors if we have questions. It’s really nice to be able to try real world stuff in the environment of the university.
How do you attract members?
At the start of each semester, we announce we are open to admitting new members and then most people apply out of their own motivation, because advisupply is quite well-known by KLU’s student body. We’re always looking for students who are motivated to make a positive impact through consultancy, as well as help advisupply advance in the right direction.
What are the club’s plans for the future?
Most importantly we need to grow our client base, because as of now it's quite limited. We’ve done projects for five or six different organizations, including Kühne & Nagel, Voigt Logistics, and Southern Shores, a sustainable yoga mat company, and we really want to expand and get new clients.
Want to be part of the team? Learn more and get in touch.