From Business School to Consulting Empire

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The experience was so positive that Bright went out and recruited an MBA from Harvard (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) full-time. And the price at MBA & Co. was right—about the same cost as hiring a plumber, he says.

What You Pay For

At MBA & Co., salaries run anywhere from $14 to $400 an hour, with an average of about $56. For some of its consultants, that's a pay cut. Myriam Boniface, a native of France going into her second year at Wharton, worked through MBA & Co. at a British advertising firm looking to break into the French market. Boniface had worked for a boutique consulting company previously and estimates she took a 30% pay cut for the short job, though she welcomed the new experience. "My nature is curious," she says. "I like to go into different things, and I'd like to help other companies in the development stage." But as for the money, "they were getting a bargain," she says.

Like Boniface, "there's always a percentage of MBA students who don't want to go down the traditional career route," Callaghan says. "They don't want to work for a large consultancy firm or a large investment bank." He anticipates that MBA & Co. will be as useful for those students as it will be for the ones biding their time before taking a job with a larger firm. The hope is that many placements will end up as full-time offers, and others will serve as introductions into different industries. Already, he says, the company has placed some students in interim and full-time positions in addition to its core business of coordinating project-based work.

But if Callaghan's business functions the way he hopes it will, it's the companies that will benefit the most. Small firms with access to top-tier talent will prove more competitive in the face of economic hardship. In Pennsylvania, Wharton's Flaherty says, independent studies showed that companies which received the kind of low-budget consulting that MBA & Co. specializes in almost doubled their five-year survival rates.

That's an encouraging statistic when so much of the health of the economy seems to rest on small businesses' ability to replace the large and failing companies. And it implies that budget-friendly student consulting isn't going anywhere any time soon. Says Flaherty: "This stuff does work."

Anne VanderMey is a B-schools writer at BusinessWeek.

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