After years of working as a lawyer advising businesses, mostly in the energy and consumer goods sectors, I came to Fuqua eager to test how my legal training would translate in a broader business context. I had experience helping clients think through risk, structure, and consequences, but I wanted to better understand how leaders build strategy when problems are still evolving and clear answers have yet to emerge. Through the Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP), I had the opportunity to take on a real business challenge in the relatively unfamiliar food sustainability space. Over 12 weeks, my team and I worked with Griffith Foods, and I came away with four lessons that reshaped how I think about strategy: it starts with people, improves through feedback, succeeds through implementation and changes how you approach future challenges.

Strategy Starts with Understanding People

For our project, my team developed a framework to help Griffith Foods partner with targeted consumer packaged goods companies to create products aligned with their sustainability goals. The team had varied work experience, which shaped how each of us approached the project. Interestingly, getting to know each other (and our differences) facilitated effective collaboration and laid the foundation for some of my closest friendships at Fuqua.

Our team’s diversity of backgrounds became our strength. One teammate excelled at research, another brought structure to our thinking, another challenged assumptions with creative solutions, while others kept us organized and grounded under pressure. I found myself coordinating the client relationship and synthesizing our work into a coherent direction. In addition to these roles, we met regularly and collaborated on the structured problem-solving required for the final project deliverable.

Before we could think about recommendations, we had to agree on the problem we were solving. In our early meetings, we challenged assumptions, tested different interpretations of the client’s objectives, and debated what success should ultimately look like. Like business law, the problem did not have a single correct answer waiting to be found. Much of the work involved defining the problem itself before proposing a solution.

Strategy Improves Through Feedback

Guidance from faculty was helpful when pressure mounted. Dr. Chris Wedding introduced us to various toolkits to identify the client’s pain points and our unique offerings. He also gave us the independence to experiment and employ our learnings, easily moving between the roles of an instructor and a mentor when the situation required it.

Our meetings with Dr. Wedding and Quadri, a second-year MBA student and FCCP fellow,  provided opportunities to receive comments on our progress and our thinking. More importantly, they often supported by infusing objective criticism on our work plan and final deliverable, which helped us address possible questions before they came from the client. Over time, I realized that the value of feedback was not simply correcting mistakes, it was helping us see assumptions we did not know that we were making.

Strategy Succeeds Through Implementation

The client was supportive throughout the project, readily providing additional information and clarity when requested. This assisted our primary data collection and analysis in testing our hypothesis and positions. However, they cared most about the value our team could deliver. While they were curious about our findings and the rationale for our approach, ease of execution was a recurring theme in discussing the context for achieving their objective.

Eventually, our recommendations became stronger when we stopped asking, “Is this a good idea?” and started asking, “Would the client actually be able to do this?”

Strategy Changes How I Think

As we completed the project, I gained confidence in my ability to deliver value to clients while also benefiting from the meaningful relationships I built with my FCCP teammates. In the end, the client appreciated our recommendations, which not only validated the need for their plans but also provided viable pathways and action items for developing these partnerships.

Ultimately, FCCP taught me that strategy building is far less about having the right answer than about asking the right questions, bringing the right people together, and delivering recommendations that clients can implement. Those are lessons I’ll carry long after graduation.