Small Businesses Can Benefit from Purdue Calumet Student Business Consultants

PUC-LogoOpenings remain for local small business owners to receive free consulting services this fall from Purdue University Calumet business students.

As part of the university’s experiential learning initiative, students are seeking clients with whom to consult. Groups of three to five senior students enrolled in the “Small Business Consulting” course will join faculty members and business owner advisors to form consulting teams intent on helping individual client companies.

Strategies & recommendations
Each consulting team will interact throughout the upcoming fall semester 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
The consulting opportunity begins late this month through early December. More information is available by contacting Purdue Calumet Small Business Institute Director and Professor of Entrepreneurship Jamaluddin Husain at jhhusain@purduecal.edu or by phoning him at 773/531-4000.

Qualified clients must be located within reasonable driving distance of Purdue Calumet’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.

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,” Prof. Husain said. “For business clients to benefit from our service, it is extremely important that they willingly share information with our consulting teams.”

The experience benefits students by allowing them to apply classroom and textbook knowledge to a real world environment, the objective of Purdue Calumet’s experiential learning initiative. Experiential learning is a graduation requirement of all baccalaureate degree-seeking Purdue Calumet students.

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