When I decided to attend Tuck, I spent the summer outlining what my two years would look like. Part of that was ensuring that I take advantage of as many consulting opportunities as possible, primarily through the suite that comprises TuckGO. One of these opportunities is OnSite Global Consulting, which is an elective course that offers students real-world consulting experiences in their second year of study, and includes three-weeks of work “onsite” in the target country.
Looking back at this experience, this OnSite project was one of the most profound learning experiences I’ve had professionally and culturally at Tuck. Our client was Ecolicuá, a Montevideo-based InsurTech startup that manages an auto insurance price comparison website (PCW), the first of its kind in Uruguay. This startup was founded by two undergraduate students at Universidad Católica, which is where we were also based during the work weeks. To my surprise, our clients were younger than us, at 23 and 30 years old (Felipe and Luciano), who were previously insurance brokers. I first thought this was unusual because people are generally out of college by 22 years old in the US; however, I realized that Uruguayan society calls for people to work full time while pursuing their undergraduate degree, so “undergrads” in their late 20s or early 30s were common.
Our team consisted of five students, one of them an MBA student at Universidad Católica. The initial problem statement called for us to examine other aspects of insurance that Ecolicuá should expand into. When we engaged them in an adjacency exercise our second day in country, we realized that the initial problem statement was not appropriate given where they were in their product life cycle. Ecolicuá had yet to launch their PCW for auto insurance, so focusing on other insurance areas didn’t make sense to us. We therefore worked with them to pivot, addressing a more streamlined question: how do we best position Ecolicuá for success in the auto insurance comparison space, and for future expansion. To answer this question, we split the work into three workstream topics: 1) customer profiles, 2) customer experience & ongoing optimization, and 3) adjacencies. We ultimately interviewed over 650 people through focus groups, surveys, and corporate discussions to drive our primary research. Throughout the three weeks, we helped them implement various tools to aid in each of these topics, including implementing Google Analytics, and giving them a blueprint for how to evolve their analytics suite as their business grows.
Culturally, there were a couple things that surprised me. First, since Uruguay has only 3.5 million people, it has a “small town” vibe, so we gained unparalleled access to very senior government and business leaders. This also highlighted how social the Uruguayan people were—we would schedule 30-minute meetings, and they often lasted 1-2 hours off good conversation about the weekend, life, etc. This spilled over into our social interactions with clients too, whether it was at the dance club Casa Uma, eating homemade asado in the beach town of La Barra, or watching Cambalache-inspired tango at the local bar Fun Fun. Enjoying life with your work partners, who are also your friends, is core to doing business effectively here.
Lastly, the insurance market is vastly different from the US. Underwriting doesn’t exist as a practice in Uruguay—insurance companies ask a few basic questions and then issue a policy. Insurance is tied to the car and not the individual, so there isn’t any knowledge transfer from company to company. The interesting thing about working with start-ups is that we didn’t gain this underwriting knowledge (or similarly important enough details) at the beginning of the project, but rather throughout our time on the project. This called for us to make tactical adjustments throughout the project, whether it was the people we interviewed or the questions we asked during our focus groups. I now better understand some of the concepts from Professor Alva Taylor’s Design Thinking elective, and the importance of being agile in fast-changing environments.
Darryn Lee is originally from Compton, CA and is a second-year student at Tuck. On campus, Darryn is the student body president, a visiting executive fellow, and an admissions associate. Prior to Tuck, he worked for six years in asset management at BlackRock in New York City, mostly in institutional sales for their U.S. Defined Contribution business. After Tuck, Darryn will work at MetLife as a director in their Global Leadership Development Program.
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