How I Turned My Science Training Into a Booming Consultancy

ATKCO

Chicago

Shayna Atkins, founder and CEO

2-year revenue growth: 2,579% Shayna Atkins, 35, always dreamed of becoming a scientist. But even with her physics degree from Spelman College in hand, she wound up in another field. As the founder of the Chicago-based consulting and implementation firm AtkCo, Atkins uses her research on the “science of work” to help startups, nonprofits, and billion-dollar companies modernize their tech, streamline their operations, and create processes to help them grow. And Atkins has applied the same lessons to her own company, growing her business from a side hustle to a seven-figure enterprise in nine years.

“I come from an entrepreneurial family. My mom owned a storefront on the West Side of Chicago that sold pagers and cellphones. As a child, I was not into business at all. But after getting my degree, I went into consulting, and a volunteer opportunity at my job with Accenture brought me to Jamaica, where I taught entrepreneurship skills to momand-pop shop owners. It was a motivational experience, and after I got back to Chicago, I started a side hustle in 2015 offering process improvement and technical training for individual business owners.

“As I started to put content on LinkedIn about my work, I began to attract corporate clients. After three years, I left my full-time job and entered an all-women’s accelerator through the startup incubator 1871. The women I met through that experience and I advocated for one another—that’s how we were able to eventually get larger deals.

“During the pandemic, we changed our model to entirely B2B. We wanted to help everybody, but we also had a business to run. Very large corporations were asking the same types of questions as small-business owners: How do you implement an effective digital road map with the pace at which technology changes today? Those corporations started to do business with us, and that drove our growth. Our average contract size is over $300,000.

“When you’re growing at such a fast pace, you can’t ignore

things and let them fester. You also can’t flip a switch and have a new department. We adopted this concept called scaffolding; it’s what we put in place to get through a stage of growth, as we build the permanent thing to replace the scaffold. For instance, we knew we needed a formal training program to support our employees as we scaled, so before we could develop that, we started informal skillsharing workshops.

“We practice what we preach. We’re always asking questions, hypothesizing, and experimenting. I am still a scientist at heart; I just apply it in a completely different context.” —AS TOLD TO REBECCA DECZYNSKI

A stint teaching entrepreneurship in Jamaica inspired Shayna Atkins to found her company.