Kris Safarova and the art of starting again

At a dinner she had not been invited to in her own right, Kris Safarova found herself sitting beside the local managing partner of an international consulting firm. She was somebody else’s guest’s guest. Her undergraduate degree was still unfinished. Then the conversation turned to music. The background that had seemed awkward in a business job search suddenly interested the person beside her. A concert pianist had something a consulting firm could recognize.

It is a small scene with a large question inside it: who gets to decide which parts of a life count? Safarova has spent her career crossing the border between apparently unrelated occupations. Today she is the founder and CEO of FIRMSconsulting and a host of The Strategy Skills Podcast. Her work gives other people a way to study how experienced business practitioners think. The pianist’s route into the room has become a business concerned with opening rooms.

A pianist with a second syllabus

Safarova was born in Russia and lived there until she was 21, before moving to South Africa. Her early professional identity was musical. She trained in classical piano at DG Shatalov Music College and toured Europe as an official music representative of the Russian Federation. The later business biography includes places that would look perfectly at home on a concert itinerary: Moscow, Johannesburg, Toronto.

Her education eventually acquired a second syllabus. She earned a commerce degree from the University of South Africa, graduating cum laude, and an MBA from Ivey Business School with distinction. At Ivey she also led the Public Sector Club and edited its journal. These were substantial additions to her credentials, each requiring her to learn another professional language.

A piano diploma and an MBA make an entertaining pair on a résumé. Their coexistence also complicates the tidy career advice that asks young people to identify a lane and remain in it. Safarova’s experience allows a more interesting possibility: an earlier occupation can retain its value even when the next employer initially struggles to see where it belongs.

The résumé travels. Recognition may not.

Safarova calls herself a “professional immigrant.” She has moved between countries three times. In her telling, migration means transporting a life while discovering that its evidence may need to be assembled again. Her Russian music qualification once could not be found in an accreditation database. In Canada, she encountered the familiar demand for local professional experience before someone would offer the job that supplied it.

She remembers burgundy shoes with holes in their soles during her time in Africa. The holes were invisible to other people. They were quite apparent to the wearer. The detail is more useful than an abstract declaration about perseverance: it captures how a respectable appearance can conceal the daily arithmetic of starting over.

Her account of supporting relatives also enlarges the usual founder story. The decision to build a business was connected to responsibility for people beyond her own household. Reinvention had consequences beyond a more interesting business card. The opportunity had to support a life, and that life included other people.

“I am the brand. I am the product.”

Kris Safarova, writing about building a business around her expertise

Learning the client’s side of the desk

Her consulting experience includes Deloitte Strategy & Operations and PwC Consulting & Deals. One assignment involved leading a team developing the model, strategy, prospectus and implementation plan for a proposed direct insurer in Eastern Europe. The work culminated in presentations to financial-services executives and investors in Johannesburg and Moscow. A strategy had to survive questions from people who might supply the money.

She also worked in corporate finance at BMO. Banking introduced a different discipline: evaluating companies as borrowers, across industries, with financial commitments attached. Her career subsequently brought her back to consulting. The sequence gave her experience of both developing a business case and examining one from the financing side.

That distinction helps explain the practical character of her later publishing. A recommendation eventually encounters a budget, an implementation problem or a person who has good reasons to resist it. A convincing slide is only one stage in that journey. Her teaching interests extend into the less photogenic business of making the recommendation usable.

The consulting engagement becomes a book

In Succeeding as a Management Consultant, Safarova follows an engagement team through an eight-week assignment. Readers encounter problem framing, hypotheses, analysis and recommendations within a continuing client situation. The 2020 edition runs to 460 pages. This is a commitment to staying with the work after the introductory diagram has exhausted its charm.

The format matters. A list of tools can tell a reader what exists. A sustained account can show when a tool becomes useful, how one decision constrains another and why a team needs to adjust its approach. It asks the reader to follow a process rather than collect impressive vocabulary. Consulting has quite enough vocabulary already.

The book has also entered formal classrooms. A published MBA curriculum at Brazil’s Mackenzie Presbyterian University lists it in the supplementary bibliography for an applied-knowledge module. That is a concrete destination for a book intended to make professional methods teachable: another institution’s reading list, beside a practical assignment.

The Strategy Journal approaches the same ambition through participation. It guides users through defining a problem, organizing hypotheses and tests, managing work, communicating progress and calculating a benefits case. The reader is expected to write. A journal with blank spaces is a quiet challenge to the comfortable habit of agreeing with a business book and then placing it on a shelf.

Safarova has also used fiction to teach. Mavis & The Productivity Paradox places problem-solving in a dystopian industrial setting; Turquoise Eyes uses a business crime story involving a Mexican bank. In a later reflection, she singled out Mavis and Turquoise Eyes as personal favorites while observing that they had received less market recognition than some of her other work. An author’s preferred books and the market’s preferred books can occupy different shelves.

A microphone makes the classroom larger

The Strategy Skills Podcast began in 2015, following FIRMSconsulting’s case-interview podcast in 2011. By 2019, Safarova was describing a dual purpose: introducing people to paid training and reaching those unable to participate in coaching or memberships. Free listening belonged inside the business model from an early stage.

Her explanation of the editorial focus was economical: “We stick to just two topics: case interviews and strategy.” The medium allowed unscripted discussion of consulting engagements and professional judgment. A listener could hear ideas develop over time, rather than receive only a polished conclusion.

There is a useful tension here. Business education promises clarity, but an interesting interview needs room for an answer that refuses to fit the opening question. Safarova’s role as host puts her between the practitioner with a complicated experience and the listener hoping to understand it. The quality of that encounter depends on the questions, the follow-up and the willingness to let a guest explain.

The host lets someone edit her

In a conversation with LinkedIn specialist Judi Hays, Safarova submitted her own profile to a live review. Hays examined the headline, content, connections and company page. For a founder whose work includes helping other professionals develop authority, it is a pleasingly practical choice: make your own public presentation available for correction.

The episode also shows her interest in the route behind a professional identity. She asks Hays how a career spanning several cities and advertising work led to a business focused on LinkedIn. The backstory has a job to do. It gives the advice that follows a setting and lets the listener understand how the guest arrived at it.

Safarova has taken the guest’s chair herself. On Ray Brehm’s Book Profit Secrets in December 2022, she discussed sustaining bestseller status and the business of publishing. Brehm introduced her as an author of more than 20 books. The conversation places her writing within another part of her working life: how books find readers and continue to do so after launch.

Still asking how judgment travels

The interview subjects now extend beyond the internal workings of a consulting engagement. On March 24, 2026, she interviewed Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz about ideas connected to his book Private Power and Democracy’s Decline. The discussion brought technology, culture and policy into the same conversation. It is a broader scale of problem, with the same need to examine how the parts interact.

Her current work also includes Michael, an AI strategy product. FIRMSconsulting describes her as having led the team developing it around experienced business judgment. That description states the ambition; a product’s usefulness must be assessed in its actual work. For Safarova, the project continues a recognizable line of inquiry across books, recordings and software: how much of a practitioner’s reasoning can be made available to somebody else?

The dinner conversation remains an apt beginning. A background in music became legible to an unexpected audience. Since then, Safarova has built formats that ask readers and listeners to follow unfamiliar reasoning long enough to understand it. There is something fitting about a former pianist making a career of that request. Give the work your attention. Stay for the difficult passage.