Bear Studios is not a normal club. You won’t find it on WUGO or on any other club listing because it’s not a club at all — it’s an independent LLC. It’s not a normal LLC either, staffed and led exclusively by students. For the past ten years, they have provided consulting services to over 180 companies mostly in the St. Louis area.  Utilizing their unique set of strengths and roles, Bear Studios continues to find new ways to innovate the industry.

Bear studios originally began as a start-up accelerator, focused on harnessing innovation from the medical and engineering schools. But, after seeing some success in consulting, they switched over to a consulting-focused model with three main disciplines: strategy, design, and tech. Strategy involves aspects of business planning, financial modeling, and marketing; design focuses on tasks like website design and UX/UI framework; technology provides services like actual product code that serve as a baseline for customers’ use. They currently have a total of 22 consultants who divide into one of these three categories.

Bear Studio’s internal structure resembles that of a typical consulting firm. New underclassmen enter as primary consultants, and after their first semester are normally promoted to senior consultants. Then, students have the opportunity to become project managers and directors, with the latter sitting at the top. Current director and senior Jacob Oscherwitz said the system “[helps] from the organic structure perspective, stay[ing] very much clean and organized, because it can get messy for sure.”

Bear Studios is currently led by three directors, seniors Lucas Abrams, Spencer Linenberg, and Oscherwitz. As part of their role as directors, each owns a piece of the company. These pieces are passed down with each successive change in leadership. Abrams describes the transfer as valuable.  He says, “You’re investing your time and energy and your focus into developing this out and making it greater every year for the people we have in our team, as well as the clients that we’re serving.” Oscherwitz comments on how capital involvement affects the customer relationship, noting, “they’re in it, and for us, that means also we’re in it. Everybody has skin in the game now.” In many ways, the practice of passing down ownership is emblematic of how Bear Studios utilizes its unique position as both a student run organization and an independent LLC.  On one hand, ownership provides an individual connection that a club cannot replicate. Yet, on the other hand, the LLC stays small and exclusive to WashU students, allowing the directors to be direct in their involvement.

The three create an integrated organization in the role of director. He comments, “Spencer might do a little bit more work in the marketing department, especially since he had experience as a senior consultant on that team. Jacob might have more experience in the growth department, because he has more experience with client sourcing, for example. But overall, we have the same focus and share the same goals and I think that’s a really important part of being a unified team.” Past directors have even held workshops for the consultants on applicable business topics in an attempt to strengthen the student-led structure that Abrams says offers “the privilege of not necessarily being bound to anything.”

One of these privileges is the opportunity to work with small businesses that would be passed up by larger firms. Oscherwitz says, “For a majority of consulting firms, you’re not going to work with a mom and pop diner because it’s not going to be financially feasible or financially worth it.” For example, Bear Studios is working alongside a school district in Michigan developing a proprietary software to track chromebooks in order to mitigate theft.

Oscherwitz says, “Our low cost approach enables us to be a little bit more socially conscious of who we’re working with.” In the end, Bear Studios simply strives to provide a unique offering that balances the joys of college with the professional landscape that inevitably lies ahead. Linenberg says, “We’re just college students, but we can kind of bring in that fresh perspective and work with people. I think that’s really cool.”