Experience Report: Working at McKinsey / BCG
Dear fellow Steemians,
Since a few years, I am working for a large top tier strategy consulting firm (think McKinsey, BCG, Bain) in Europe. When talking to relatives or friends, I notice that many people do not really understand what it is like to work in consulting. People confront me with misconceptions and cliches, both positive and negative ones. I often get asked what a typical day in the life of a consultant looks like. In this piece, I try to provide this information. I hope it is useful in helping you better understand what working in consulting is all about.
For starters, lets look at the structure of a typical week. Monday is travel day, in the morning we take the first plane to our client. Usually, this means arriving at the airport before 6 am. Once we arrive, the core team (usually a project leader plus 1-3 associates) works client-site until Thursday. Thursday evening, we fly back home, leaving the client around 6 to 8 pm. On Friday, we work from our home office, closing up the week and doing administrative work. Most weekends are off, though there are exceptions.
Given the variety in project topics, clients and locations, there is no such thing as a typical day. Nevertheless, I provide you with the schedule of a Tuesday from a few weeks ago in London. Every day is different, but I do think this schedule is helpful in understanding what working in consulting is like.
7.00 am - Waking up
The alarm sound of my smartphone wakes me up. I quickly check my e-mails to make sure there is nothing that needs my immediate attention. After getting dressed, I meet another associate I work together with in the hotel lobby for breakfast. We share some ideas for our next team event (fun evening activities for the team, often organized by junior colleagues every ~1-2 months) and order a taxi to our client.
8.30 am - Arriving at the client office
We start every day with a quick check-in together with our project leader. Every team member shares his priorities for the day and the progress he aims to achieve until the evening. We also look at important calls or meetings we have with clients or our internal senior leadership.
9.00 am - Problem solving with Marketing head
Our team is responsible for a review of our client's marketing processes. Every associate, including myself, is assigned to one business unit of the client. I meet my core client - the Marketing head of my business unit - and brainstorm some ideas with him about how to grow revenues by optimizing their product pricing. We come up with a list of potential measures and I decide to take this as the basis for some further research.
10.00 am - Call with Partner
Besides the core project team, we have our Partner who manages the relationship to the most senior clients and is a Marketing expert in our firm. He comes to visit us every 1 to 2 weeks. In addition, we have calls with him to discuss our progress and receive feedback and other suggestions. As a team, we prepared a document to discuss with our Partner. However, he is catching a plane and therefore cannot open his laptop. We have to guide him through the most important discussion points and receive some useful guidance for the next days.
11.00 am - Call with Pricing practice
Following up on the client meeting at 9.00 am, I call an expert of our pricing practice, an internal group of professionals that have an overview of all our work and expertise in that field. We have a great discussion about the product pricing ideas I elaborated together with my client. Some ideas seem to have great potential, others are probably not worth pursuing. The expert sends me some internal knowledge documents about the topics we discussed, detailing best practices and approaches that might be helpful for my work.
1.00 pm - Lunch with the team
Our whole team meets for lunch in the client's canteen. We have some time to relax and share some fun stories about last weekend.
1.30 pm - Getting things done
Back in our team room, I take some time to go through my e-mails and organize my thoughts. I start working on an Excel model to quantify some of the pricing ideas I discussed with my client and our pricing expert. My goal is to get an understanding of the revenue potential of different ideas to prioritize those that would potentially really make a difference to the business.
3.00 pm - Meeting with Business Intelligence head
I have regular meetings with the head of my business unit's Business Intelligence department. For many aspects of our work, we need client data to be able to size opportunities and calculate business cases. I prepared a list of data reports I need to complete my Excel pricing model. When discussing my needs with the Controlling head, we realize that some data is just not available within their reporting systems. We brainstorm what we can use instead as a good enough approximation and come up with a feasible solution. He agrees to send me everything I need within the next 2 days.
4.30 pm - Helping a colleague
Before working with this client, I worked on another project in a different industry. It is common practice to change projects every 2 to 4 months (with some exceptions). Another associate took over my former area of responsibility at my old client and we have a call to make sure everything is going smoothly. The associate tells me about some challenges their team is currently facing and I do my best to help him out based on my experience with that client.
5.00 pm - Working with PowerPoint
Together with the team, we work on the document for an important Steering Committee meeting with senior board members of our client. It is true that consultants do a lot of work with PowerPoint. Thankfully, we have slide support teams in different time zones around the world. To create PowerPoint slides, we "just" need to draw the page on an actual piece of paper, scan it and send it to the support team. The support staff transforms the paper drawing in an actual PowerPoint slide within a few hours. By leveraging these support offerings, it is possible to create complex PowerPoint documents within a short period of time.
7.30 pm - Check-out with the team
At the end of every day, we have a check-out together with our project leader. Everybody talks about his day and recaps whether he reached the goals set in the morning. When challenges come up, we try to together brainstorm ways to solve them. Our project leader steps in and offers help, whenever necessary.
8.00 pm - Dinner at the hotel
We all drive back to the hotel and have a dinner in the hotel restaurant. This is the time to relax and bond with our fellow team members. Working together for months in such an intense environment often creates true friendships that last well beyond the shared time at the consulting firm.
9.00 pm - Wrapping up the day
In my hotel room, I recap the day and make notes on what my priorities are for tomorrow. I work through my e-mails to make sure there are no loose ends when I wake up tomorrow. The slide support team sent me the PowerPoint slides I handed in earlier. I review them and spend some time myself to optimize them.
10.00 pm - Sports in the hotel gym
Working as consultant can be quite intense and stressful. I love to do sports in the evening to free my head and stay in shape. Hitting the hotel gym is a great opportunity to do some weights and go for a quick run. Even though it is not always easy to motivate oneself to go to the gym, I always feel energized and positive afterwards.
11.30 pm - Going to bed
Back in the room, I check my phone one last time for any urgent e-mails. It has been a long day and around this time I usually go to bed to make sure I get enough sleep for the next day to come.
That's it - a typical day in the life of a consultant. I would be super excited to hear from you what you think about this. If you are a consultant as well, can you relate to this and are your days similar to what I am describing? If you do not work in consulting, do you have any questions? Let me know if there is anything related that interests you - I will do my best to cover it in future pieces!