Category — consulting101

Following up on the last Consulting 101 article, “Shopping for the first day – clothing“, today let’s have a look at the gear for your weekly travels to the client side.  Most people run with two bags: an onboard-roller-suitcase and a laptop bag. Some prefer a suit bag over the rollercase, but as I try not to talk about things I have no clue about, you’re on your own on that one.

Onboard rollers (or trolleys, or the things with wheels to lug behind you)

• Size matters.
  Be sure to buy one that does comply both with your local and international carryon-luggage size standards. The “gold standard” of business travel is to not check in any luggage, which gets you more time before and after the flight, as well as the certainty that your luggage always is where you are – not a 100% sure thing if you check a bag in, especially when you are checking it in late. Thus: Be ready to take it on board, and have it at the size that allows it.

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[UPDATE: There have been incredibly good and information-packed contributions in the comments to this post - go check them out!]

You signed your contract, you hopefully took a good vacation, maybe you even moved to a new town – now you are getting ready to become a consultant. Awesome!

Of course, by now, you have the consultants’ lifestyle all figured out… and you decide it’s time to go shopping to get the right gear for your newly found life on the road. This post and the next one should give you some input on what to get, what to spend money on, and what you can safely put on your “someday/maybe” list. Let’s start it off with clothing. [Read more →]

While reading through “born to be riled” by Jeremy Clarkson, the fabulous motoring journalist and presenter of BBC’s “Top Gear” (the best show about cars – ever. Period. Even girls love it. It’s the best going show on all of BBC… nuff said.  Now where was I?) … right: reading this book, which is a collection of Clarkson’s newspaper columns, I came across a very interesting tidbit:

“I’m often asked what qualifications you need to work on Top Gear, and I’ve always given the same advice. Like cars by all means, but love writing. Love it so much that you do it to relax. See the new Alfa or whatever as nothing more than a tool on which your prose can be based.”

Let this sink in for a second. This is a guy who gets to drive the newest, fastest, most exciting cars in the world in the most exciting, remote, fun and crazy locations in the world, and is paid for it. But his message is not “boy, you got to be a complete petrolhead to be fit for this job” – he says that you really need to love writing, the journalists’ basic process, so much that you do it for relaxing, to be fit for that job.

With consultants, I think, it is a similar story.

There’s the consultant’s lifestyle. Although of course not as glamorous as often depicted, there is a lot to it, especially for the young and eager types out there. You travel a lot – in fact the airplane is your bus and the taxi is your bike. You sleep in fancy hotels. You wear a dark suit. You get to meet the top management of large corporations – and they even pay you really good money for all that exciting stuff.

If your motivation to be a consultant is to lead the lifestyle (of course, only thinking about the shiny advantages), then you might not make it far. Or become quite miserable fairly fast. Probably both.

Here’s the inside scoop: Consulting, at the entry level that I (can) talk about, is all about the basics. You don’t get paid for looking posh. You get paid for doing a lot of work, under often less-then-perfect constraints (like… time). This work entails hell of a lot of research, analysis and synthesis of data – what other people sometimes call “gruntwork”. I call it crunching. You’ll have to sift through thousands of pages in search of one key figure. You’ll need to take an unsorted mess of data, throw it up in the air, and catch it in wonderfully organized, storylined, factchecked, approved and finetuned Powerpoint charts.  There is nothing fancy about the work. It can be tedious. Yet, this is what you are mostly measured by. What you do to help a project succeed, your firm and your clients.

Jeremy has it right. He tells us that only when you are good at the basic tasks of your job, then you can hit it off. I, for myself, don’t love every data deep-dive that I have to make. I don’t love spending hour after hour in Powerpoint (though I trade Excel for Powerpoint at any time. I loathe Excel, powerful as it may be). So I don’t expect you to do it. But I do absolutely believe that you cannot be a good consultant (as I said, in the junior’s ranks) without being comfortable with it, and the more enjoyment you get out of it, the merrier.

For all of those contemplating the move into consulting, this means you should think about the actual WORK you’ll be doing at least as much and as seriously as you do think about the perks you’ll have.

As a closing remark, this posting has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I, after a year in consulting, find it almost comforting to work in Powerpoint. I sometimes get so much fun out of making good slides that I am scared of myself. That is a totally unrelated issue, and I am dealing well with it, thank you very much.

Congratulations! You aced the interview, your reasoning was MECE and for analysis you SWOTed the BCG matrix with Porter’s Five Forces. You are, as they say, THE MAN, and the lovely person from HR let you know that they will send you a contract that is yours to sign and seal the deal.

Now what?

First of all, let me put a disclaimer. I am not an expert on this stuff, I just have been there before. As they say in the sunscreen speech - my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

Alright, alright. Still – Now what?

They want you, so they made you an offer. Realize that this is the point where you have the most power in the whole process, but you need to play your cards wisely. Once you signed the contract, you can of course try to further negotiate and do stuff – it might just not lead so much more than some very confused and borderline angry people on the other side. Including your future boss.
As is described wonderfully in the book “What color is my parachute” (a great what-am-I-good-at and how-do-I-search-for-a-job-that-fits-me-right book), you can/should only try to wiggle the posts that make up the contract before they are hammered into the ground.

• The cash
  You were waiting for this the whole time, right?
  For a junior consulting job, normally there is not that much room to negotiate in the first place: Many firms have tight ranges that they pay for entry positions. Still, they are ranges. If you are so lucky to know what the range is, and you feel that your double MBA and PhD in theoretical maths are not priced into the contract well enough – you COULD ask for more money. I did not do this, as I was content with what I was offered, so for tactics and stuff you’ll need to ask elsewhere. Take this thought with you, though: They are constantly hiring people as smart and as well educated as you are. Heck, they have even seen better ones. You should make sure to know exactly what your leverage is before you ask for more money.
• The benefits
  If you think everyone gets a car and it is not in the contract? Well, then you might not get one. Ask for such stuff once you got the contract in your hands and once you talk to HR. DO NOT ask for goodies in the interview rounds – that’s a killer, and not a good one. So – when the time has come, and you think something is missing to make this package real gold for you, ask for it, politely. Be reasonable and as humble as you can manage to be. Chances are that they ramp up a bit. For Germany for example, one thing is moving assistance. Often, a company does not include it in the first offer, but when you ask for it, they are happy (more or less) to help you out with some cash to get your stuff to the city where your “point of affiliation” (=home office) will be.
• The home office
  When working for a bigger company, they have many offices, and you might have only interviewed at corporate headquarters. Check if you are assigned to an office in the contract, and if it is the one you want. If not, call them up and have it changed. Basically, this is a thing you should have talked about in the final interview, at least briefly – but who knows, maybe you were thinking about the (for sure!) upcoming Porsche too hard.

If you got that all settled, had a nice chit-chat with HR or the hiring Partner, the offer is final, and you should have a pretty good idea if you want to take it or not. But if….

You got other irons in the fire?
It was probably a good idea to not bet on one horse only in search for your first gig. Now you got an offer – or more – and maybe some applications are still in the process.
Most offers have an expiry date. It is reasonable to ask for an extension for one or two weeks, to be able to see how other things turn out – but much more, without a very good reason, just makes it obvious that you are waiting for something better to come around the corner before you take the offer they made you. This is not the perception you want to create, right?
If you have multiple offers on your desk at the same time – make the decision led by your heart and gut feeling (how did I feel around those people? Am I looking forward to working with them? etc.), and supported by facts. DO NOT BASE YOUR DECISION ON SALARY ALONE! Money can buy a lot of things, but not job satisfaction (ok, there might be people in iBanking who are an exception, but still). The money has to cover your basic living expenses, and more is better than less for sure – but really, I can’t stress this enough. It must not be all about cash.
If you are still in the process with other companies and you want to take the offer you got – play it fair, tell them that you took up a different opportunity (no details needed), and that you’d like to talk to them another time around. Be friendly, be polity – remember that people always meet at least twice, and maybe next time, they are your must-have-oh-my-god-I-want-to-work-there choice. Don’t burn bridges.
Some people might still go to an interview after signing a contract… make up your mind if you want to steal those people’s time, and if it really gives you anything to do so.
Avoid at all costs to sign a contract “just for safety, in case I find nothing better”. Many contracts contain a fine for not showing up, and although this can be settled in a talk in many cases, it certainly does not make the other side happy, because they just have to start all over again. If you are unfortunate, word gets around… especially if you are joining straight from university and the company’s HR talks to your school’s placement people. Seen it happen, wasn’t pretty, ’nuff said.

Now celebrate!
Hey, you just signed up for a challenging and exciting career, and maybe even your first real job. Celebrate! Invite your friends, have a blast… and use the time before you start. Travel, move if you need/want to, get settled… and maybe even prepare a little bit.

This post is part of Consulting 101, a series all about starting out as a consultant.
I’ll cover the preparation in the next installment – stay tuned!
As always, your feedback is most welcome.

An email exchange with reader Ash brought me to the conclusion that we need a new series here on the KC: Consulting 101.

Consulting 101 is laid out to be a helpful guide at the very beginning of your consulting career – from preparation to the first days. I’ve already outlined a number of topics for this, and the series will probably start in the next week.

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments what content you’d wish to have covered in the series, I’ll be likely to include it.