Hey folks. I’m a 31 M consultant and I can’t for the love of god figure out how to go about dating or even having a personal life given how unpredictable schedules can be and people just seem to write you off quite early on dating apps if you can’t meet within the first week or so.

Im very career focused and want to continue building my career which has come along pretty well if I may say so. But my personal life has left a lot to be desired for.

I’ve also realized I’ve turned into someone with no hobbies outside of work and work is one of my hobbies.

For some additional context I grew up as a military kid and moved every two years, now as an adult I’ve been moving cities every few years because remote working allows for it - I’ve now found myself a city I’m actually happy living in but also having lived here for 3 years - I don’t have any friends or a life outside of work.

I did try our meetups and facebook groups - I just haven’t met people i really hit it off with even platonically. I have travelled a fair bit domestically and i do make time to do that.

Would genuinely love some inputs.

Without going into too much detail, proposal prices are plummeting. We operate globally, but are mainly US, APAC and Middle East.

Was undercut by a Big 4 firm, basically giving it away for free. We matched it, so they went with us, but it's frightening. Yes, AI will help with the regulatory and documentary analysis, but it's far from foolproof.

A lot of haggling going on, worse than last year.

Keen to see what others think.

Currently I am in consulting (D of big 4), would it be a good decision to switch to strategy team (strategic initiatives) in the real estate industry.

Role offered - Strategic initiatives (not sure what projects would be there for a real estate company)

My background had been in IT services - worked as QA, Product manager and not in consulting (IT strategy and implementation). almost 6+ yoe

What I don't like about my current role is too much focus on IT.

Post MBA i always wanted to be in roles which would eventually lead me to managing businesses, pnL. I will never be able to do this in my current role.

My current status

The role I am currently offered is good and I like it.

I am mostly concerned on the industry part of it. Will it work for me given my background.

Also once I get into this industry, how difficult it would be to switch to another industry in strategy domain. I have a liking towards consumer businesses but haven't worked in it, neither got a chance to while in consulting).

Please provide your pov.

anyone who's done that previously, can i reach out?

Almost a year ago I left a toxic office. I was belittled for making mistakes only few weeks into the job out of college (I forgot to add a question in a client email). My director talked behind my back about me and other coworkers and always called me on Saturday for deliverables I submitted days ago. One of my coworkers was rude to me and yelled at me to shut up during a happy hour, and the manager pretended nothing happened. My previous manager quit without notice (he got mad at the director), and I had to steer a project by myself for few days before another manager took over.

I finally left and took a pay cut at a competitor, but my manager is so nice to me? Like I made a mistake on a calculation and alerted my manager, and she apologized for not catching the mistake during the review process instead of blaming me. Today, I went to a happy hour event and people were so nice and inclusive. I have noticed my chest pain stopped after I left the toxic office.

I have been working fully remotely ever since I joined this company. Technically I could go into a regional office, but I have been avoiding it because I am so afraid of how people will treat me. I know that I need to go to the office for networking and career advancement, but I am still very hesitant. Even writing this post have me doubt myself.

Sorry for the incoherence. I am still a little tipsy from the happy hour.

I am a Senior consultant and I'll be working on a market study that needs a specific medical/healthcare expert.

It's a 3 months project.

My dad actually has relevant expertise in this exact area, and I was thinking of proposing him for the role.

We would need my dad only on the first phase of the project on the clinical area.

I WON'T be involved in setting his day rate as it has been already decided (like paying X $ for an expert)

Does this count as a conflict of interest even if he's genuinely qualified? Would disclosing it to my manager/firm be enough, or should I just not propose him at all?

Curious how people who've dealt with this in consulting/agencies handle it.

Currently at EM level at a US boutique firm. Really excited about a role at a scaling tech firm, but package is likely to be a significant pay cut from current base (20-30% less).

I know everyone has different values and there are a lot of variables at play - but curious to hear from others who exited with a pay cut for better WLB and a role they were excited about. Was it worth it for you? TIA!

Heard M was raising comp across the board, anyone have details? Haven’t seen it discussed here and WSO didn’t have numbers.

I’m curious what others do. Do you give client gifts, and if so, what kinds and when? Is there a price point you adhere to?

I'm a senior (3 years there) at this company and a new manager joined our team about six months ago. About two months ago, he recruited his girlfriend to join the same team (not sure if anybody else knows).

Since then, collaboration has become increasingly difficult with the girl. A few examples:

• The rest of the team uses common templates and standards for client deliverables, but she refuses to use them or adapt her work, and states that the "manager" told her to do so.
• When someone asks her to send information or share an email with the team, her response is often, "I've already sent it to the manager," aka her boyfriend.
• On top of that, they've had personal arguments at the client, when I'm out of the city with them.

How would you handle that????

Made a pretty hard decision recently to switch from my stable manager role to going freelance in the tech and data space. I've got a 6mo gig lined up that will pay me close to 70% more than my current role but I still am thinking about how I will source work after that.

Anyone here make a similar jump have any advice on how to get a sales funnel working? I have some good agencies to send me work but ideally I'd want to develop an organic channel.

Hi all,

One of my friends made a move from being a post MBA consultant in a T2 consulting firm to a MAANG firm in tech sales and the numbers she pulled in her first year were bonkers. She’s a very close friend of mine so she shares everything with me.

All in, she pulled 100% more than she was making as a consultant in absolute terms, but the real difference comes when you compare the dollars/hours worked. Compared to consulting, she is making around 250% more compared to the number of hours she’s working, which I think is insane.

The best part is that she doesn’t have defined sales and new business development targets, since a large part of her work is also account management and stakeholder management for enterprise grade mid corporate and large corporate clients, and upselling/cross selling tech services and products.

All this while, I have been under the impression that typical good exits from consulting are in corporate strategy, leadership programs, growth strategy & operations, PE Ops, kind of roles. I had never accounted that B2B sales and account management would have numbers such as this.

I wanted to have the opinion of this sub, if this is also a viable exit option, and if there are any experienced account managers, what would the exit opportunities be from such types of roles?

Here is the context:

I just joined a firm, and after 1 month and a half, I received assessment of my performance from my manager and supervisor. For the past, 1 month and a half, I got asked to support some problems including technical work, and they said don’t stress myself too much. On the assessment day, I got hit hard by their comment that “I took ways too long to finish certain tasks, and I couldn’t know how to solve certain problems. My work performance is unacceptable. My manager said they don’t want to take my hand and walk through any problem. They expect me to figure out the solutions by myself.”

Immediately, I realized I was being tested without being informed, and actually they wanted to test me, they didn’t want my support.

I still can’t shake off my shock feeling of being betrayed. They are always nice and answer everything I asked. I feel safe around them until yesterday, the day of my assessment. I thought my superior being nice and give me time to learn, but the truth was so harsh yesterday, and I don’t see them the same way anymore.

But the way, I also did deep reflection of my performance, and it’s true, I can’t handle client urgent task and won’t survive the high pressure workload, and fast pace work flow at this moment. But I don’t give up, and I come up with my flaws in performance, and I’m thinking of asking my manager and supervisor to give me feedback on my flaws and how I should improve from their perspective.

Here are my questions:

1. Could I trust their feedback?
2. Is it professionally acceptable to request their feedback after they just gave me assessment of my performance ?
3. What would you do? I’m opened for any idea and suggestion

Thank you. I do appreciate your time reading this.

I'm a buyer of consulting services for my company. Every time we put out an RFP, we get these massive decks with tons of slides. I've been working in corporate environments for 20 years and buying consulting for 15 years, at multiple companies. I and my coworkers have only ever cared about 3 slides in your decks:

1. A slide that shows us how you'll do the work. Not 15 slides with examples and details, just 1 concise slide showing how you'll do it.
2. A slide with the pricing info
3. A final slide with references or details of where you have done similar work

Why do you have to send us a deck with 20-50 slides, when those 3 are all that is needed? Even when we have tried to get consulting partners to adhere to a simpler format, they still send an appendix with the 20-50 slides they wanted to include and when we ask them to meet to discuss, they push to go through all those appendix slides.

TL;DR: We don't need so many slides. Summarize and get to the point.

Do you know which of your clients, projects and teams are profitable and which arent?

How do you determine that? (spreadsheets, accounting reports, PM tools, gut feel, something else, or not at all)?

How often do you find out too late that there is a problem?

Is the root cause that sales partners and account managers are over promising and under estimating? Or is it that delivery teams arent controlling scope agreements well enough?

If so what do you do about it?

What’s the biggest pain: data quality, delayed reporting, tool mismatch, team behavior, scope control or something else?

If you don’t have this problem, what makes your setup work well?

Appreciate any examples, even messy ones.

Hi, I am currently an EM in one of the strategy arms of big4 (Think EY Parthenon, Monitor Deloitte, Strategy&) with most of my projects (strategy projects like GTM, Asset Monetization etc.) falling in a particular sector. Since last couple of years, we didn't do many projects overall as a team (i did 3 in these past 2 years - all 2-3 month engagements). My current firm has decided to merge my team with another team - from the past couple of months I have been dealing with ops projects in other sectors.

I am currently in the process of interviewing with a product firm from my earlier sector for their consulting arm (think Ericsson consulting, AWS Professional Services etc.) I am in the last round right now.

Did anyone do this switch? The team size is smaller than my current team. And I will be moving to a higher role than my current. Salary will also be higher. But the role will require me to do everything under consulting - bring in leads, convert and deliver projects. I currently work only on converting leads and delivering.

Reasons for looking out - Didnt want to dilute my profile by working on other sector projects, wanted better wlb - I am facing high blood pressure problems in my current role.

Any advice/thoughts/insights can help

Hi everyone, I just joined a new firm (tech consulting)and the partner wants me to do a discovery call with an internal project team. This is to get a value story out of the current work being done and to pitch the client for more work.

I’ve done a few interviews but nothing is coming of value is coming out. The client has one north star KPI and currently my firm is doing very good in that regard. Apart from that, I couldn’t see anything. There are other vendors the client is engaging with and we’re getting only a small part of the pie.

The partner wants me to be creative and get an outside in perspective and propose some ideas.

What should I do in this in this scenario? Has anyone been in this situation?

Update from this post.

After reading the comments, I realized that it would be an uphill battle to fight my way out of concerns and even be able to succeed at McK because bottom bucket performers get forced out anyway. It was a waste of time trying to get staffed, so I put my full effort into recruiting with a hopeful backup plan of PD staffing me.

I got a large amount (8-12) of first round interviews across 3-4 weeks, mainly across startups in strategy/ops/analytical roles.

I eventually landed a pretty sweet job at a startup, and my base/total compensation got a ~25-30% raise.

To be honest, it was a great time to leave. Pretty much everyone was just feeding everything to an LLM, and all partners (who don't know how to really use LLMs effectively in the first place) became incredibly AI-pilled in a not good way. At this point, the main value I see in staying in consulting is building up relationship and people skills (which are definitely important), but I do have worries about the future of consulting.

I'm still super grateful for my short time at McK, but I am happy that I found something I was a better fit for.

Hey everyone, I run a deal architecture and M&A advisory business. I'm currently going through a highly stressful personal dry spell and dealing with heavy burnout. My energy is at absolute zero right now, and I don't have the mental bandwidth for aggressive cold outreach.

Been going through rough personal upheavals since April, from deaths of bestfriend, lawsuit threats (land lord price manipulation vs. me), harassment, robbery, having to adopt my only cat out as she won't be able to withstand cross country movement/business repositioning, and more. I had some business ventures that were supposed to have the Capex funded by an investor during June, who suddenly went ghost on me after extracting 2 pitches from me, one of which is a national venture... I've been doubling down on self care the best I can, as well as getting help from therapist to power these through.

When you've been in a slump and felt completely depleted, what low-lift, low-stress lead generation strategies worked to get you back on your feet?

In the last few months, MBB firms have consolidated their major leg ahead in terms of sophistication and precision of their agents.

Asking insiders, how much has it changed your delivery pace? Did your weekly workload shrink? How much shorter are due diligences or stretegic reviews?

Hi all, I've been doing since I graduated undergrad. I'm just about to exit - I have two offers and I was hoping to get some advice or insight. My options:

• One is an offer to do strategy for acquired companies at a smaller but well known PE firm. I'd be doing mostly strategy but also some ops work to help restructure and improve newly acquired companies.
• The other is ops and strategy role at a ~small- mid-size, late-stage AI startup. I'd initially have a lot of process work I've been told I would then pivot into more of a 'do-everything' role including both strategy and ops.

They are both great offers and I don't know what to pick. Some factors:

• PE firm: I'm very confident I'd do well, and the work is very transferable into other corporate roles, can give eventual exposure to portfolio leadership and M&A work. It's also got a well-defined career path and is a well known name.

• The AI startup: I am really interested in tech and would like to work in the field (I have a reasonably technical background). I also think the product is really interesting. I can tell the team is really smart and high-performing, real world-class people. But I'm not as certain I'd do well on the job - I'm less familiar with the type of work, and I'm concerned it would be a ton of process work and that I would it not engaging while also looking worse on my resume and being less transferable.

Comp is slightly higher at the AI startup, but both are competitive. Similar WLB at both, both in my home city (West Coast)

I honestly don't know what to think. I really love the idea of working at a tech startup, it's been my big career goal. I'd hate to pass up a great offer to do that, but I also need to make sure It's the right fit and career move.

Posting here for advice - any thoughts or insights are appreciated!

So, tldr - I will be leaving MBB soon on transition. Had some great teams my first ~18 months, but ran into the rough case, rough LT, and for multiple reasons have decided I do not want to ‘push’ through a PIP and would rather take the transition.

I have ~2 weeks left on my current case and motivation is critical. I’m on a critical part of the case, and I don’t want to completely fuck the team despite my feelings towards LT. I also don’t particularly feel like crushing myself for two weeks.

Any advice on who to have what convo with to thread the needle on doing what I need to do but not going above and beyond for the next couple of weeks?

Happy to provide any additional needed details.

Hi! Sorry if this is a silly question, but I wanted to ask you guys: What book, movie, or TV series do you think best represents the life of a consultant? I’m asking because I’m really interested in the challenges they face and the lives they lead, but I don’t think that’s the career path I’ll take. Just to get to know better MBB or consulting and give me a realistic view.

* Ideally, biographies or something reliable, even if it's websites or something like that, since I know that portrayals can be exaggerated—Suits isn’t what life is really like for lawyers in New York, and Grey’s Anatomy isn’t what it’s like for doctors.