in the movie up in the air george clooney plays a consultant who travels 322 days a year flying across the country firing people he wears nice suits probably racks up a ton of points on his credit cards for travel and also stays at nice fancy hotels but consulting is not really like what you see in the movies and so in today's video i'm gonna help uncover one of the most secretive industries in the world in today's video i'll first get you familiar with the top consulting firms i'll then go over what you do on the
job the lifestyle and hours hierarchy and compensation and lastly the pros and cons to help you figure out if consulting is right for you by the way if you're curious to know how i got the information i did for this video before i went into banking at jpmorgan i was actually really really interested in consulting and did a summer with deloitte and i also spoke with a bunch of friends at mckinsey bain and bcg in order to gather the information that i did for this video i also wanted to let you guys know in advance
that i interviewed my friend at bcg and we're going to be publishing that interview on monday on youtube and we're also going to have it as a podcast version called rare liquid careers and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts on spotify or apple podcast new episodes will be published every monday at 9 a.m pst all right now let's go over the rankings of consulting firms the undisputed tier one is called mbb which stands for mckinsey boston consulting group and bain and these companies are the holy grail in consulting mckinsey is the largest
was founded in 1926 and is often considered the most prestigious and intense boston consulting group was founded in 1963 and has a reputation for having the most brainy culture and bain was founded by a former bcg consultant in 1973 and has differentiated itself through its expertise in private equity via bain capital mckinsey bcg and bain regularly compete against one another and these firms focus a lot on big picture projects that shape a company's strategy so c-suite executives are often involved you then have a tier two set of firms including companies like booz allen oliver wyman
and lek and these firms still offer great experiences but the projects are usually not as high profile and these firms tend to specialize in specific industries in the third tier we have companies like accenture and big4 companies and their consulting arms who focus more on implementation rather than strategy and from my own experience from working at deloitte the projects usually involve more mid-level management on the client side the last tier involves smaller boutique firms that typically specialize in an industry or a certain field and in general the projects you work on are a lot smaller
in scope all right so now that you know the firms let's discuss what you do in consulting in consulting you're typically working on one project for one client at a time and your work can vary widely depending on the type of project size of the client and the industry there are an endless number of types of projects which can also depend on the type of consulting firm you're at which you can see in this list here but digging into some of the common types of consulting projects here are some of the main ones under strategy
we have entering a new market category of products or customer segment developing a plan for supply chain production sourcing or sales or transforming a company's business model then there are performance improvement projects which can include operations improvement cost reduction pricing strategy and value chain projects then there are m a projects which can involve m a strategy due diligence or post merger integration projects consulting projects can range anywhere from a few weeks to even a year or longer but on average they last a few months each so as you can imagine you'll just have a huge
broad range of exposure to different projects industries clients and so that's really one of the great things about consulting is you just get so much exposure to a lot of different types of businesses as a consultant your work varies widely day-to-day but generally you're digging deep into company-specific data and financials in excel or gathering information through qualitative interviews in the forms of surveys calls or focus groups and after analyzing large sets of information and data consultants extract the key takeaways and create presentations that provide strategic recommendations that can help improve a company's business next up
let's talk about the lifestyle and hours for consultants in terms of your lifestyle you're generally working from monday to thursday at the client site and often are being flown business class to your client's site and you also get to stay at nice hotels that are fully paid for you fly back home on thursday evenings which usually means a slightly shorter workday and on fridays most consultants after a while don't even go into the office and have shorter work days that end between 1 to 5 pm depending on how busy your project is as a note
on travel because of kovid 19 over the past one to two years or so most consulting projects have all really just been done remotely and there's been no travel but my friends at mbb tell me that over the next few months to a year or so travel will likely come back regarding your hours consultants will work anywhere from 50 to 75 hours a week and so really really busy days will end somewhere around midnight to 1am but you'll never have to work weekends which is a huge plus in comparison to something like investment banking which
you can learn about more in these two videos right here what's also great about the consulting lifestyle is that when you're in between projects meaning when you have just finished a project and you're waiting for your next one you usually won't have that much to do you'll work maybe on a firm initiative or do something like plan a social event or you may fill in for another consultant who's really sick but in general you don't have that much work to do the work's not intense when you're in between projects and if there's nothing to do
then you actually just get the day or even few days of the week off next up let's talk about the hierarchy in consulting and the compensation starting with the hierarchy consulting firms use different titles but there are generally six levels from business analyst to partner as you see here the number of years you stay at each position also varies depending on performance but as you see in this chart you usually get promoted every two to three years on average one thing to note is that after the business analyst level it's usually tough to get promoted
to consultant and so most either exit consulting or go get an mba and if they're lucky the firm will pay for the mba as long as they come back and work there for two years now moving on to compensation there were just so many figures and so many firms and things have been changing a lot lately so i'm just going to focus on these compensation that you get after your undergraduate and mba at bain and bcg right out of undergrad you're typically given a 90k base salary while at mckinsey you get 100k and you also
get a signing bonus of 5k and a performance bonus ranging from 20 to 30k so in your first year you'll be making around 115k to 135k out of mba you can expect a salary of 175k a signing bonus of 30k and a performance bonus ranging from 40 to 45k so you can expect to basically make around 250k right out of mba school the compensation is a huge reason a lot of people go into consulting after mba school and if you want to learn more about my upcoming mba journey you can check out this video right
here let's next help figure out if consulting is for you by going into the top three pros and cons starting with the pros the first is that you become a pretty savvy business thinker because you're helping companies formulate their strategy and you also get a lot of exposure to different industries and top level management as a result you also have great exit opportunities as a consultant because you have a stamp of approval that you're able to handle a job like consulting and you also just develop so many great personal and professional skills and so whether
you want to become a product manager or focus on strategy at an industry firm or if you want to go into venture capital or private equity the world is pretty much your oyster after consulting the second important pro of consulting is just the huge amount of diversity and exposure that you get as we covered earlier on in the video as a junior consultant you'll be working on a variety of different types of projects with clients ranging from small ones to fortune 500 companies and you'll also be working on various different types of industries whether it's
healthcare or tech and so getting this huge amount of exposure is especially great if you're someone who gets easily easily bored and wants to experiment and try out a lot of different types of things in business last but not least the perks in consulting are absolutely amazing my friends at mbb gave me the following list first you can expense dinners up to 50 with no questions asked second you get flight and hotel status and a ton of points from all your traveling which means a lot of free traveling for you in your personal time third
there are a lot of expensive team events like yacht cruises and fancy dinners that can cost a few hundred dollars per person fourth there are second mints and externships where you can temporarily explore working at another company for six to twelve months fifth there are formal leaves of absence programs where you can get two months off every one to two years where you don't get paid but still get benefits and lastly it's super easy to move from one office to another and they actually pay for all of the relocation costs that you incur while moving
so while perks are a bit superficial to have as a pro consulting firms really do their best to keep their employees happy and bcg and bain regularly are ranked among the top companies to work for across the world next moving on to the cons the first is that there is a lack of implementation and so while you do work on a lot of projects with businesses and it can get you you do get your hands a little bit dirty in terms of working with management you're not actually there after the recommendation to see it and
make sure that your entire strategy that you propose actually gets done as a result a lot of consultants kind of get the feeling that working on a lot of powerpoint presentations and telling a management team to do something but not really seeing all that come to fruition can get a little bit tiring over time and there's a desire that kind of comes out of over comes over time where you want to actually build something and so that's a huge con for consulting second in normal times when consultants are traveling traveling does get pretty lonely and
tiring and most consultants actually prefer not to travel and want to kind of stay in their home city because if you think about it traveling from monday to thursday to somewhere else also means that you're paying for rent at your home city where you're not really there most of the time and always catching flights and going back to a nice hotel but just being by yourself can get pretty lonely the third con is that there can be a lack of predictability from working with different clients and bosses and cities and different industries like all the
time moving from one project to another it can mean that your life or what you can expect to do at work will be constantly changing and so this can be a pro like i discussed earlier but can also be a con depending on your personality all right so this wraps up my overview for consulting and if you want to learn more about consulting from a bcg consultant then as a friendly reminder i'm going to be posting an interview on youtube at 9am this upcoming monday and it's also going to be available on podcasts wherever you
get your podcasts new episodes with a person who works at a different industry in business is going to be posted every monday at 9 00 am pst you can also follow me on instagram and tick tock for more content and i also have a separate investing channel which you can check out as well and with that said thank you so much as always for watching hope to catch you in the next video thanks so much [Music]
