SidetrackAg said:

---

I have come across a few threads on here and a couple of other forums that basically just turn into arguments regarding where to get an MBA. The one thing that always comes up in discussion is consulting, and how much money it can make. For those with experience or knowledge, why is consulting viewed so negatively as far as personal life, family, etc go? I do not have any experience with it, which is why I am asking. Is consulting where the big bucks are, or is there a different path after MBA that does not provide all of the issues with the consulting world?

---

My career: Engineer @ EPC > T20 MBA (Kelly, Anderson, McCombs, KF) > Big 4 > Another Big 4.

I'm over 6 years in Big 4 and hopped to another last year because I was beginning the process of being counseled out. I have zero interest in ever selling work and EM/SM is a very good sweet spot for comp-to-effort and WBL. So I reset my clock by moving firms and will exit once my sign-on fully vests.

You don't need an MBA for Big-4. However, entry point matters until Partner/Managing Director where everything equalizes. I'm in M&A and our MBAs band about $30k higher (base) at the Senior level (entry for MBA) compared to non. There's also sizeable differences in bonus.

I generally loathe everything about consulting.

I hate the firm kool-aid, the firm politics, the pressure to sell garbage, and the view that busy = value and the pyramid scheme of Partnership. I used to love it, but I'm a dad now and life is too short for this BS.

I won't say I'm quiet quitting, but I've stripped my job down to the basics and life is manageable: I only focus on utilization, I turn down all internal efforts, I found a good long-term, fixed-fee spin project where I run a single workstream. I work 40 or less and 99% WFH / work from the ski resort. The #1 thing you learn in consulting is how to play the game of navigating stakeholders and telling compelling narratives. I do that with my clients and my career at the firm. In reality, visibility is very hard from leadership to my role today and we roll everything up to a few round-table discussions a year where one single Partner presents me. Preparing that Partner to present me is the only area I go above and beyond now.

Fascinating thread--convin especially me there are challenges whatever path one chooses.

I have my MBA, plus loads of experience in all areas of Tech including hardware, software, and the last 20+ years in Sales. Curious how to translate that into Senior level consulting, perhaps in the M&A area. Love to hear any input from this group...

Man, as a career company employee (engineer, no MBA) and energy exec, none of what y'all are describing sounds fun. I've been told that I'd make much more money consulting than doing energy startups but I don't know about the day to day of consulting.

I'm in a slightly different bucket being that I consult on HR but specifically compensation. That consulting is generally done through Big 4 (a few of them) and a lot of orgs whose core business is insurance brokerage (Mercer, Aon, Willis Towers Watson, etc.).

My path here was an MS through Mays, 10 years in O&G, and then in to rewards consulting. What 30k said earlier is 95% my experience in this little niche of advisory/consulting.

Pros: The young people coming out of school and joining as associates are really, really bright. I do my job pretty well but would have been nowhere near as polished as some of the 22 and 23 year olds I have worked with at that age.

You get a lot thrown at you especially if you are decent and willing to take on the work/revenue. This leads to, as others have mentioned, real life problem solving for many different problems at the same time and some really solid experience in a short amount of time.

I feel pretty empowered to essentially run my own business on behalf of the practice/company.

Cons: Most Partners and Managing Directors don't give 2 ****s about their staff. Most of them want their associates and junior consultants pumping data and deliverables out even if they couldn't tell you what they are handing you to deliver to the client. These are the people responsible for ensuring we make ourselves and the company look good and we give them few tools and even less time to develop them in a way that would really allow them to be producers.

I tend to have a problem with the career consultants. This was mentioned but their solutions tend to be based in a vacuum, similar to how we think about recent grads only having surface-level textbook knowledge. They tend to forget politics and the human aspect of which we do so their ideal solutions often assume ideal environments which is almost never the case when someone has engaged a consultant.

Consulting is an echo chamber. I'm becoming convinced that execs use consultants to justify the lack of wage growth relative to inflation we've seen across almost all non-exec jobs for the last few years (and longer). The people with the loudest voices (Partners) haven't ever dealt with what we've seen before since they started practicing. Record low unemployment numbers, highest inflation in 40+ years, o shoring jobs we traditionally sent overseas. This is all new territory for them and many are taking the lazy approach of "let's advise what we've always advised."

Clients are just terrible a vast majority of the time. It's a lot of customer service as an engagement and account lead in addition to having to be the SME.

No regrets joining consulting and I enjoy many facets of it. I'm likely to make some sort of change as my wife and I move towards adopting a child. However, I genuinely do like having to keep up with what's happening in the broader economy in addition to what's happening with my clients and within the space I consult. Plus, it's HR consulting - the bar has generally been set pretty low in most cases by in-house HR or crappy consultants. Being remotely competent makes you look like an oasis of competence in a desert of idiocy.

Comeby! said:

---

Man, as a career company employee (engineer, no MBA) and energy exec, none of what y'all are describing sounds fun. I've been told that I'd make much more money consulting than doing energy startups but I don't know about the day to day of consulting.

---

Consulting compensation is very transparent. We have a Google Sheets on Fishbowl for my firm that nails cohorts to the dollar by service line and city.

Here's the typical Big 4 MBA path, Parthenon/S&/M&A pockets - Advisory non-strat bands a bit lower, but in the ballpark.

Using PwC titles, EY and Deloitte map a bit differently, but they're the same in effect:

• MBA Senior Associate: $185k + $60 sign and 20-30% bonus target
• 1-2 years at Senior (above) - Manger for 2 years ($210k base) - Senior Manager ($230k base) for 2 years with 20-30% target
• Director's (EY/Parthenon Senior Manager / Vice President): $300k average base with same 20-30% target
• Director for 2-7 years based on how well you play the game.
• First year Partner/Principal is $500-600k - average PP for '22 was $1.4m and takes about 5 years to ramp to that.

Consulting isn't fun. But the odds of fighting for that one c-suite role that pays $1+m is much lower in industry than my odds of making Partner in Big 4. I'll never make it, but that's the motivation for many to put up with the hours, stress and travel.

For a non-MBA industry entry, the practice really really matters and is not nearly as prescriptive as the above.

$30,000 Millionaire said:

---

Consulting stopped being appealing to me when 1) I wanted ownership and 2) I realized it's nothing more than pimping young people's time and pretending you're an expert. The partners at your firms are not experts. In fact, they don't know jack squat. What they do know how to do is sell, nicely package content into a story and write no duh white papers chock full of buzzwords. #2 is the unspoken truth of every one of these firms.

---

You always have to wonder why, if it is the associates doing all or most of the work -- research, analysis, etc. -- and the partners out there selling the work, how the partners themselves (supposedly with all the experience) actually know what they're doing. At best, their knowledge is either out of date or based on what their subordinates tell them and at worst, they're solely concerned with the next project.

It isn't any different from home and commercial contractors -- seeking to keep their guys busy while they go find the next project.

91AggieLawyer said:

---

$30,000 Millionaire said:

---

Consulting stopped being appealing to me when 1) I wanted ownership and 2) I realized it's nothing more than pimping young people's time and pretending you're an expert. The partners at your firms are not experts. In fact, they don't know jack squat. What they do know how to do is sell, nicely package content into a story and write no duh white papers chock full of buzzwords. #2 is the unspoken truth of every one of these firms.

---

You always have to wonder why, if it is the associates doing all or most of the work -- research, analysis, etc. -- and the partners out there selling the work, how the partners themselves (supposedly with all the experience) actually know what they're doing. At best, their knowledge is either out of date or based on what their subordinates tell them and at worst, they're solely concerned with the next project.

It isn't any different from home and commercial contractors -- seeking to keep their guys busy while they go find the next project.

---

Partners are owners foremost. C-suites aren't in the technical weeds either. They guide the growth, operations, strategic goals and shareholder management. They don't assemble the reports, but the CEO presents it on the earnings call.

Similar to Partners, they own a business that sells people. Partners on my engagements only bill a few hours for stakeholder critical meetings, QC and readouts. The "expertise" usually sits at our Directors / Senior Managers or our internal knowledge repos for benchmarking, best-practices, templates, workflows, etc. And a simple unspoken reality, we consult with alot of companies which means we have a pretty good pulse of what's going on with your competitors or have seen what doesn't/does work. At the end of the day, Partners don't sell expertise, they sell outcomes. Hence the ability to stitch BS narratives together for something that hasn't even happened yet.

But even then, our sell is simple:

1) CYA / assurance - something needs to be done, cost-out, strategy, growth, but hiring the [insert big firm here] gives you the fall guy as $30k mentioned; "no on gets fired for hiring MBB" is what my KF consulting prof would say.

2) Your business is in the business of your business. It's core purpose isn't strategy, M&A or process improvement. Our muscle is to ingest a lot of complex data points, lay them against our frameworks, box in the problem statement, identify a solution and most importantly quantify the value (again, we do this a lot of places and have data points that are hard to come by in the market). It's not a complicated process, but hard to execute within the business. We benefit from the top-down entry which empowers the teams to move across business units/teams and connect the dots on a broader scale.

RangerRick9211 said:

---

91AggieLawyer said:

---

$30,000 Millionaire said:

---

Consulting stopped being appealing to me when 1) I wanted ownership and 2) I realized it's nothing more than pimping young people's time and pretending you're an expert. The partners at your firms are not experts. In fact, they don't know jack squat. What they do know how to do is sell, nicely package content into a story and write no duh white papers chock full of buzzwords. #2 is the unspoken truth of every one of these firms.

---

You always have to wonder why, if it is the associates doing all or most of the work -- research, analysis, etc. -- and the partners out there selling the work, how the partners themselves (supposedly with all the experience) actually know what they're doing. At best, their knowledge is either out of date or based on what their subordinates tell them and at worst, they're solely concerned with the next project.

It isn't any different from home and commercial contractors -- seeking to keep their guys busy while they go find the next project.

---

Partners are owners foremost. C-suites aren't in the technical weeds either. They guide the growth, operations, strategic goals and shareholder management. They don't assemble the reports, but the CEO presents it on the earnings call.

Similar to Partners, they own a business that sells people. Partners on my engagements only bill a few hours for stakeholder critical meetings, QC and readouts. The "expertise" usually sits at our Directors / Senior Managers or our internal knowledge repos for benchmarking, best-practices, templates, workflows, etc. And a simple unspoken reality, we consult with alot of companies which means we have a pretty good pulse of what's going on with your competitors or have seen what doesn't/does work. At the end of the day, Partners don't sell expertise, they sell outcomes. Hence the ability to stitch BS narratives together for something that hasn't even happened yet.

But even then, our sell is simple:

1) CYA / assurance - something needs to be done, cost-out, strategy, growth, but hiring the [insert big firm here] gives you the fall guy as $30k mentioned; "no on gets fired for hiring MBB" is what my KF consulting prof would say.

2) Your business is in the business of your business. It's core purpose isn't strategy, M&A or process improvement. Our muscle is to ingest a lot of complex data points, lay them against our frameworks, box in the problem statement, identify a solution and most importantly quantify the value (again, we do this a lot of places and have data points that are hard to come by in the market). It's not a complicated process, but hard to execute within the business. We benefit from the top-down entry which empowers the teams to move across business units/teams and connect the dots on a broader scale.

---

spoken like a true consultant, well done!