Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton (now Strategy&)
Sept 2008 - August 2009
My first job after university was as a management consultant for a leading firm in London. The role was intense with a large amount of travel, challenging projects and tight deadlines. The work was predominantly project-based which could last weeks to months and typically involve phases of research, analytics, problem solving and client presentation and handover.
My Reflections on the Role
A great first job after university
I don't have a lot of positive things to say about a career in management consultancy. I didn't particularly feel passionate about the ultimate purpose of the work, the clients, the amount of travel or the aggressive timelines and work culture. As such a few months into the job it became apparent to me that it wasn't going to be a career for life.
That said I would still argue it is a great place to start your career if you want to ultimately want to go work in any professional environment from starting a business to working within a big corporate. In the short period I worked in consultancy I got to work for a variety of clients with a whole host of different problems that require unique approaches to help them solve.
I developed skills on how to operate within clients, understand their problems, gather and analyse vast amounts of data and then present solutions back to stakeholders. The intensity of the role means that you rapidly get to grips with the fundamentals of how business and people within businesses operate.
Besides management consulting other jobs that were popular when I graduated were banking and accounting. Based on what I've come to know about these roles they're also great places to learn about businesses. However they tend to reduce businesses to financial metrics and ratios and are concerned less about the actual operations. I might be wrong, but I feel that starting my career in consulting has helped me in more useful ways as I moved into startups than coming from a banking or accounting job.
Technical Skills
In addition to some of the softer skills relating to working in professional environments I learnt specific technicals skills. I had to use Microsoft Excel, Access and PowerPoint heavily as part of the analytical, problem-solving and presentational elements of the job. I really enjoyed working with all of these tools; Excel is extremely powerful when you get to grips with it. Through tools like pivot tables you can slice-and-dice datasets with ease and gain insights really quickly. I also got a lot of satisfaction in building slideshows (decks) for clients using PowerPoint, it allowed me develop communication, story-telling and presentational skills. It would be a stretch to describe putting building slides as a creative pursuit but there is a certain level of creativity in trying to express ideas visually.
Projects
I worked on a variety of project during my time in consulting. One of the more analytics heavy projects was for a global chemicals company who had a working capital problem. Too much of their finished or semi-finished product was sitting unused in their warehouses and was tying up millions of dollars in capital. We worked with the client to analyse thousands of products and help them optimise production scheduling, helping them make the right amount of each product to meet demand. We had to extract millions of lines of data from their systems, crunch these using MS Access and Excel and present a strategy which enabled them to have enough of the right products available within inventory at any given time.
I also worked on less analytics heavy projects within oil and gas, financial services, clean tech and national Government.
Feedback
The key metric in consulting is your billing ratio, i.e. how much of your time are you working on client projects earning money for the business, versus "on the beach" where you aren't on a billable project and no client is paying for your time. I had a strong ratio within my cohort and got good feedback during the prescribed "360" feedback sessions from seniors.
Ultimately the financial crisis hit the consulting business hard and my whole junior cohort was put on sabbatical as clients were tightening their belts. We were paid part of our salaries to not turn up to work, but we would be available to return to work when demanded. Being in London in my early 20s with some money and no job to go to was pretty fun and I hung out a lot with friends who were in the same position.
Next Steps
Eventually I did want to get back to work and Booz Allen were not yet rehiring. I came across a startup called Kind Consumer which would be my next job. They were just early-stage so couldn't offer a lot in salary, but I had some sabbatical money coming in from Booz this was fine for me. I joined Kind and loved the mission of the company and the startup life. At some point Booz did request that I return, but by then I was really enjoying working in a startup so resigned and never looked back.