Who wants to be a consultant?

I don’t know of any six-year-olds who say, “I want to be a management consultant when I grow up.” Even the children of management consultants who watch their parent leave Sunday night only to come home in time to tuck them in Friday night probably don’t sing the line from Harry Chapin’s song Cat’s Cradle, “I’m gonna be like him”  (or her).

There are several times when people start to think about a job in consulting:

• Junior year undergraduate –“OMG -how am I gonna pay off these loans?” -Maybe an internship in consulting, and work for a couple of years.
• Pre or post MBA, Law degree, STEM MSc “I need to pay-off loans, and/or what is my ticket into senior management, or even consulting? (“I dunno, the money is good and the travel is exciting.”)
• After working at a company for four to eight years or more when the company hires consultants. (“Hey, they just took my ideas and packaged them in PowerPoint. Look at what they get paid and they get to travel and always do different stuff. I can do that job!”)

Okay, I am being a little cynical. I was a consultant for thirty-seven years, worked for five firms and was an independent for twenty-three of those years. It’s fair to say I enjoyed the field, and the work, but I was extraordinarily naïve when I decided to go to business school to become a consultant and at almost every stage of my career. This is an anti-naiveté primer on a consulting career.

The Money

Starting salaries are quite good, which is why consulting is often the choice for smart, but student-debt-ridden undergraduates. You will earn that money with excessive hours; don’t ever make the mistake of calculating what you earn per hour.

Mid-term, money is often better in corporate jobs, the hours more reasonable, and the travel less. Many undergraduates leave for corporate jobs after two years or they go back to graduate school. A very few get sponsored by the top firms to get MBAs with a promise that they will work for those firms for a defined period after graduation.

Long term, some senior partners make a very good living, if they bring in million dollar projects, through direct selling or thought leadership. For the rest, consultants can earn a solidly upper middle class income, but not tech entrepreneur or investment banker rich.

The Travel

Consulting projects are most often done on “client site.” You go where the clients are. The travel seems quite exciting to the uninitiated, but if that is what attracts you to the field it usually gets old quickly.

I worked at firms where I literally left on Sunday afternoon and came home Friday night every week. In these firms if you were not applied to a client and travelling, it was called being “on-the-beach,” but that wasn’t a good thing. Being on the beach meant you did research, or other unbilled work and being unapplied too long meant you were in danger of being let go.

When you are on client site, even in a very exciting location, you rarely have any opportunity for site-seeing. There might be a team dinner on Thursday night at a fancy restaurant where everyone overeats and overdrinks and still has to be on site at 7:00 Friday morning.

Some stay over a weekend to site-see, or tack on personal travel after a project, but if you are married or have other long term relationship commitments this requires some planning.

Other Downsides of a Consulting Career

The money is good, but not great. The travel isn’t what you thought. What else?

Tough on relationships

An outcome of the travel is the strain it puts on relationships. Many long term consultants are divorced. Also if you are the type of person who makes friends where they live, it is difficult to stay in touch with your neighbors if you are only home on weekend. It means no book clubs, weekday barbeques, no classes at the local high school or art center, no practicing with your neighborhood garage band.

Work friends are tough to find

Many projects are staffed from several offices, so even if you wanted to spend more time with people  you worked 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. with for five days they go home to a different city on the weekend. Further some projects are yea-long, but most  engagements are shorter, so if you work for a big firm your work mates are changing every two to three months.

Some firms staff groups of people together to combat this. There are smaller firms, or those with more local client bases, but that typically means a trade-off for less interesting work.

Upsides of Consulting

Why would anyone want this job?  I was a consultant for thirty-seven years, here are my answers to that question:

• The variety of the work – every few months I worked on a different problem, revenue growth, profit growth, people stuff -different problems, different companies, different industries. It was always changing.
• The challenge of the work – very few companies hire consultants for problem -solving of “dead-easy” problems. Even if they were simply hiring you as an ‘extra pair of hands,” there was some reason they weren’t just hiring a temp from Manpower. Most work you were hired for was something they had tried to figure out or do themselves and given up. They might have given up because they couldn’t figure it out. They might have quit because there was too much disagreement on causes or approach. They just needed help for a tough problem and it was worth the money.
• The perpetual learning curve – To be a consultant there is always something you need to learn and quickly. You will need to learn about the client’s company, success patterns. culture, and political system, (who makes what decision, who must be included, etc.) You might learn new industries for your established methodologies or a new methodology for an industry you’d worked in several times. Dull and boring it isn’t.
• The people – the best consultants are smart people, focused on solving the consultants problem, open to learning new things all the time. The best clients are very similar. Both consultants and clients work in teams. They have an agreed approach, a collective work product, mutual accountability and aid. They help each other out. Are there jerks? Sure, but I made it my business not to work for jerk clients or with jerk consultants more than once. I managed to (mostly) work with people who knew how to get stuff done and still have fun.
• The values – What made me stay in consulting for thirty-seven years was it gave me the opportunity to practice my values:
  • Authenticity – I got to be my own weird self. I was valued for my different perspective and my openness to different points of view.
  • Helpfulness – we were there to solve a client’s problem, help that was asked for. Were weren’t there to do the client’s job or interfere where we weren’t requested. We weren’t there to prove how smart we were, just to help where asked.
  • Results and Process – for me solving a problem, getting a result was always important. Just as important was how I did that. I always wanted to teach the client my process so that they could do it themselves the next time. I was a process consultant, but found clients who were willing to allow me to do more than provide an answer.

So you still wanna be a consultant?

If with eyes duly open, it is a great field that will feed you mind body and soul if you keep your head on straight and your heart open.