To keep this brief I'm looking to connect with some ex-consultants who are interested in helping with some advice on my new startup model I've created this year. I've been accepted to a Startup Conference in Portugal in November, and I have a working prototype.

I saw my previous post attracted some great feedback on ex-consultants who started their own startup. I developed a prototype thats live that connects data layers for buildings and is aimed at (B2B) but can be (B2C). If you have experience working with Commercial Property or PropTech and want to see what you can help improve on I'd love to connect.

Timeline

- 1-9 months - Solo build (Claude / Vscode/Supabase/Vercel) - some contractors

- Current - Building out a Property Management Application for the Conference

- Gaps - Feedback loop / EU based consultants who can give feedback /

- Goal - Attain seed money in November from the conference

Feel free to DM if you want to see a demo in the next week or so and want to provide some feedback. Esp interested in EURO based ex-consultants as next target markets are (Ireland/Sweden/Ned/Esp) or markets where there owner investment buildings and units. Not promoting the app on this post, but can privately.

I am retired and now implement Quickbooks Online for nonprofits, pro bono. One question is when to "cut over" from their legacy system to QBO and I consider it best practices to do this as of the beginning of their current fiscal year. I occasionally get a client who wants to cut over for the previous fiscal year in order to get history or better reporting than they have. I applaud the idea but this means reposting a full year of transactions on top of keeping up with current postings. I have lost the argument 3 times in my volunteer career and all ended in disaster for the pro bono client. Needless to say, I feel bad about this.

I would prefer to talk them out of it but I do not seem to have the communications skill to do so. They simply do not understand the amount of work an extra year of posting means. I would like your advice on whether to refuse to continue with the project if they take this approach. I have a viable alternative of doing the current year, getting comfortable, and then reposting the prior fiscal year.

My thought is to simply say "This is how it is done" and refuse to continue with the project if they do not listen to me. (It is good to be a volunteer). I would appreciate your thoughts?

Traditionally I’ve been an hourly consultant with my interactions with clients being over the phone and/or webconference. I have an upcoming meeting with the client and a 3rd party which requires travel and an overnight stay, about 24 hours in total. If my hourly rate is $X/hour, how should I think about setting my fees for this? 

Any consultants here using a dumb phone?

What about pausing notifications on outlook/slack for certain hours? How about all together?

I recently was convinced to try stopping notifications on outlook & slack for evenings and mornings... The more I've lived without them the more I realize it's been totally fine, which has got me wondering about whether or not I should try muting notifications all together...

I'm just sick of my smart phone.

Quick rant, but if you're networking to try and get a referral to a consulting firm or an exit, make sure you get the referral / do the coffee chat *before* you apply and not after

Most big companies do referrals one of two ways. The first option is the employee inputs your email and fills out a form, and then the candidate is sent a link through which to apply. The second option is the employee passes the resume along to recruiters to try and side-step the normal near-black-hole of submitting through the online portal

In either case there's usually nothing we can do (within reason) once you've already applied (and there's no way to receive a referral bonus if you join)

It's just baffling that 75% of people who reach out to me for referrals, including consultants who worked at the same firm I did that used the same exact referral process, have already applied. I'll still happily chat with you if you get the interview but I can't help you get it, and you'd know that if you paid any attention to how referrals work at your own company or ever googled "how do job referrals work." This is your career and you're desperate to exit, take some ownership

I recently moved into industry in a corporate strategy role and my new company has projects they have been working on for years and some they haven’t even started yet which have also been sitting for years. I came in with a back log of projects and now I feel like they are grinding me down and treating me like an external consultant instead of an actual employee. For example, expecting me to turn over these projects extremely quickly, and kind of micromanaging me because they need to get them done. Almost everything is being routed to me, and I’m getting pulled into everything.

It’s a very small team and my other teammates do not get this treatment and I’m starting to resent it. They are the ones that made all of these projects build up. Also, I took a pay cut and the rest of the whole organizations vibe is laid back, but I’m getting rocked. Any advice on how to manage this as it’s causing resentment and defeating the purpose of leaving consulting lol. Recently was reached out to a recruiter and went through final rounds so potentially getting a new offer with way higher comp to justify the grind. What would you do?

I'm a Senior Partner at a boutique Comms firm. I was doing a review of our T&E ledger a few weeks ago and noticed one of my Director's teams was expensing roughly $250 a head for solo dinners.

I honestly don't care about the 250 bucks. That's a rounding error. But I pulled the itemized receipts and the actual orders were just embarrassing. Standard lobster apps. Basic cuts of filet. Two well whiskeys. It looked like a regional sales team's big night out at a suburban mall steakhouse. If our enterprise clients see our people surviving on cheap surf and turf, they're going to think we're going under and start negotiating our billing rates.

So I pulled the Director aside and told him he needs to "curate a better image" for his team. I thought the implication was obvious. Tell them to start ordering the A5 Wagyu, get some decent caviar, and expense wine that actually has a vintage. We have to project success to justify our retainers. Somehow this guy completely missed the point and slapped his team with a $125 meal cap.

Now his whole department is in a panic. I just heard through the grapevine that one of our analysts is so broke they are ordering a dozen plain chicken breasts at dinner and smuggling them home in a carry-on bag to feed their kids. We look like absolute peasants right now.

But the real issue here is my Amex Centurion points. The firm routes all this team's travel spend through my master account. With this ridiculous $125 limit, my point generation has completely stalled out. If this drop in spend keeps up I'm going to have to fly commercial to St. Barts this winter instead of chartering.

How do I tell this Director his cheap middle-management mindset is literally ruining my holiday travel plans without HR getting annoying about it?

I am an Analyst at a boutique Comms consulting firm. I make roughly minimum wage when you factor in my 80 hour work weeks. Up until recently, we had a brilliant expense policy based entirely on vibes. Naturally, I used this to singlehandedly keep my family of five alive. Whenever I traveled, I would expense a nightly $250 dinner. My Director honestly believes I was housing a lobster appetizer, a filet mignon, four desserts, and a gallon of scotch all by myself.

In reality? I was ordering exactly 17 side dishes, three plain chicken breasts, and a massive chocolate cake, sweeping it all into my carry on luggage, and flying it back home to my three ravenous children. It was our primary food source. Everyone was well fed and happy.

Then tragedy struck. My Director randomly capped our meals at $125. He claimed leadership wanted a better image. What about the image of my toddlers weeping over their sudden lack of truffle mac and cheese?

My financial plan is in absolute shambles. Yesterday I spent my entire 1:1 desperately explaining that corporate micromanagement is literally starving the future generation. He just stared at me. Am I being unreasonable for expecting a consulting firm to subsidize my children's nutritional needs?

I am a Director in a small Comms consulting firm. I run a team of 6, and travel is roughly 25% of the role. Up until recently, my department had no set expense or per diem policy. It was all based on “use your best judgment.” But, expenses are reviewed by leadership, and ELT was starting to ask questions about my team’s habit of a lobster app, filet mignon main, multiple desserts, and 2+ whiskeys each night, often running up $250+ solo tabs per dinner on weeklong trips. No I’m not exaggerating. Team was doing this for both client and internal travel. I was told by our senior partner to “curate a better image” for my team.

I took the view that we can’t expect everyone to interpret vague parameters the same way. We never made it clear what “too much” was. So, I recently set a cap: any given meal cannot go over $125. I don’t care/count how many meals you take in a day, but just don’t let the system flag any one spend above that amount.

The team is in shambles. Yesterday one of them spent our entire 1:1 explaining how this firm is going downhill by micromanaging its best assets. They are so upset that I need a gut check, please. Is this really so unreasonable? If so, what alternatives should I consider?

Saw these out for free on the corner. These 4 books pretty much sum up my experience

I am a Saas consultant working at a boutique firm (<250 consultants globally). We have a staffing manager who assigns us to projects, so we are not responsible for finding ourselves billable work. Though upper mgmt reviews our utilization annually, they don't make firing decisions based off of it, as we aren't given specific targets to meet (bc we have no control). I've been here my whole consulting career, but I've been contacted by several recruiters recently and have actually been considering responding since we'll likely be acquired soon. I know at larger firms like Deloitte and Accenture it seems like individual contributors are responsible for finding billable work and meeting utilization targets. Can someone explain how this works? What happens if you don't meet your targets? Ty!

Looking to see how many consultants who worked in the consulting big4 or bain or mckinsey actually left consulting but used that knowledge to start their own business? or an AI project?

Worked in the SAAS consulting space and left 2 years ago after a brief stint with a customer and it was hard to see how customers work, compared to the projects in consulting. There is life after life in consulting but curious what others have done.

Ever since starting I’ve realized my memory is really impeding me on this job. I take notes for everything and have a to do list, which helps me stay on top of tasks. But remembering random facts like what assumption I made in a model last month or things a client said during a meeting a couple of weeks ago is ago is a struggle for me, even if written down.

It’s starting to impact the speed of my work and client interaction. Anyone dealt with anything similar or have any tips on how I can improve this?

I’ve been working for a boutique consulting firm for the last 7+ years and burnt out from the stagnation of things. I’m a Director level purely by busting my ass and strong performance with clients and people management and about to finish an MBA program ahead of schedule.

I’ve been job searching for the last 3 years aggressively and thought the MBA would help since so many roles made it a requirement (and I genuinely wanted to earn one and be the first in my family with a masters). But I keep getting to the final round of interviews only to have an internal candidate picked over me

I’ve leveraged my clients, the school alumni network, the mba career services, a headhunter, and all the ai automation platforms - and still nothing.

So the ask is, how did you escape consulting. I’m going insane exhausting every avenue besides starting my own company, which I have little desire to do with mba student loans. Help your boy out.

For graphs - axis names, highlight the main bar, separate bar color for projections vs historic. group bars on the x axis by cohort, create secondary axis if needed etc. - all the best practices that exist

Similarly for tables - alignment, text colors, bulleted list, indentation for nos etc

General language - sharper articulation, no simple headings but insight led statement etc

Was ex consultant, new role requires writing but no one values all this gliter. I value it, but it takes too long to format the tables and graphs manually. The analyst/ associate equivalent folks find it pointless to learn beautification and it frankly adds no value to core skills

Looking for any skill that you've created for this?

The only consulting firm I've worked at is my current firm, and I've asked questions about what common performance review practices are before. (I have worked in industry and it was not like this.)

Now I'm a manager giving reviews to my direct reports, and I am once again wondering whether our process is within the normal range for consulting.

I know there is always room for subjectivity in reviews, but I was shocked at the complete lack of objectivity in our process. Going through it as a manager has really made sense of why the review process felt so random, political, and disconnected from what good performance actually looks like. As a junior employee, it was really hard to know how to improve or what was going well.

I would even go so far as to say the process feels like they're just doing a lot of procedural steps so it looks official. And then everyone accumulates negative ratings so they can later describe departures as performance-based, rather than layoffs. (Yes, American companies are all at-will employment, but some places are not this shameless about it.)

Here's what the review process is like at my company from a manager view:

We have a rubric, but the rubric has no examples of what the competencies look like in practice - they're very vague. The rubric gives some guidance on what level the person should be rated against, but there are gaps. For example, the ratings are AC1, AC2, etc. and the job titles are also AC1, AC2, but sometimes an AC1 needs to get AC2 to be on track and sometimes an AC2 can get an AC1 and still be considered on track. (I've also gotten a lot of pushback when I asked about this because the rating is supposed to be purely about these vague competencies and we shouldn't be thinking about the person's tenure when we give the rating.)

The person being reviewed has no real opportunity to appeal or respond. At most, they are allowed to suggest examples to add to the review.

People have multiple managers per cycle. We have 50/50 staffing so people typically have 3 or 4 managers during a review cycle, but it could be as many as ~5 or as few as 2.

The review itself happens behind closed doors. In the meeting, all the managers speak in vague platitudes with no examples. The person who speaks the loudest dominates, and no one disagrees with each other. We do have more detailed written reviews, although many managers do not use examples there, either. We tell people that there is weighting for length of project and recency, and maybe that happens at some point, but it definitely doesn't happen during the meeting with the managers.

I’ve been at my current mid-sized firm for a few years, and on my recent engagement, I've been staffed at a massive corporate client.

Long story short, they have a couple of job openings and threw my name in, and the client team really wants to make it happen. Now, they couldn't poach but threw obvious hints.

Since they’re a huge, risk-averse company, they made sure everything was strictly by the book so I applied on my own so it doesn't trigger any non-poach stuff in the MSA. The client also went out of their way to assure my firm that hiring me won't shrink any of our ongoing SOWs.

Like many of you know, consulting is draining. The work-life balance is incomparable so that was a huge deciding factor for me. So, I had the talk with my Partner today. I pitched it as just exploring an opportunity, completely avoided talking numbers to dodge a bidding war, and just said I want to go client side. Honestly, the Partner was amazingly supportive and understanding. Leadership is hashing it out internally right now.

But i feel terrible. I actually love my firm, my leadership, and my team. The fact that the Partner was so nice makes me feel like a massive traitor. I know going client-side is the right move for my career, but leaving them feels awful.

Has anyone else had an exit to a client that actually went smoothly? How did you shake the guilt of leaving a firm you genuinely like? Also, what should I expect while leadership and the client talk behind the scenes? Any advice on making sure the handover goes perfectly so I don't burn this bridge would be awesome.

Thanks!

I'd love to hear how you broke through this particular "barrier" when interviewing for new roles, either full time as a consultant.

I thought I had a role in the bag recently as an full time MD in charge of business metrics and alignment. Basically, somoene to come in at the 30K level and develop structure around their acquisitions as it relates to consolidating talent and real estate, and enuring their location strategies support their GTM strategies.

Everyone thinks that their business is "unique and hard to understand" but it really isn't. You need a product that people are willing to pay for. You need to deliver it as a cost lower than you sell it for. You need to understand where you are today and what your growth and consolidation strategies are. The distinction is that each company has different products, different customers, different operations, and different growth strategies. That's what makes consulting so fun. And learning those things won't take a smart, motivated person more than a few months.

I had several rounds and was doing well, but then I hit a roadblock; the person who would be my boss. They straight up came to me and said "I don't get your resume. You've done a lot of things. You've only been in this particular industry for a year, and have not been with our company. How could you possibly have the depth of knowledge to succeed here?"

I was unphased, walking him through the various disciplines I'd consulted in: revenue strategy, real estate strategy alignment, designing and standing up capital planning processes and procurement processes, designing and integrating interactive KPI dashboards, in addition to a lot of customer-market-product fit work (surveys, analysis, and metrics history). The fact that my role is as a ringleader to bing siloed teams and knowledge together, to be able to spot issues and value-add scenarios, and bring them to life.

But, he never accepted my thesis, even though the job description requires experience in all of those areas. He had been there for 15 years, working up a linear path, and I couldn't convince him that having a smart, motivated person with a broad depth of experience was far more important for a broad-based, "built the plane while flying it" role than a SME who's been doing some version of the same thing for 10 years.

I know consulting is difficult to understand (or intimidating) for a non-consultant. How do I better position myself next time?

I’m wrapping up a consulting project and want to hand over the final project files in a way that I wish I had received them.

Throughout the project, documents came to me through countless individual emails and attachments. I don’t want to turn around and do the same thing to the client.

There’s no shared drive or client portal that I can upload everything to, so I’m curious how other consultants handle this. I’m thinking one organized folder structure with contracts, hotel/venue documents, banquet and AV, financial closeout, final event materials, etc., along with a simple document index so the client can easily find what they need.

How do you typically deliver the final files?

Hey all, a little levity for the PM - so what are we wearing when the leaves hit the ground and pumpkin spice everything becomes a thing and mariah Carrey gets defrosted for the holidays? Still fleeces and thin puffer vests with dress shirts? Or good ole QZips? I'm looking at Schöffell myself for vests. Banana Republic actually has some decent lightweight black vests from Costco, anyway, discuss!

posting because I searched for this a bunch of times and never found a decent thread.

setup: ~40 slide deck for leadership every month. layout never changes, only the numbers do. maybe 60 figures across text boxes, tables and charts. every month I'd save-as last month's file and go through it cell by cell, calculating MoM and YoY by hand because half of them aren't in our BI export.

took ~2 hours and I'd still get one wrong. once had a YoY that was actually a MoM, nobody caught it till the CFO asked why growth suddenly looked incredible. fun meeting.

tried the linked-excel-objects route first, breaks the second anyone renames or moves a file. looked at think-cell, which honestly seems like the right tool, but procurement said no.

ended up with a placeholder setup instead: I drop tags like Revenue_monthly straight into the slides, point it at my spreadsheet, and it fills everything in one go and works out the MoM/YoY/YTD itself. charts too, which was by far the hardest part to get working.

one evening to set up, about 2 min a month now.

is everyone just doing this by hand, or is think-cell basically the standard once you're somewhere that'll pay for it? feels like it should be a solved problem by now.

I’m dealing with a client dynamic I’m curious how others handle.

I’m proactive and tend to get in front of issues before they become problems. Lately, I’ve noticed that when I do that with one client, I sometimes get responses that are curt, corrective or condescending, even when what I’m doing is intended to protect the client and the project.

I don’t want to overreact to someone’s communication style. But I also don’t want to get to the point where I hesitate to use my judgment because I’m anticipating how the client might respond.

For those who have dealt with this, how do you keep doing your job confidently without becoming defensive or letting the client’s tone change how you operate?

Wondering how common it is to request/be granted a 1:1 flex day every time I'm expected to fly on a Sunday.