Aight fish fam, it's been one of those days. What's been your biggest consulting-related fuckup that left you wondering how you still had a job when the dust settled?

As a manager in a sales role, I sent the client an internal pricing doc instead of client pricing doc as an attachment, with an MD copied as well. It was after regular working hours (as most mistakes seem to be) and I quickly realized what I’d done so I basically spammed the email thread with 3 or 4 more emails in a row, the last one saying “apologies for multi-emails- please disregard previous versions and use attached pricing going forward.” I got away with it, although I did not sleep very well that night

Puking in a conference room

As an Associate I was doing billing for our project (~$3 million a month) tabulating the hours and bill rates in excel. Forgot to drag down a SUM formula. Understated our intended invoice by about a million dollars. Client saw and we had to say "lol jk. It's actually a million more."

Sleeping with a client person and getting called out for it by my superiors 🤦🏼‍♂️

Start with your story :)

^ wut?

One of my clients in a reorg project sent the spreadsheet with the salary data of every employee to the entire engineering organization. Not our fault, but created lots of drama

OP, you’ve failed to start the thread with your story. Unlikely that one sentence will get you any meaningful responses.

Double counted a billion dollar asset in a spreadsheet. Whoops!

Apparently it was enough that I had a formal conversation about confidentiality...

Op-What's fucked up with that? I mean client is a weirdo but you didn't screw up

Spending a whole work week on fishbowl

Yeah that’s not a big fuck up invoice mistakes are common and easy fixes.

Also neither is telling someone your client wtf. I guess if you’re on a top secret gov client maybe?

Okay real answer: shared travel plans with friends and family... Who then proceeded to post details publicly on Twitter

The client saw

BCG1- those are my favorite types of mistakes. Making HR or management explain salary discrepancy never gets old

Also for context what was your level at the time?

Did “travel plans” include client name?

Don't recall offhand if they did, but it was enough info that people put two and two together

I emailed rank and file client staff to schedule interviews after this break. The steer co member was furious that I hadn’t cleared the list with him first - something I DEFINITELY should have done. I thought it was harmless and didn’t want to bother him right before the holiday. Not good. Not good at all.

Long story short, we made a really stupid, convoluted strategy to save the client 12% of roughly $8-10MM. It was really dumb but our project lead kept pushing it.

Obviously, we implemented it wrong because it was so convoluted and dumb that it was impossible to do right

Ended up costing the client quite a bit on top of the savings we’d promised.


If we had fired that project lead, I’d still be at that old company. But we didn’t and I was like “fuck it. I can’t work for someone this incompetent” and I left

That client had some fantastic talent working on it. But one very, very dumb person. Out of a 7 person team, 4 of us left within 7 months because we were sick of dealing with that shit. And this is a company office that loses 1-3 people per year out of 100+