Can anyone on the client side give some honest perspectives on working with MBB? I feel like enough of the time we don’t have the requisite expertise and it feels like we’re rushing to put things together that barely make sense. Maybe it’s just me though so I’m trying to calibrate

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I’ve worked with McK and BCG extensively and it’s been a mixed bag.

Partners are genuinely knowledgeable and a fabulous resource but obviously are here to sell, associates are hit or miss

ZS is known as the MBB of pharma for a reason (at least on the commercial side)

likesmart

My team recently engaged with mckinsey and bcg and both were disappointing and honestly we wouldn't hire them if it fell on our budget lol

You are exactly right, they both didn't seem to really have the level of expertise their prices would make one to expect. I'm not talking about super niche expertise, it's like they didn't read the industry news headlines for like the last 2 years or they couldn't opine on what every company going thru a merger must be dealing with.

I also wondered if covid may have impacted the training of junior staff members as well. They generally seemed a lot less competent or experienced across the board.

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Bro... Why are you giving away our secrets?

funny

To add, I’ve seen outputs from other more specialized firms (ZS, etc) that I know we couldn’t do, and it makes sense why they’re getting hired

Second this for ClearView, we (MBB) cant do what those folks do (but they don’t have the scale to do lots that we do)

I’ve utilized 2/3 MBB extensively for M&A and some strategic work. It really does vary depending on the team. I’ll talk about McK specifically. McK does an amazing amount very quickly and it is generally pretty good. Imagine a specialized industry report tailor made to your target. Where McK has lost me is the lack of nuance (I agree with your statement about lack of expertise). We looked at a rare disease opportunity and they built a fancy model with some strange results & assumptions. Turns out they were using diseases with millions of patients as analogs to develop a clinical trial plan and forecast launch & peak sales estimates. The EM on another project was a mess and had some random spazz out session (strangest thing I’ve ever witnessed at work). To be fair, most of the engagements were great. However, the rates McK charges don’t really allow for a couple bad projects in a year. I Overall, they produce an astounding amount of info very quickly, but it’s clearly missing nuance and real understanding of the market. Just new inputs force fed into your (admittedly beautiful) excel models

R&D side, MBB was hired to make things done faster. the strategies they propose makes sense, albeit obvious to us. We pay big bucks to them and it reflects commitment, helps to drive cross functional alignment in that regard. Then we hired some ex-MBB consultants, because lack of experience, their role is more like project manager without real credibility to dive directions or to convince anyone on the team. So they end up doing what they do the best- scheduling meetings and make pretty slides.

I've been pretty disappointed with McKinsey in my experience. The more specialized LS firms are much cheaper and do better work.

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