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Thoughts on Transfix? Anyone invested?
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Rising Star
Can you mute people asking about two MBAs?
Top consulting firms right there!!
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Not me personally but it’s pretty common to use a top 20 MBA to pivot—a bunch of people in my program did this and it worked out pretty well for them.
If you have relevant industry experience you can also try aggressive networking or a MD referral if you know one personally.
How late and what is your focus?
@A1 thanks, the additional context and rationale made your response more useful than the initial note. I can think of a lot of contacts who are exceptions to this 10 year rule, but can also see why it’s a solid benchmark in some cases.
What are you switching from? Find something adjacent in advisory to your current work, talk with a few staff or partners from that group - that is the first step.
Chief
I got hired into consulting as an experienced hire in my mid-30’s and was much older than many of my peers, my firm doesn’t have a shortage of people within to promote or fresh undergrads to pluck from. If you want to break in you’ll need a specific skill set they’re looking for, in my case it was experience with a technology they were look to grow. You’ll have to dig and filter through and see where your skills align, but be prepared to potentially come in at a rank where you will be below manager level and working with people who are not professionally very mature, which translates to poor team leadership and not so great client handling. Either way, the pay for experienced hires is typically competitive and continue to be if you do well, in the 2.5 years I’ve been there I’ve had roughly 23% increase in base salary and 10-15k in yearly bonuses on average (includes promotion during time). Some firms will have much higher bonus numbers, but I’m fine with where I am. You can also come in as an MBA hire, each firm has target schools they recruit from, they typically bring those hires on at an extremely competitive salary.
Chief
Good leadership/management is a struggle to find in technical fields to begin with , however, it is 100 times more pervasive in consulting overall- there are literally zero team leadership and management skills expected to promote to a manager level. I have met one too many managers that do not know how to delegate, handle client relationships nor grow their team. I also do not see the firm train or make any attempt to remedy this, they usually need seniors to just churn out ppt decks all day. However, by the time people reach SM level I notice that they are much better at leading and managing teams, which I’ll assume is experience + bad managers leaving the firm. There is an inherent individualistic mindset that comes with working in consulting, likely do to the constant changes in projects where team mates come and go, which works until you get to a higher level where your network and ability to cooperate becomes much more critical. If you are willing to eat it for 1-2 years at a lower rank, you can usually promote fairly fast. The upside is that your prior experience and management skills make you a stand out amongst your peers, but if you don’t promote early enough than you’re better off leaving before you regress too much. I would also do yourself a giant favor and take some PowerPoint training/boot camp, they seem to really like to gauge your intelligence and skill sets on how nice your slides look.
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MBA or go into an advisory arm that you can leverage your current skills in and slowly start to make your way into core consulting (traditional management consulting style) Personally I did two years in audit and saw no way to pivot except
those options so I just reapplied and did the case interviews with a diff firm