Why I love being in industry:

I presented a deck and I misspelled "EBITDA" in the exec summary while presenting to the exec team.

No one noticed. No one called me out. No one gave me a nasty glance. No one sent a "pls call my mobile" text after.

No email with some stuff about "not meeting expectations" or "how could you let this happen in your role".

After the wave of panic, I remembered that I'm in industry now. I make more money, work less hours, work with great people, I'm happy.

It’s nice they reacted that way. But, misspellings in a deck is still totally unacceptable.

You need to put quality control procedures in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I say this as someone who once had a timeline slide indicating it was last week instead of the current date for a line.

I got chewed out for that mistake so badly, that I made sure to always QC everything extensively going forward. It was a great lesson to learn.

Well things are slower in Industry, it may show up a year later in your performance review. Many folks in industry don’t have work cells, hence why no txt, I remember the days when they would put “page” in email titles. They could have also been bored and didn’t notice the error, I used to dream all the time in meetings.

All jokes aside, glad you were treated humanly! This sounds like an environment where you can thrive without fear.

Y'all hiring?

I remember having a full blown panic attack over a similar miss...called my boss with a full blown apology and remedies.

He told me “stop, this
isn’t consulting”

I made the jump 3 years ago and it's been glorious! I'm at the C-2 level and I can count on one hand the number of hours a week I spend on PPT, either creating/reviewing or viewing.

Our focus is 100% on the impactful content of the decks, layout and prettiness aren't even on the radar. The overwhelming majority of the decks I see would get an analyst fired in consulting.

I remember last time I spell the project name wrong, I got a call from the director saying this is very unprofessional, but I was the one doing all the work whole night.

"fewer"

BuT pArTnErS cAn MaKe So MuCh MoNeY

Totally feel this. Back in consulting, my director would spend an hour reviewing my decks, picking out the smallest "mistakes":

- 2 different fonts used in a deck? Prepare to get screamed at.

- Font size was 14 on the previous slide and 12 on current one? Prepare to get screamed at

- Text is the wrong shade of dark grey on a slide? Prepare to get screamed at

- Charts/diagrams/icons used the wrong shade of green? Prepare to get screamed at

- Slide title and subtitle factual but not "snazzy" enough? Prepare to get screamed at


I'm now at a tech startup, still creating and presenting decks to my clients, and the first time I approached my boss and said my deck is ready for review, he said "it's your deck, why on earth would I need to review it?".

These "grave sins" at consulting firms aren't even noticed in industry, and yet I'd argue that industry decks are higher quality than consulting ones (factual, data-driven content that's easy for everyone to understand, vs fake assumption-filled content in consulting created to confuse clients and get a next phase because the "issue" looks too complicated for them to solve internally).

Take me with you

The "pls call my cell" hurt

This sounds wonderful.
How long were you in consulting before mailing the switch? And what industry did you exit to?

OP your post is inspiring - thank you! I will keep looking for my next exit opportunity

Quite true. Until an McKinsey SVP came to Dell and made it McKinsey-like

This is because in industry they actually care about delivering a quality product /service to the consumer and not as much about posturing/pretending to deliver value

FWIW, I have a friend hiring for Director of Analytics position in industry. Cannot apply as need sponsorship but happy to introduce any of you who are interested. He is an ex consultant and has similar stories to what is mentioned by OP.

If I won’t let my 6th grader turn in an essay with misspellings I have to hold myself to the same standard. Industry or not I’m too fly for misspellings. Maybe you just need a vacation.

Clients occasionally share their presentation decks with us... they are an absolute mess but the content is spot on. I think I even saw comic sans a few times...

I’ve been in consulting 10 years and this is the thing I find exhausting. The constant pressure to always be managing expectations and guessing at what putting the best face forward is. It’s relentless. Been mulling shift to industry or go independent.

Please take me with you M&A consulting post MBA for 5 years.