What is management consulting? What do consultants do?

Alessandro Catapano
Aug 31, 2021
4 min read

Updated: Dec 17, 2021

This article is part of a series of introductory articles:

I started working as a management consultant in 2019 and most of the times when I was asked by my friends what I do for a living, it was rather difficult to explain in a few sentences. Since I can no longer joke about having a black car and stuff in the trunk, I decided to expand on the topic in this article. I hope that this brief summary will also help future candidates to understand what a management consultant does and will have the proper foundation to decide whether this career path is for them or not.

What is consulting?

Imagine the following: somebody asks you how they can make more money, save costs, or optimize they day-to-day life. If you help them, you are a cool guy. If this somebody is a large corporation and you get money for support, you are a consultant. The bigger picture is that management consultants essentially provide help to firms to improve their performance by finding and exploiting new opportunities or solving comprehensive problems. Such consulting services can be offered across different business areas - such as IT, corporate finance, product strategy, M&A, HR and operations - both in the private and public sector. Because of this vast scope of projects, management consulting tends to be an extremely colorful and interesting career path, sought by many fresh grads.

Why is there a need for consultants?

The answer is threefold: speed, know-how or experience, money.

Know-how / experience

There are debates whether McKinsey's competitive advantage lies in their global exposure and experience. My friend at McKinsey is always joking about having at least 3-4 projects in their "pocket" that are identical to the project they are writing the proposal for. Each consultant company builds its own knowledge base ("pocket") that they can utilize anytime. Improving the customer service at Walmart? Sure, we did something similar at Target. Help Volkswagen Group in acquiring a new brand? Sure, we have worked on at least 5 similar M&As. Although projects are unique on their own way, there is a huge amount of synergy that can be realized between them.

Speed

Consultants are super fast and efficient. Period. It is not just because of the working hours, which can reach even 70 hours a week. Strict recruitment procedures make sure that consultant companies can lend people to their clients, who are not just "smart", but also quick & sharp, stress resilient, have an outstanding working ethic, possess good problem-solving skills and have a topnotch business judgement. Moreover, experience, and their well-tested methodology are all contributing to the rapid implementation of projects.

Money

Some of the companies employ consultants because it is cheaper. These are typically short, on-off projects which require a few months of work. Let's say you, a CEO of a Forbes500 firm, want to migrate your data from a legacy infrastructure to a new one. You can tell your head of HR to find the right talent, hire them, pay their high salary, pension contribution, vacation days, multiple taxes and license fees. This also take considerate amount of time (and we all know that saying on the correlation between time and money), may require extensive trainings and cause a great deal of problems. Then, once the project is done, you can either keep them (and pay the aforementioned costs) or fire them (i.g. waste talent and damage the reputation of your firm and build a toxic culture). Or, you can hire a consultant company, which can execute the project in the next X weeks / months for a relatively lower fixed fee.

What do consultants do?

“Okay so this is the big picture, from the consulting firm’s perspective, but what do you do on an average day?”

- is usually the follow up question. Well, as the job tends to be quite colorful, so does the day of a consultant. A general day will consist of drafting proposals, working on spreadsheets to create and polish models for the project, creating powerful slide decks that will be used to present findings for the clients, arranging and facilitating meetings and doing any other internal projects for the firm. Usually, your days are packed but it generally depends on the project itself, and the number of employees working on it.

However, as you will be working on a variety of projects and tasks and the expected quality of work is high, you will need to have great skills to excel at the job. Namely, you will need great problem-solving skills, tolerance to pressure, amazing time-management and communication skills. Consultants rely on these basic abilities every single day to excel at their job. The job is fast-paced, so you will need to pick up these skills relatively fast, however, if you do so, you will succeed in your career as a management consultant. All in all, a consulting is indeed an interesting industry and choosing that as a career will definitely improve you.