Consulting Is Paradise
You wake up in a five star hotel in Madrid - it’s 7:30 AM and you can barely get out of bed after lasts night late effort (you finished past midnight) to polish the document for today’s readout. At least you are in a cool city like Madrid, cheering that your London based EM let the team decide where to work from this week. “Ha - I remember when I was doing an internship at Deloitte and always had to commute to the middle of bumf** nowhere to sit at a clients warehouse for our supply chain implementation project”. You assure yourself again that the hard work you are putting in is justified.
Your thoughts directly center back to work.
Hence you grab your phone by instinct and refresh both, mail and slack. Anxiously you see a response from your partner at 5:28 AM. The partner you are working is notorious for his work schedule. Even though he has wife and kids, he travels all week and typically gets up at 5:00 AM to review the teams doc. However, as he is doing really exciting work and the review cycle is coming up too, you really want to make sure to impress him.
“Great push guys …” is what you read in the preview of the mail .. slightly cheering you up. You open the mail and the excitement fades. “… but we really need to make a couple of turns on this, as of now it is far too complicated”. You are recalling yesterday’s meeting with your partner and AP, and both told the team that the document as of now is “too shallow” and needs much more “in depth insights” … you’re team worked late night to polish it up and now it’s too complicated.
Still in bed, you open the presentation from your phone and see tons of yellow stickers popping up. It doesn’t bother you too much since the responsibility of the exec sum is with your EM. However, you are already see on the exec sum some stickers related to your chapter (financial case). “Didn’t we discuss yesterday downside case should be around $350mn? Far too low now!” - you feel you’re anxiety creeping up while checking your meeting notes. You remember that they really wanted the downside case higher. However, they also did not wan’t to assume a CAGR higher of 8% in the model, hence you went with the figure just slightly below 8% CAGR.
You open slack to text your EM and justify yourself. Youre EM already texted in the group chat around 07:00 AM. “Good morning guys! Already in team room 35 and taking a first round at the document @you, could you please go through the financials again” - Damm, you realize that your EM still sent out Emails around 1:30 AM and is now already in the office. You recall that he wants to be badly promoted to AP, also a reason why he worked through whole Sunday to polish the section that the other associate and you made.
You quickly respond and then frantically grab your stuff to get out of the hotel asap. The other associate (PhD in quantum physics, Imperial College) which is slightly nerdy and hasn’t talked a thing with you outside of work related topics is also always coming in quiet early. You really need to nail this project, telling yourself again, given reviews are upcoming and a lot of juniors have already received bad reviews in the past.
You quickly brush your teeth and get ready. Seeing yourself in the mirror hurts. Your skin looks all white and greasy, your eyes look tired and are red, with dark spots below them. You put on your shirt, which is also greasy and all wrinkled up (you haven’t figured out yet how to pack shirts without wrinkling them).
Well it’s not so bad - you recall that your child hood friend (finance graduate, Bocconi) never leaves the office before 2 AM at Rothschild & Co. WLB in consulting is still much better!
You run out the hotel room and get slightly annoyed when waiting for the elevator. Since you work at MBB, you realize, that you are always in a hurry and get extremely agitated if you just have to stand around doing nothing. You realize that everybody in the firm is like that. To bridge the wait time you open up your mail again and refresh. Just some invites for this Fridays “emerging trends in Gen AI” event in the office (typically nobody goes to these kind of events besides people on the beach).
Finally the elevator comes, you run down the hotel lobby bypassing the breakfast (which is included in your stay, Marriott Titanium) and sprint to the taxi. You realize that you’ve catched a lot of looks. A young guy so nicely dressed in such a fancy hotel, these people must think you are doing something very important (they didn’t really look at you at all).
You’re in the cab. Again your anxiety creeps up as the city is way more crowded than expected. You open up slack to give a heads up to your EM - “will be there in 12 min”. You also see on slack that the nerdy associate is already online, further irritating you.
You look outside the cab and catch how beautiful the city is. This is your only glimpse of the city. People are walking in groups and enjoying themselves on the morning. Cafes are packed. Some are going for a morning run. You tell yourself that they for sure aren’t working at MBB or in banking.
Arrived at the office you literally sprint to your team room. You again get annoyed by all the people waiting for the elevator. You tell yourself that they must be all on the beach or in support functions, since they are dressed rather casual. “Of course they have time to stand around! They are not working on a $5bn DD for one of the most well known large cap funds in Europe”. You arrive at your team room. Your EM is already in expert calls again, as the partner wasn’t happy with some insights we had thus far.
The EM barely greets you - he quickly glances up and makes hand gestures that he’s in a call and you should be quiet. The nerdy associate, of course, already is there. You could tell by his looks that he studied STEM. He wears a really unfitting shirt and akward shoes. Well, not everybody can have the same style as you (accounting and finance, LSE) who dresses like your friends who went to banking.
You quickly jump into your model to work on the financials. You have a really hard time arriving at a higher downside case, without significantly altering the assumptions. You try around a bit and realize there is some leeway on the cost side - you just scale down FTE cost, nobody will check that anyway as all are concerned about top line. The FTE figure was also a pure guess by the partner.
The EM has finished his call now. He quickly greets you “hey what’s up” but is in a different world by himself (his red eyes are tied to the monitor, not looking up once). You try to be somewhat social and ask whether the call was useful but receive no answer. After some silence he says “sorry what? Sorry really have to concentrate on the exec sum now”.
The nerdy associate hasn’t said a word since - he is looking at some ultra complex thermodynamic manufacturing process. You quickly go outside the team room to grab some coffee. You walk by other team rooms and see the same picture: pale and tired looking people staring at the screen intensely. You arrive at the coffee machine and get agitated again by waiting.
Back at the desk you update your section (you recall do not forget updating the footnote, last time you forgot your EM wasn’t happy - also your last review cycle said you need “more attention to detail”).
Your EM quickly reviews the pages but isn’t quite sold - “how did we go to 380 now?” You tell him what you did and feels somewhat comfortable. Anyway we have to time left to update before speaking with the partner and AP.
We join the meeting with the partner - the EM puts a smile on his face and tries to be funny (he always does when speaking with the partner), the partner is in the taxi to some other client. Your EM thanks the partner again for the great comments and wants to go through the deck now. The AP is quite zoned out as she works on 4 different projects and calls in from the US (5 AM local time). The partner gets agitated quickly when not speaking about content “guys, I have a hard stop in 15 minutes” so we jump in. Your EM doesn’t let you talk once through the call (some just want to be in the spotlight all the time) - then we get to the financials. The partner is happy that the number is higher but still not fully sold.
The call is nearing to an end (connection is really bad) and you catch “just make sure that we end up at 440mn” … your EM thanks your partner again for the call and we hang up. With the client call Approaching in 2h, you need to update the full model again and approx. 10 pages. Your EM and associate sprint to grab some lunch at the catering (they get agitated by wasting time) while you update the deck … MBB is paradise, you tell yourself.
