The Associates Handbook

The Associates Handbook

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Latest — 22 Sep 2026

The back of the envelope

One of the most underrated skills in consulting Five minutes of estimation tells you whether four hours of modelling is worth it. Can you quickly say whether something is worth millions or tens of millions? Whether an opportunity is worth pursuing or clearly too small to bother with? That is

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Take a break before you review

Before reviewing, take a break, and then sit down to review with some distance. After four hours inside a file you have stopped reading it and started remembering it. Your brain fills in what should be there rather than reporting what is there, which is why re-reading the same

How to write an email people can act on

Email is your central communicatrion medium. If you nail them you increase your efficiency significantly. And, never write anything in an email that you would not want everybody to read The goal: make the message as readable and as fast to act on as possible. The recipient should understand what

Learn two shortcuts a day

The lowest-effort compounding habit available to you. Forty a month, permanently. Every mouse movement you make is a small tax on your attention, because moving a hand to a mouse and back interrupts whatever your brain was doing. Individually trivial. Across a fourteen-hour day, considerable. So learn two

One slide, one message

Slides in consulting are for reading, not presenting. The client will read your deck, forward it internally, and pull it up again nine months later. Nobody will be in the room to explain it. Every page has to stand on its own. Which puts an enormous amount of weight on

Don't keep files on your desktop

A desktop full of files appears unprofessional. You cannot find anything, because there is no hierarchy and no search that respects it. You lose work, because desktop files sit outside whatever backup or sync your firm runs. And you expose yourself, because the desktop is the one part of your

What your supervisor doesn't see

Under-communicating is the number one mistake new hires make. Here is what your silence looks like from the other side of the table, and the system that fixes it. New hires assume the supervisor sees everything. They do not. Your supervisor has their own workload, their own manager to

Two windows, and a colour-coded calendar

Ownership means it gets done, not that you do it alone

Owning a workstream means you are responsible for making sure the work gets done. Doing all of it yourself is a different obligation entirely, and high performers reliably confuse the two. An Engagement Manager at McKinsey put it better than I can: “What I didn’t understand in the beginning

Always specify time zones