How to think, work and communicate like a top consultant. The tricks I wish someone had told me on day one in Consulting. Six+ years at Bain, written down to help nail your first two years at work.
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Support the handbookEmails in your Inbox are inefficient. So, you archive old Emails. But once you've archived everything, you need to learn to query well. Most people browse folders. It is slow, and it only works if you filed the thing where you now think you filed it. Search instead,
The Case is the basic unit of consulting work. A Consulting team is tasked with cracking the case. Consulting is a service business. A client faces a tough problem and lacks the internal resources to solve it, so they buy external, specialised help. You are always a service provider to
The project is your entire focus. For the person across the table it is a line item on a list they did not write. Most things about good client work follows from that one asymmetry. You work for the client and the client pays the bill. But very few clients
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
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
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