About The Associates' Handbook
Hi, I'm Moritz.
I spent over six years at Bain & Company, from Associate Consultant to Senior Manager. I arrived in 2017 straight out of university, bursting with everything my business degree had taught me, and it took about three weeks to establish that none of it covered how to be useful in the 'real' world.
My first real slide came back with thirty-odd comment boxes on it. Almost none of them were about my thinking. They were about a misaligned axis label, a footnote pointing at the wrong source, a number in the tagline that didn't match the number in the chart. The analysis was fine-ish. The craft was a disaster. Unfortunately, the craft is what decides whether anyone trusts the analysis.
That took me an embarrassingly long time to learn. I was obsessed with being fast, and convinced that typos were somebody else's problem. Two review cycles and several uncomfortable conversations later, I understood I had it exactly backwards. Catching up on a reputation is much harder than building one.
Over those years I trained more than 80 associates and around 40 consultants. In every one of those conversations I repeated the same handful of tricks, shortcuts and "here's how you avoid that next time." At some point it seemed inefficient to keep saying it out loud, so I wrote it down. Those notes became a book. This is where I publish it, one piece at a time.
So sign up to stay up to date and master your first years in Consulting.
What you'll find here
When I started at Bain, sporadically, we had a 'hack of the week' update email. At some point, these stopped. (On top, I realized, not all offices had them... for a productivity nut like me... sad.) This memory prompted me to structure this blog as a weekly new idea that you can apply immediately to your case/ project/ study.
So I will do two posts a week. A core concept on Tuesdays and a Hack on Thursdays. Each covering one idea only for simplicity. The things nobody teaches you because everyone assumes somebody else already did.
- How to review a slide so you find the error
- How to do a proper back-of-the-envelope calculation
- How to get really fast at doing your job
- How to write an email your manager can act on
- How to do selective bolding 😄
Most topics — error-free work, productivity, structured thinking, business communication — apply to anyone who produces work other people depend on.
Who this is for
Smart, motivated, quietly convinced you were a hiring mistake. Consulting runs on insecure overachievers, so if you recognised yourself there, you're in the right place and in very crowded company.
Written for associates and analysts in their first two years — MBB, Big 4, boutiques, or anywhere else that hands capable twenty-somethings a deadline and a dataset and assumes it'll work out.
If you're trying to break into consulting, this won't help. Buy Case in Point instead; it's genuinely good, and I'm not going to pretend I can beat it.
Subscribe
The Associates Handbook is an independent publication, launched in August 2026. Everything goes out to subscribers first.
The full archive. Every post published and everything still to come, searchable in one place. By the end of year one, that's over a hundred pieces. This becomes your own reference library for the Thursday evening when you need to remember how to structure a data request.
The templates. Checklists, model architectures, interview guides, prompt libraries, shortcut sheets. The actual working files, not screenshots of them.
Two emails a week.
Your subscription is what keeps this independent and pays for the money I put in writing this. Thank you, genuinely.
And if you're in your first six months and money or time is tight: email me at moritz@associateshandbook.com. I'm not going to be the reason someone can't read this.