About this site
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 degree had taught me, and it took about three weeks to establish that none of it covered how to be useful in an office.
My first real slide came back with thirty-odd comment boxes on it. I know it was thirty-odd because I counted them, twice, on the train home. 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. The craft was a disaster — and craft is what decides whether anyone trusts the analysis in the first place.
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, and that 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.
What you'll find here
Two posts a week. Five minutes each. One idea at a time — the things nobody teaches you because everyone assumes somebody else already did.
- How to review a slide so you actually find the error, instead of reading past it for the fourth time
- What a five-minute estimate saves you (roughly: Tuesday, and most of Wednesday)
- The four ways extremely busy people stay extremely unproductive
- How to write an email your manager can act on in eight seconds
- Why nobody in the history of consulting has ever needed a pie chart
About a third of it is consulting-specific, and I'll say so in the first line so you can skip it. The rest — error-free work, productivity, structured thinking, business communication — applies 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 — no algorithm deciding whether you see it.
The full archive, permanently. Every post published and everything still to come, searchable in one place. By the end of year one that's over a hundred pieces — your own reference library for the Thursday evening when you need to remember how to structure a data request.
The templates, not just the theory. Checklists, model architectures, interview guides, prompt libraries, shortcut sheets. The actual working files, not screenshots of them.
Two emails a week. Nothing else, ever. I have never once thought "what this person needs is more email," and I'm not about to start.
Your subscription is what keeps this independent — no sponsors, no ads, nobody's product to promote. Thank you, genuinely.
And if you're in your first six months and money is tight: email me. I'm not going to be the reason someone can't read this.