How does a typical week of a consultant look like? What is a typical working day of a management consultant? This video is not about the McKinsey lifestyle vs BCG lifestyle vs Bain lifestyle, it will shed light on common traits of the MBB lifestyle, the hard work, team dinners and the work-llife-balance in strategy consulting and management consulting. The video breaks a typical work week into typical working days, gives details on the travel schedule in strategy consulting firms, so you can get a first understanding of the Bain lifestyle, McKinsey lifestyle and BCG lifestyle. You will learn how splendid the MBB lifestyle is and what it means when consultants spend “day on the beach”. How often do case team dinners happen and how do case team dinners fit in a typical day in management consulting? Goldbrain will elaborate on the management consulting lifestyle and the typical week in consulting. What are typical consulting hotels? Which nights of a typical week in consulting do you usually spend in consulting hotels? Is the management lifestyle worth pursuing or will the brutal travel schedule and hard work prohibit a splendid lifestyle and result in a sub-optimal work-life-balance? Office meetings happen in a typical McKinsey week, a typical Bain week and generally in a typical MBB week. Goldbrain explains which character traits will help you enjoy the Consulting life, particularly the McKinsey life, the BCG life, the Bain life and the MBB life. Not always consultants work at the client site but from a consulting office or home. So not always the McKinsey life is all about travelling, the BCG life and the Bain life are here pretty similar to the MBB life. Monday and Thursday are often travel days in a the typical week in consulting. The office Fridays often is the highlight in the Management consulting lifestyle.
Video transcript:
What do you think life is like for a Management Consultant? Just to remind you, these are the those guys who work at McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or Bain, and other top management consulting firms, and take home salaries of more than $ straight out of college or about close to $ after business school. If you think their life is about Rolex and big watches, muscle cars, and driving boats, you're dead wrong. In this video, you will see what a typical week of a top Management Consultant is like.
If you think you've got a CV that it takes to join one of the leading top management consulting firms and if you want to maximize and optimize your chances of landing the job, if you don't want to risk it, being rejected by one of the top firms, apply for the Gabriel Goldbrain success training on www.gabrielgoldbrain.com. Now let's talk about how a typical week of a top Management Consultant starts.
First of all, you may have heard that management Consultants work a lot on the client site. Depending on your region, you may be 4 days at the client site, and in some regions, they may even ask you to spend 5 days on the client site. So, usually, the first act you do is you travel to the client. If you're remote to the client, you may have to travel starting on Sunday afternoon. If the client is closer, it may be enough if you start very early, in the morning on Monday because it's expected that at the latest, you're at the client at about , in the morning on Monday. Typical means of transportation are the airplane. In Europe, it's also sometimes the train or the car, but in the US, a lot of times, you go by plane. Also, all Consultants, they excessively ride taxis because that saves them time and the hassle of finding the correct address, even though it's more expensive, but they don't care.
On Monday, like on Tuesday and Wednesday, typically, you leave the client site at about . Then you grab some food, usually a short or dinner, and then at , you're back at the hotel. And if you think then you relax and do nothing, you're completely wrong.
Typically, you continue working, prepare presentations, prepare for the next day. So, that's how you pretty much spend your evenings. So even though Consultants tend to be in the best hotels, like five-star hotels, sometimes they have to go to four-star, but usually, they're at the best hotels you can imagine because they virtually live in hotels all the time during the week. So, the consulting firms, they try to make their life as good as possible, but nevertheless, they almost never see the spa, see the gym, go to the sauna, or the nice things that the hotels offer. Most of the time, Consultants work.
So, often times, you hear Consultants talk about shiny places. They're in Shanghai, they're in New York, they're in LA, they're in Paris, they're in Berlin, they're in London, they're in Dubai. But they don't see the city because they work all the time. So their life is working; they barely see more than the client site and the hotel and the way to the client and the way to the airport. That's basically what they do during the week. It's a pretty tough life.
On Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, consultants get up at in the morning. If they do some sports before breakfast, if they don't do sports, they usually get up at about , , get ready, then go to breakfast at about or . Pretty much every day from Monday through Thursday, you would have lunch at about or for half an hour. If the customer has a canteen, you typically go there; otherwise, you grab something from a place close by. This can be a challenge if you live a healthy lifestyle because the foods you eat may not be available. So it's good if you prepare for that in some way.
Thursday is kind of a special day, like Monday, because it's a travel day. Many consultants leave the client site at about , because they have to grab a plane to go back to their office. If you're lucky and the project on which you're working is at a client site which is close by to your home, for you, Thursday is pretty much like Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. So, you leave at about from the client site, maybe , have some food, and then in most cases, you continue working after dinner.
On Friday, if your project follows the model, you will be at the office of the consulting firm. It's called the office day. You will be expected in the office at about the same time you're usually at the client site. So, , you will be in the office. Several things take place on Fridays. One thing you often see is the so-called office meeting where the whole office gathers, and Consultants talk about relevant developments for the office or within the firm. This is usually led by senior Partners, engagement managers, and those who have topics that they want to talk about.
Other things which commonly happen on Fridays are Staffing meetings. So when there are new projects, Consultants who are on the beach, as consultant language says, which means they do not have a project which they are staffed on, these Consultants are matched with projects. And so, these meetings for the planning, project planning, these usually take place on Fridays. Juniors like business analysts, fellows, Associates, and often times also project managers or engagement managers, they're not part of these meetings. So, associate partners and partners and Senior partners, they usually dispose of the more Junior colleagues and assign them to their project and negotiate: Who they want? Who they want to give away? Who they can bring in from another project? Who might be a good fit?
Fridays are also very popular for recruiting interviews. So first round and second round interviews often take place on Fridays because a lot of Consultants are in the office and can spare one or two hours of their time to do recruiting interviews. Later on Fridays, you may also sometimes have events which are like office drinks, office Buffet, so that you have a nice ending of the week together with your colleagues. The working week of a consultant ends at about on a Friday. So even if we did not talk too much about what happens in a project, what kind of things an analyst does, what kind of things an associate does, what a manager does, and so on.
You see the week, I mean, particularly this is true for the more Junior roles like the engagement manager, the associate, the business analyst. For the more Junior levels, the week is pretty much structured as I laid it out. In some regions, you may have differences like, for example, in India and Asia, clients they prefer to see Consultants also on Friday.
So basically, a Friday in India is pretty much what is the Thursday in the US. So Friday in Asia maybe more of a travel day. So, you leave at about , depending on when your plane, your train, or your other means of travel will be leaving and how long you need to travel to reach your home destination.
As you see, a top Management Consultant will only have little free time. So, his private life is basically centered around Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, and in some cases, even not Sunday. So it happens in days. That's the private life of a consultant. And there are still things where he has to organize his private life, fix the car, buy things, organize things, private travel, visit parents, visit friends. So that's how the private life of a consultant looks like.
In times of home office in some regions and with some clients, they became much more flexible. So the or the five days model, they're not applied that strictly.
So if you think you're in a very special region or you have are very lucky with your clients, let us know which firm you work for down in the comments. Let the community participate and share your experience in your consulting firms. Do you live a similar life as I described it, or is yours completely different? Let the other people know which firm you work at and share your Consulting life.
So as you've seen, a consultant's life is pretty much about working. It's not about hanging around in bars. It's not about bragging with watches, with big cars. It's not about all of that. They don't have the time to do it. Although most Consultants have good communication skills, I think they're not extroverted or eccentric in that way. Most of them are analytic, and they live kind of an understatement lifestyle.
For them, you can make them happy with nice team dinners in good restaurants, which you have every weeks. And then you have some offsite events where you go skiing with the team, go to a sunny nice place to have workshops or similar things. Sometimes, if their project is not too demanding or not in a critical phase, you might see Consultants sneak out at , at night, go to some bars, have some drinks with colleagues, and then go back to the hotel maybe at . So that's kind of the typical lifestyle you see in management consulting. I have two videos that I want to recommend to you. The first is about the pitfalls of the McKinsey recruiting process if you decide to become a management consulting at McKinsey, and the second one is about the building blocks and the structure of case interviews.
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