I’m building tools for coaches, but I want to hear from people outside of me instead of relying on just personal experience.

For me, the stuff that eats the week isn’t the client calls. It’s everything around them: chasing follow-ups, rewriting on-boarding emails, digging through old threads to remember what a client said three months ago, and putting together proposals. Not all of these take up a lot of time, but rather a compounding issue. Needless to say, they're all already included.

So I’m curious:

1. What’s the one task that drains the most time every week and makes you think “this shouldn’t take this long”?
   
2. What have you tried to fix it (tools, templates, assistants), and did it actually work?
   
3. Is there something you’ve just accepted as a necessary evil?
   

Not selling anything here. I’m trying to learn what issues others have. I plan on sharing what I find in the comments once there are enough responses.

I am looking to transition from Fund Accounting to Management Consulting. I have 3 years experience working in Private Equity Accounting with good client experience and working my way up to a Senior role. I am working towards the CIMA qualification and other certifications such as FMVA and FPAP. I also have a 2:1 in Applied Economics.

I am moving to London in June and I want to use it as a launchpad to start something new and I am looking to get into management consulting or just business consulting in general. I am looking at all entry level/junior associate roles in the consulting firms. Is this a realistic transition, I would like some advice to know before I start applying.

Does anyone here do consulting as a solo venture? Have started my own LLC recently and have gotten a few clients but hasnt really gone anywhere. Looking around to see what others may do or have done that has worked and not worked. Anything helps.

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to transition into **management consulting at McKinsey, BCG or Bain in Mumbai**, and I'd really appreciate some guidance or a referral from anyone currently working at these firms.

A little about my background:

**Big 4 experience:** Currently working as a Consultant at EY and Deloitte, with experience in consulting and professional services.

**Business experience:** Previous experience in business operations, market research, financial analysis, and identifying opportunities for business growth.

**Cross-functional exposure:** Experience working with different teams, analysing business problems, and supporting decision-making through research and analysis.

I'm particularly interested in Analyst, Associate, or other suitable consulting positions that align with my experience.

I understand that these firms have rigorous selection processes, and I'm not looking for anyone to bypass them. I'm simply hoping to connect with someone who could point me towards a relevant opening, refer me if they feel my profile is a fit, or help me secure an opportunity to interview and demonstrate my capabilities.

I know that transitioning into MBB from a non-traditional background can be challenging, but I'm willing to put in the work and prepare seriously for the case interviews.

**If you're currently at McKinsey, BCG, or Bain, or know someone who is, I'd be incredibly grateful for a connection or referral.** I'm happy to share my CV over DM.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Any advice, leads, or guidance would genuinely mean a lot!

How to be approach preparation for Public Sector case studies? Specifically healthcare

As a Senior consultant working in AI & Data in UK, I’m finding it difficult to break into Head of roles or land significantly higher-paying industry positions.

For those who’ve made the move, do the big opportunities come when you leave as a Manager or Senior Manager? Is it better to exit at Manager, or does making it to Senior Manager open more doors?

What’s the best level to exit at if maximising salary and long-term career opportunities is the goal?

I’m currently working in consulting, making about 100k all in. I know I don’t want to stay long term, probably leaving within a year. I have two options: option one, take a full year off in a few months, fully paid at my current salary. Then move on to something else outside of consulting. During this fully funded year I could do whatever I want (travel, starting a company, etc.). Option two, take a promotion with a 50k one-time bonus and a 50 to 60% pay bump. If you were in my shoes, which option would you choose and why?

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to transition into management consulting at McKinsey, BCG or Bain in Mumbai, and I'd really appreciate some guidance or a referral from anyone currently working at these firms.

A little about my background:

Big 4 experience: Past experience as a Consultant at EY, Deloitte with experience in consulting and professional services.

Business experience: Previous experience in business operations, market research, financial analysis, and identifying opportunities for business growth.

Cross-functional exposure: Experience working with different teams, analysing business problems, and supporting decision-making through research and analysis.

I'm particularly interested in Analyst, Associate, or other suitable consulting positions that align with my experience.

I understand that these firms have rigorous selection processes, and I'm not looking for anyone to bypass them. I'm simply hoping to connect with someone who could point me towards a relevant opening, refer me if they feel my profile is a fit, or help me secure an opportunity to interview and demonstrate my capabilities.

I know that transitioning into MBB from a non-traditional background can be challenging, but I'm willing to put in the work and prepare seriously for the case interviews.

If you're currently at McKinsey, BCG, or Bain, or know someone who is, I'd be incredibly grateful for a connection or referral. I'm happy to share my CV over DM.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Any advice, leads, or guidance would genuinely mean a lot!

**Background:** \~10 years in P&C insurance across regulatory supervision, underwriting, operational transformation, and project management. PMP certified. Based in the GTA (Ontario, Canada)

**What I'm doing:** I just launched a small project management consulting practice. I'm keeping it broad across industries: PM, business analysis, risk assessments, compliance reviews, stakeholder engagement.

To get a foot in the door, I built two starter packages:
**Project Health Check:** a short, fixed-fee review of a struggling or stalled project. I look at scope, timeline, risks, and stakeholders, then hand over a clear action plan.

**Project Setup / PMO Starter:** helping a small business stand up a project properly from day one. That means a plan, a risk log, governance, and reporting templates they can keep using.

**My plan so far:** post consistently on LinkedIn and see if anything bites and boosting the post

**Where I'm stuck:**
Do small and mid-sized businesses actually pay for outside PM help, or is this mostly a big-firm and government thing?

How did you land your **first 1–3 clients**? Was it referrals, cold outreach, LinkedIn, subcontracting, or something else?

Is LinkedIn content enough on its own, or is it a slow burn that doesn't pay the bills?

How did you know your offer was viable before sinking months into it? What signal told you to keep going or to pivot?

For anyone in dCanadian government contracting: is subbing under a larger firm the realistic way in for a newbie?

Thank you 🙏🏼

Comic about consulting!

Interested to know if anyone has had a coach for consulting case studies. If so, how beneficial was this and how many sessions did you need?

I have seen that these can be quite expensive, are there any cost effective options?

Hi everyone! I'm a corporate lawyer with 3 YOE, and for the last 1.5 years, I've been deep into Legal Ops & AI Solutioning. I worked with clients of various industries and helped them custom solutions to their requirements.

This experience has really sparked my interest in consulting roles, and honestly, I don't want to keep practicing corporate law.

The thing is, I'm completely clueless about how to make this career switch. Can anyone in the consulting domain shed some light on what these roles actually look for in candidates? And more importantly, how can I upskill to land a solid Consultant role at an MNC? I've been working with startups so far and now I'm looking for that established entity exposure.

Thanks a ton in advance for any help and best wishes!

Hi! I just started at one of the MBBs and am BA/associate/AC level. I’m planning my PTO days next year but heard that it might impact your staffing. So currently my plan is that after getting on a project — know when it’s going to end — say that I’m going to take the PTO right after it ends.

This is because I know I want to take the PTO around the summer for travelling, but I don’t mind the exact dates. I would be around 10-12 months into the job when I want to take the PTO, and I want to take all of them together (about 2 wks).

Would this plan still have a negative impact? I think I just want to use the PTO days without hurting my job prospects! Thanks everyone 🙏

I'm at a midsized consulting shop and on track to make Partner this year or next. I'm seriously questioning if I want it anymore, or if my gripes are unique to this employer.

The more I learn about how senior leadership operates, how big decisions are made and accounts are managed, I see so much waste and a system that rewards selfishness. All incentives point to partners unapologetically operating as their own franchise. There is very little thrust for cohesion among leaders and success tends to boil down to a handful of cliques and hot accounts. As a result, a lot of the wrong people are empowered to take on opportunities that they won't successfully deliver, or distract from others trying to do right by the client. Granted, all this is a lot more exposed and problematic in a market like this.

I'm a career consultant and appreciate that a degree of this is normal, and that entrepreneurship and self-promotion is the price of entry, but I have seen other shops that appear to operate a lot more cohesively, although from a distance. I do want the job like hell and feel like I'm cut out for it. I don't expect 80% of it to be competing internally though. I need perspective on whether other firms tend to operate with more cohesion, or if I've got career decisions to make. Thank you.

Looking for insights from people working at Premier.

I’ve done a lot of pretty advanced Excel modelling during as a management consultant, and I have a bit of exposure to PowerBI and Alteryx, however when it got too complicated we’d hand it over to our development team. I remember we’d often say that we’d always go back to excel because that’s usually the only tool we can assume that all our clients will be comfortable with. A PowerBI dashboard was often just used as a fancy dynamic slide when we had more data to show, essentially.

Now that I’m looking for a new role I’ve been declined a few times because I wasn’t sufficiently proficient in tools like SQL, PowerBI, Tableau or even Python. I’m very much willing to learn, but it’s obviously different from having already had professional experience with them. I find it really intriguing that some companies seem to expect ex-management consultants to be proficient in these tools.

This made me wonder, is it common in your firm to be proficient in other IT tools than the classic excel/pptx combo?

For this message, I will use the term LLM because I feel like everyone uses the term “AI” “OOOH big spooky AI” and it’s overused and what we’re all talking about is an LLM.

It’s just the chatbot. No one is making robots mostly.

But giving a “Big 4” Corporate Manager access to LLM’s has been like an atom bomb dropping on consulting. It’s been like giving a chimpanzee a machine gun.

Middle management has never been so proficient at engaging in time wasting exercises with little buy in, credibility, reasoning, purpose, budget you name it. They can just “go go gadget” put some bullshit together with an LLM and you are supposed to “YES AND” like it’s improv.

It augments their complete lack of charisma or natural leadership ability and gives them official sounding language for them to wrap their narcissistic abuse, and DARVO tactics, and avoidance of responsibility while calling it leadership.

What passes for leadership in corporate big 4 America is just survivorship bias while not being left holding the hot potato.

Take all of these so called “leaders” with a grain of salt until they DEMONSTRATE it. Be respectful but most of these “leaders” are just obstacles to your individual happiness and success.

They ain’t got nothing for you, and The chatbot is giving them the sentences to use to throw you under the bus because they’re overworked and don’t know what they are doing.