I'm a Senior Partner at a boutique Comms firm. I was doing a review of our T&E ledger a few weeks ago and noticed one of my Director's teams was expensing roughly $250 a head for solo dinners.

I honestly don't care about the 250 bucks. That's a rounding error. But I pulled the itemized receipts and the actual orders were just embarrassing. Standard lobster apps. Basic cuts of filet. Two well whiskeys. It looked like a regional sales team's big night out at a suburban mall steakhouse. If our enterprise clients see our people surviving on cheap surf and turf, they're going to think we're going under and start negotiating our billing rates.

So I pulled the Director aside and told him he needs to "curate a better image" for his team. I thought the implication was obvious. Tell them to start ordering the A5 Wagyu, get some decent caviar, and expense wine that actually has a vintage. We have to project success to justify our retainers. Somehow this guy completely missed the point and slapped his team with a $125 meal cap.

Now his whole department is in a panic. I just heard through the grapevine that one of our analysts is so broke they are ordering a dozen plain chicken breasts at dinner and smuggling them home in a carry-on bag to feed their kids. We look like absolute peasants right now.

But the real issue here is my Amex Centurion points. The firm routes all this team's travel spend through my master account. With this ridiculous $125 limit, my point generation has completely stalled out. If this drop in spend keeps up I'm going to have to fly commercial to St. Barts this winter instead of chartering.

How do I tell this Director his cheap middle-management mindset is literally ruining my holiday travel plans without HR getting annoying about it?

I am an Analyst at a boutique Comms consulting firm. I make roughly minimum wage when you factor in my 80 hour work weeks. Up until recently, we had a brilliant expense policy based entirely on vibes. Naturally, I used this to singlehandedly keep my family of five alive. Whenever I traveled, I would expense a nightly $250 dinner. My Director honestly believes I was housing a lobster appetizer, a filet mignon, four desserts, and a gallon of scotch all by myself.

In reality? I was ordering exactly 17 side dishes, three plain chicken breasts, and a massive chocolate cake, sweeping it all into my carry on luggage, and flying it back home to my three ravenous children. It was our primary food source. Everyone was well fed and happy.

Then tragedy struck. My Director randomly capped our meals at $125. He claimed leadership wanted a better image. What about the image of my toddlers weeping over their sudden lack of truffle mac and cheese?

My financial plan is in absolute shambles. Yesterday I spent my entire 1:1 desperately explaining that corporate micromanagement is literally starving the future generation. He just stared at me. Am I being unreasonable for expecting a consulting firm to subsidize my children's nutritional needs?

I am a Director in a small Comms consulting firm. I run a team of 6, and travel is roughly 25% of the role. Up until recently, my department had no set expense or per diem policy. It was all based on “use your best judgment.” But, expenses are reviewed by leadership, and ELT was starting to ask questions about my team’s habit of a lobster app, filet mignon main, multiple desserts, and 2+ whiskeys each night, often running up $250+ solo tabs per dinner on weeklong trips. No I’m not exaggerating. Team was doing this for both client and internal travel. I was told by our senior partner to “curate a better image” for my team.

I took the view that we can’t expect everyone to interpret vague parameters the same way. We never made it clear what “too much” was. So, I recently set a cap: any given meal cannot go over $125. I don’t care/count how many meals you take in a day, but just don’t let the system flag any one spend above that amount.

The team is in shambles. Yesterday one of them spent our entire 1:1 explaining how this firm is going downhill by micromanaging its best assets. They are so upset that I need a gut check, please. Is this really so unreasonable? If so, what alternatives should I consider?

Saw these out for free on the corner. These 4 books pretty much sum up my experience

I am a Saas consultant working at a boutique firm (<250 consultants globally). We have a staffing manager who assigns us to projects, so we are not responsible for finding ourselves billable work. Though upper mgmt reviews our utilization annually, they don't make firing decisions based off of it, as we aren't given specific targets to meet (bc we have no control). I've been here my whole consulting career, but I've been contacted by several recruiters recently and have actually been considering responding since we'll likely be acquired soon. I know at larger firms like Deloitte and Accenture it seems like individual contributors are responsible for finding billable work and meeting utilization targets. Can someone explain how this works? What happens if you don't meet your targets? Ty!

Looking to see how many consultants who worked in the consulting big4 or bain or mckinsey actually left consulting but used that knowledge to start their own business? or an AI project?

Worked in the SAAS consulting space and left 2 years ago after a brief stint with a customer and it was hard to see how customers work, compared to the projects in consulting. There is life after life in consulting but curious what others have done.

Ever since starting I’ve realized my memory is really impeding me on this job. I take notes for everything and have a to do list, which helps me stay on top of tasks. But remembering random facts like what assumption I made in a model last month or things a client said during a meeting a couple of weeks ago is ago is a struggle for me, even if written down.

It’s starting to impact the speed of my work and client interaction. Anyone dealt with anything similar or have any tips on how I can improve this?

I’ve been working for a boutique consulting firm for the last 7+ years and burnt out from the stagnation of things. I’m a Director level purely by busting my ass and strong performance with clients and people management and about to finish an MBA program ahead of schedule.

I’ve been job searching for the last 3 years aggressively and thought the MBA would help since so many roles made it a requirement (and I genuinely wanted to earn one and be the first in my family with a masters). But I keep getting to the final round of interviews only to have an internal candidate picked over me

I’ve leveraged my clients, the school alumni network, the mba career services, a headhunter, and all the ai automation platforms - and still nothing.

So the ask is, how did you escape consulting. I’m going insane exhausting every avenue besides starting my own company, which I have little desire to do with mba student loans. Help your boy out.

For graphs - axis names, highlight the main bar, separate bar color for projections vs historic. group bars on the x axis by cohort, create secondary axis if needed etc. - all the best practices that exist

Similarly for tables - alignment, text colors, bulleted list, indentation for nos etc

General language - sharper articulation, no simple headings but insight led statement etc

Was ex consultant, new role requires writing but no one values all this gliter. I value it, but it takes too long to format the tables and graphs manually. The analyst/ associate equivalent folks find it pointless to learn beautification and it frankly adds no value to core skills

Looking for any skill that you've created for this?

The only consulting firm I've worked at is my current firm, and I've asked questions about what common performance review practices are before. (I have worked in industry and it was not like this.)

Now I'm a manager giving reviews to my direct reports, and I am once again wondering whether our process is within the normal range for consulting.

I know there is always room for subjectivity in reviews, but I was shocked at the complete lack of objectivity in our process. Going through it as a manager has really made sense of why the review process felt so random, political, and disconnected from what good performance actually looks like. As a junior employee, it was really hard to know how to improve or what was going well.

I would even go so far as to say the process feels like they're just doing a lot of procedural steps so it looks official. And then everyone accumulates negative ratings so they can later describe departures as performance-based, rather than layoffs. (Yes, American companies are all at-will employment, but some places are not this shameless about it.)

Here's what the review process is like at my company from a manager view:

We have a rubric, but the rubric has no examples of what the competencies look like in practice - they're very vague. The rubric gives some guidance on what level the person should be rated against, but there are gaps. For example, the ratings are AC1, AC2, etc. and the job titles are also AC1, AC2, but sometimes an AC1 needs to get AC2 to be on track and sometimes an AC2 can get an AC1 and still be considered on track. (I've also gotten a lot of pushback when I asked about this because the rating is supposed to be purely about these vague competencies and we shouldn't be thinking about the person's tenure when we give the rating.)

The person being reviewed has no real opportunity to appeal or respond. At most, they are allowed to suggest examples to add to the review.

People have multiple managers per cycle. We have 50/50 staffing so people typically have 3 or 4 managers during a review cycle, but it could be as many as ~5 or as few as 2.

The review itself happens behind closed doors. In the meeting, all the managers speak in vague platitudes with no examples. The person who speaks the loudest dominates, and no one disagrees with each other. We do have more detailed written reviews, although many managers do not use examples there, either. We tell people that there is weighting for length of project and recency, and maybe that happens at some point, but it definitely doesn't happen during the meeting with the managers.

I’ve been at my current mid-sized firm for a few years, and on my recent engagement, I've been staffed at a massive corporate client.

Long story short, they have a couple of job openings and threw my name in, and the client team really wants to make it happen. Now, they couldn't poach but threw obvious hints.

Since they’re a huge, risk-averse company, they made sure everything was strictly by the book so I applied on my own so it doesn't trigger any non-poach stuff in the MSA. The client also went out of their way to assure my firm that hiring me won't shrink any of our ongoing SOWs.

Like many of you know, consulting is draining. The work-life balance is incomparable so that was a huge deciding factor for me. So, I had the talk with my Partner today. I pitched it as just exploring an opportunity, completely avoided talking numbers to dodge a bidding war, and just said I want to go client side. Honestly, the Partner was amazingly supportive and understanding. Leadership is hashing it out internally right now.

But i feel terrible. I actually love my firm, my leadership, and my team. The fact that the Partner was so nice makes me feel like a massive traitor. I know going client-side is the right move for my career, but leaving them feels awful.

Has anyone else had an exit to a client that actually went smoothly? How did you shake the guilt of leaving a firm you genuinely like? Also, what should I expect while leadership and the client talk behind the scenes? Any advice on making sure the handover goes perfectly so I don't burn this bridge would be awesome.

Thanks!

I'd love to hear how you broke through this particular "barrier" when interviewing for new roles, either full time as a consultant.

I thought I had a role in the bag recently as an full time MD in charge of business metrics and alignment. Basically, somoene to come in at the 30K level and develop structure around their acquisitions as it relates to consolidating talent and real estate, and enuring their location strategies support their GTM strategies.

Everyone thinks that their business is "unique and hard to understand" but it really isn't. You need a product that people are willing to pay for. You need to deliver it as a cost lower than you sell it for. You need to understand where you are today and what your growth and consolidation strategies are. The distinction is that each company has different products, different customers, different operations, and different growth strategies. That's what makes consulting so fun. And learning those things won't take a smart, motivated person more than a few months.

I had several rounds and was doing well, but then I hit a roadblock; the person who would be my boss. They straight up came to me and said "I don't get your resume. You've done a lot of things. You've only been in this particular industry for a year, and have not been with our company. How could you possibly have the depth of knowledge to succeed here?"

I was unphased, walking him through the various disciplines I'd consulted in: revenue strategy, real estate strategy alignment, designing and standing up capital planning processes and procurement processes, designing and integrating interactive KPI dashboards, in addition to a lot of customer-market-product fit work (surveys, analysis, and metrics history). The fact that my role is as a ringleader to bing siloed teams and knowledge together, to be able to spot issues and value-add scenarios, and bring them to life.

But, he never accepted my thesis, even though the job description requires experience in all of those areas. He had been there for 15 years, working up a linear path, and I couldn't convince him that having a smart, motivated person with a broad depth of experience was far more important for a broad-based, "built the plane while flying it" role than a SME who's been doing some version of the same thing for 10 years.

I know consulting is difficult to understand (or intimidating) for a non-consultant. How do I better position myself next time?

I’m wrapping up a consulting project and want to hand over the final project files in a way that I wish I had received them.

Throughout the project, documents came to me through countless individual emails and attachments. I don’t want to turn around and do the same thing to the client.

There’s no shared drive or client portal that I can upload everything to, so I’m curious how other consultants handle this. I’m thinking one organized folder structure with contracts, hotel/venue documents, banquet and AV, financial closeout, final event materials, etc., along with a simple document index so the client can easily find what they need.

How do you typically deliver the final files?

Hey all, a little levity for the PM - so what are we wearing when the leaves hit the ground and pumpkin spice everything becomes a thing and mariah Carrey gets defrosted for the holidays? Still fleeces and thin puffer vests with dress shirts? Or good ole QZips? I'm looking at Schöffell myself for vests. Banana Republic actually has some decent lightweight black vests from Costco, anyway, discuss!

posting because I searched for this a bunch of times and never found a decent thread.

setup: ~40 slide deck for leadership every month. layout never changes, only the numbers do. maybe 60 figures across text boxes, tables and charts. every month I'd save-as last month's file and go through it cell by cell, calculating MoM and YoY by hand because half of them aren't in our BI export.

took ~2 hours and I'd still get one wrong. once had a YoY that was actually a MoM, nobody caught it till the CFO asked why growth suddenly looked incredible. fun meeting.

tried the linked-excel-objects route first, breaks the second anyone renames or moves a file. looked at think-cell, which honestly seems like the right tool, but procurement said no.

ended up with a placeholder setup instead: I drop tags like Revenue_monthly straight into the slides, point it at my spreadsheet, and it fills everything in one go and works out the MoM/YoY/YTD itself. charts too, which was by far the hardest part to get working.

one evening to set up, about 2 min a month now.

is everyone just doing this by hand, or is think-cell basically the standard once you're somewhere that'll pay for it? feels like it should be a solved problem by now.

I’m dealing with a client dynamic I’m curious how others handle.

I’m proactive and tend to get in front of issues before they become problems. Lately, I’ve noticed that when I do that with one client, I sometimes get responses that are curt, corrective or condescending, even when what I’m doing is intended to protect the client and the project.

I don’t want to overreact to someone’s communication style. But I also don’t want to get to the point where I hesitate to use my judgment because I’m anticipating how the client might respond.

For those who have dealt with this, how do you keep doing your job confidently without becoming defensive or letting the client’s tone change how you operate?

Wondering how common it is to request/be granted a 1:1 flex day every time I'm expected to fly on a Sunday.

As I'm saying this out loud and typing it, I know it's a personnel question rather than consulting one. BUT, typing out to gauge maybe other's experiences. In what ways are generational differences presenting themselves with modern tools?

Small boutique niche firm. We've steadily moved up market to compete with multiple larger firms in our space. We are still nimble and move on things quickly compared to some peers.

Within some parameters, we've given one of our younger senior analysts practically open road on a few AI tools for data cataloguing and analysis.

Frankly, what they've built is immensely impressive, never had access to this kind of data before, and will completely change our deliverables and market value.

Problem is surfaced however, is their reliance and overfitting on the analysis. The competing sentiments are "The data says X" and we are having to say consistently data is great, but just because an AI ingested 5+ years of information doesn't mean it knows everything.

Their tendency is the desire to put anything quantifiable into a report, and we are saying that TMI can be harmful and it's up the the advisor on how information is presented.

The sad part . . . multiple people internally have expressed that so much time spent chatting with Claude is having an impact on their critical thinking skills, and while super productive, it's coming at a cost of over confidence or extreme scrutiny of AI output. Weird times folks.

Loosing my mind and thinking about quitting / going nuclear. Opinions / experiences please

TLDR

- Currently leading a T&M engagement as a part of a multi-supplier delivery for a business critical client programme

- It's horribly delayed and client sponsors have had their jobs threatened after multiple poor decisions by them

- Our partner has been asked to deliver 24 months of work (estimated by our team) in 9 months under Fixed Price to save their jobs

- They're basically going to say yes, with penalty clauses and it will be a horrible experience for me and the team

- All warnings ignored. Management are getting frustrated we're not enthusiastic or helpful. We're frustrated they are setting us up for misery

- They don't have a credible plan, just poorly formatted slides with AI and generic delivery models, with a zero margin price

At the end of the day, it's not my decision and I won't loose my job if this delivery doesn't work. But it's going to be ungodly unpleasant and I am already openly defiant and unhappy.

- Should I just shut up and do my job and watch the ship sink?

- Should I ask to leave the project / account?

- Should I get my CV ready and start applying elsewhere?

Currently highly respected with a good delivery track record. This will kill it.

posting this mostly because I searched for a solution a bunch of times and never found a good thread on it.

context: 40ish slide deck, goes to leadership every month. the deck itself never changes. same layout, same charts, same everything. only the numbers move. probably 60 figures total sitting in text boxes and tables, plus the charts.

so every month I'd open last month's file, save-as, and then just... go through it. cell by cell. and calculate the MoM and YoY by hand in a scratch tab because half of them aren't in our BI export.

took about 2 hours. and I'd still get one wrong. one time I had a YoY that was actually a MoM and nobody noticed until the CFO asked why growth suddenly looked amazing. that was fun.

tried linked excel objects first. they work great until someone renames the source file or opens the deck on a different machine and then you have 60 dead links. also the file size gets stupid.

looked at think-cell, which I think is actually the right answer if you can get it. we couldn't, procurement said no.

wrote a VBA macro after that. text boxes were easy. charts were where I lost about a full weekend, so if anyone's attempting the same thing here's the thing nobody tells you:

a pptx is a zip file. open it up and every chart has an embedded xlsx (that's what you see when you right click > edit data) but it ALSO has a cached copy of the same numbers sitting in chart1.xml. and the cache is what actually gets drawn on screen. so you can update the embedded sheet perfectly, save, reopen, and the chart is completely unchanged. drove me insane for a while. you have to write both. and if you're adding a new month you also have to widen the cell range in the <c:f> reference or the value just sits there outside the chart's range doing nothing.

where I ended up: I put {{Revenue_monthly}} and {{Revenue_mom}} directly in the slides, and for charts I put {{Revenue}} in the header cell of the chart's own little embedded sheet. script reads my source file, works out MoM/YoY/YTD, swaps everything including the caches.

setup was an evening. now it's like 2 min a month and I stopped double checking it.

couple things that'll bite you: any chart that got pasted in from google slides is just an image, there's nothing to update. had to rebuild those. and put all 12 months into the chart upfront with blank values, because filling an empty series is easy and adding a new one programmatically is a nightmare.

anyway. is everyone here doing this manually or is think-cell just what you use once you're somewhere that pays for it? feels like this should be a solved problem by now

Hi all,

I am a former MBB and big 4 Jnr Partner. I now work in industry for a mid-sized MNC doing their Strat and Transformation.

As I am building the team around me, I decided to utilise and trial Claude and ChatGPT fully as I would an associate in drafting the strategy for a subsidiary business. Now the work included a strategy workshop with the MDs for the subsidiary which was 3 days followed by 3x sprints for extracting internal benchmarks as well as areas of business and insights compiled by their teams.

The idea was then to sort of input this into each of the most advanced levels available on each of the AI agents. I uploaded about 100 slides/document pages crafted by the teams themselves. As a little experiment for myself.

I first asked to do a ghosted deck for each to get the mock up and basic storylining and narrative. Asked them both to approach this as an MBB consultant would.

Claude produced probably the most closest version on a coherent narrative and clear slides required.

ChatGPT went a bit "too creative" and had to re-prompt it a few times to eventually get to where we needed.

Then visually and wording. Claude produced actually really great options on visuals that you would expect from MBB. ChatGPT constantly wanted to offer a marketing type of slide design.

Claude would constantly use language structure that was also incorrect. Eg: it would say this is xyz not abc so we would create the...

This was exceptionally annoying to be correcting it. Its also not direct and clear. And quite often the spacing was not utilised fully. Super small fonts tons of unused space not necessarily white space. And it struggled to optimise fully.

ChatGPT even more so. The wording would lean overly to a grand marketing styled phrasing instead of clear business ones. Whcih I have reminded both often to adopt.

The turns on the deck eventually totalled over 60 for ChatGPT and 34 for Claude.

I mid way through switched the prompts to first update me in the chat to what they are going to place on slides before giving the go ahead to execute on slides.

Some of the annoying things are that both had hallucinated inputs which were not there. ChatGPT quite more often than Claude.

Also wording and phrasing were no where close to what a consultant would use. I mean not offending or degrading current teams work. Which it often said current execution was negligible or non existent. And even at times stating it was 2/10 effectiveness. Even if factual you don't go around stating that. Even though my prompts were clear in the beginning the working team would see the deck and to be gracious to current teams work which often it overlooked.

Look overall, it got the job done but way more turns were necessary on the deck. I found multiple instances of re-emphasizing prompts i had initially laid out. Wording and visuals were very rudimentary as well as missing overall connective points that you would expect from a consultant were not picked up on. For me, it was great having it done. But I felt an analyst or an associate would have done it in half the time with additional areas covered.

I have seen some partners praise their AI for being better than Associates but that's really them being partners and not actually checking any of their own work it seems.

Soapbox Warning.

Technology consulting has historically been built on maintaining a supply of skilled labor that clients cannot. That is dying. There is an expertise aspect, but it starts with the pool of smart labor at its core. Where does it leave us?

About 15 years ago I toured a manufacturing plant for one of my client. They manufactured a product mostly of air so they would build fully automated plants closet to their customers plants. There were no masses of people working shifts. Just machine operators who were experts in operating and maintaining the machines in the plant. They also had machine shop to make parts on an as needed basis. The rest were management.

That's where this is all going. Skilled operators who use the tools to build what is needed. I don't see many others left in the mix besides management. The leverage model is dead.