Legal consultants are approached for legal advice by their clients. Doctors are ‘consulted’ by patients suffering from different ailments for identifying the line of treatment and therapy. Similarly, there are consultants in the fields of marketing, finance, branding, sales and human resource. This is the world of management consultancy or management consulting, which covers almost every key function of business.
Consultancy is about problem-solving — understanding the symptoms (from the client), diagnosing the problem, researching, proposing and implementing a solution. The enormous variance and complexity of the problems in the world of business make management consultancy a challenging, lucrative and, therefore, coveted area of work, with people bending over backwards to work for companies such as McKinsey & Co, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Bain & Co, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and Oliver Wyman.
What is management consultancy?
Management consultants aid organisations in solving problems and implementing best practices/processes, which helps them in improving their performance and efficiency. The organisations include government department, agency or a public sector unit (PSU); small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and start-ups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These organisations engage management consultants to avail the expertise of external professionals who possess the research and analysis tools to help solve complex problems, and this need is often exacerbated by the inadequacy of internal resources for undertaking such tasks.
The task could be as diverse as providing financial advice on a merger or an acquisition, working with operations teams to assist with restructuring, identifying organisational values and driving a strong culture in liaison with the human resources department, conducting a market valuation study to help the marketing team make a go-to-market strategy or working with a CXO to advise on overall business strategy. This variety of exposure is one of the exciting facets of working in management consultancy.
In the contemporary world — the practice of management consultancy involves three phases. The first, known as foresight phase, is where you conduct a diagnostic study of the firm, its structure, business operations, the nature of difficulty the firm is encountering and the complexity of the situation. The second, the insight stage, is where management consultants work with relevant teams at the client organisation, often even with members of the senior management, to combine expertise and knowledge to identify a solution. And finally, the impact stage, is where management consultants form a partnership with the client organisation and executes the strategies formulated to yield tangible benefits for the client. These are the steps through which management consultants generally add value.
Management consultancy, as an industry, has been growing consistently over several years, and is currently valued over $600 billion. Based on data from salary tracking companies Glassdoor , Payscale and Indeed , the average salary of a management consultant globally is about 50 per cent more than the average white collar professional salary. An analyst at the start of her/his career can look to make between $70,000 and $1,00,000 per year, an associate with relevant postgraduate qualifications can expect between $1,50,000 and $2,00,000, and partners at the top of the ladder comfortably rake in a million bucks a year.
While one can start out in the field after a relevant undergraduate programme, it is generally advisable to consider postgraduate studies too, either as a break from the profession or before entering it. This may be an MBA or other 1-year or 2-year postgraduate programme in management, business administration or allied fields. What stands graduate aspirants in good stead are strong analytical and quantitative abilities, problem-solving skills, multi-tasking abilities and top-of-the-line communication and inter-personal skills. Any technical proficiency — in business, management, accounting, finance or economics — is an added advantage.
Life as a management consultant
Life as a management consultant is both rewarding and demanding. Work hours are longer than ‘normal’, meaning that the work-life balance can be a bit skewed, especially at the start of one’s career. As you climb up the ladder, there is significant flexibility to manage one’s time, work from home, but the start of the career provides for a steep learning graph, and for good measure. There are tight deadlines, the work pressure is intense, and owing to the high payouts, one needs to be excellent at multitasking, along with being mobile and willing to travel to client locations on a regular basis.
The upside is that, as part of one project team or another, you will have the unique opportunity to gain cross-industry exposure, understand the working of different departments within diverse businesses, and frequently be thrown into unknown situations and be expected to respond. For instance, even as a junior analyst, you could find yourself interacting directly, often one-to-one, with the senior management in top-notch organisations, and potentially even advising them! This is highly enlightening, teaching one to present clearly, succinctly and effectively, and also to rely on one’s background work and knowledge and speak one’s mind freely. This affords one the opportunity to be innovative in one’s approach and analysis, and also develops the crucial skill of autonomous decision-making.
Words of advice
Knowing all this at the outset, will help you choose, or reject, a career in management consultancy, on an informed basis. If you do take it up, familiarity with the challenges that come with it will help you, to tide over any initial hiccups. Given the varied, yet always challenging, nature of everyday work in management consultancy, and the deep networks one develops with pre-eminent people in multiple industries, this work experience stands one in good stead for later pursuits in life, be it employment in other service sector roles, working in industry or entrepreneurship.
The demand for management consultants has grown manifold owing to the increasingly complex, multi-cultural and multi-national operations of enterprises across the globe. In India, the start-up boom will drive significant growth in the number of nationally and globally relevant firms in the coming decades, and these firms will require the expert advice of management consultants as they grow. Therefore, the career prospects are bright, arguably brighter than ever.
(The author is an Associate Professor of Management at Indian School of Business & Finance.)