On Management Consulting

Before playing poker full time, I used to work as a strategy consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, one of the leading advisory firms globally. When fellow poker professionals and fellow MBA batchmates question me on this perhaps unconventional career switch, my responses are usually along the lines of ‘Consulting wasn’t for me’, ‘Poker gives me a lot of freedom’, ‘I hated travelling for work’ and so on. Two and a half years on from consulting, I feel like I can write about my experience in a fairly dispassionate manner.

Consulting is a job where you work with different clients in various industries. You fly in to a relatively remote project location on Monday morning, work throughout the week, and fly back to your ‘home location’ on Friday evening. The nature of work can vary from creating a go-to-market strategy for a company launching a new product (for example a tyre company launches a new tyre for trucks, how should they go about it in India), to cost-cutting in a steel company, to creating a road-map for toll tax collection for the Indian Government (these are all projects I personally worked on). You are paid relatively handsomely for your work, although most of the money you make as a consultant is tail-ended (more on that later), you get to stay in fancy hotels, collect frequent-flyer points and your social status is quite high. Sounds like the dream job right?

Well, not quite. Here is why I think one of the top jobs out of the best B-schools in India may not be a good fit for a lot of people.

Your time is my time

By my performance evaluation reports, I was an above average consultant during my three year stint. Not one of the top performers, but someone who the firm thought ‘had significant future potential’. Now it is very natural for anyone ambitious to seek out to be the best in whatever they do. In consulting, this attribute is time. Once you clear the basics, i.e you can work with excel and power-point, smooth talk clients etc, what really separates the best from the rest is how ‘available’ they are. Your partner needs urgent support on a proposal on a Saturday he has to send in by Monday morning, are you willing to cancel your plans to watch EPL and support him? It’s Friday night and you are out on a date with your girlfriend, but some client thinks there is something wrong with the presentation you emailed him last week, are you willing to apologize to your girlfriend, cancel your plans and open up the laptop to figure out if there is any mistake (usually isn’t, you cancelled your plans for nothing). While seventy hours a week is the norm across consulting firms, the mind-space taken up is closer to 90-100 hours/week, leaving you just enough time to sleep and shower.

Meet the insecure over-achievers

To many, even spending an inordinate time at work is okay in the company of smart, motivated, intelligent folks. While I would definitely endorse an average consultant as having these qualities, what’s a big bummer is their insecurity. For example, one of my managers used to maintain an Excel sheet to track performance of his peers, and how it would impact his chances of making partner. As most of the people in consulting firms have top-notch credentials, you become enveloped in this echo-chamber of over-achievers, where most coffee-table discussions will be about who gets what performance quintile and who got passed over for their promotion. While initially I tried to fit-in by participating in them, very soon it becomes dull and depressing. One disclaimer here, there are several exceptions to this class of people, and I met one of my best friends in consulting, but the majority creates the culture, and unfortunately it’s borderline toxic.

The true nature of high-impact work

While the work I did as a consultant looks terrific on paper, in actual terms it was deeply unsatisfying. The main reason for this was the over-emphasis on perception management. For example, it was fairly common to smartly manipulate the numbers to exaggerate the impact of our work (sometimes as high as 10x), something I was initially uncomfortable doing but later became indifferent to. Also internally, you always had to put on an air of false confidence and appear to be on top of your module, even though things might not be all so rosy underneath. It was just not okay to stand up and say that you have no idea how to solve something, so let’s get together and work towards a solution. There were other issues around using antiquated data analytics technology, but my expectation is that consultants are smart and would upgrade this as time passes.

Let’s talk numbers

Strategy consulting in the top firms in India is a $10 million (INR 75 cr) career, assuming you work for twenty-five years. While this is a very handsome amount, it’s important to understand that most of it is made once you make partner (on average 10-12 years post joining the firm). So your income distribution will be such that you make your first million $ in about 12 years, then you make your next million $ in the subsequent three years, and the remaining 8 million $ over the next 10 years. So roughly 80% of the money you make will be in the last 10 years of your career. While this is also true for most other professions, consulting does not allow you to lead a normal life, and therefore if you don’t see the lifestyle as sustainable, it’s best to quit early.

There are two other questions you have to ask yourself when evaluating consulting from a wealth creation perspective. Firstly, do you even need this sort of money, and secondly, is there an easier way to make this money outside of consulting. While I have very limited experience, the answer to the first question for me is a resounding no, and the answer to the second one appears to be yes, and hence quitting consulting was a no-brainer.

So what’s the takeaway?

As with most things, one’s career choice is very personal. Consulting offers an individual a chance to observe (but not participate) decision-making at very high levels of the corporate world, to build a very strong on-paper profile with good exit opportunities, and as a career it’s one of the most high paying ones in India. On the flip side, it takes away most of your time (and therefore your freedom), puts you in a high-stress insecure environment, and does not teach you any real world skill.

And therefore I play poker for a living (lol).