r/consulting

Just got a T2 consulting offer as an associate. Currently work at a CPG company on a transformation team (scope is a mix of ops, finance, and building digital tools). Details below.

Current Role

• Level: Sr. Manager/Associate Director
• Compensation: ~180k - 190k TC in a VHCOL
• WLB: Currently remote, but this can change at any moment. In that case, I would be looking at a 2-hour round-trip commute for 3 days/week. Probably work about 30 hours per week.
• Pros: WLB is really good. I like my manager, and if I wanted to change teams/scope, there are usually plenty of opportunities.
• Cons: Slow career growth. The next promotion comes with a significant pay bump, but it's a black box. It can come in 2, 5, or even 10 years. The company isn't doing great either. The pay raises are also below inflation, but I guess that's an industry thing. I'm also risking being pigeonholed into one industry that's not having its best moment.

Offer

• T2 Consulting, Associate
• Compensation: All-in, probably 230k-250k. Still in VHCOL.
• WLB: Based on my discussions, pretty bad. 65-70hr work weeks with potentially weekly travel, depending on the project.
• Pros: Consulting stamp even though it's not MBB, opportunity to work with different industries/project types. Pretty clear promotion path, if you survive. Next level would bring my TC to ~300k. No interest in being a partner.
• Cons: Hours, travel, Up-or-out risk; I would be coming in as an older associate, so I'm taking a tenure hit. Burnout risk.

How would you compare these 2 at this life stage/tenure? My idea was to stay 3-5 years and hopefully move to a higher-growth industry (e.g., tech) or a higher-growth role within my industry/adjacent industries, but looking at where people have exited this company and practice, I'm not really seeing what I hope to see. This may have been a no-brainer for me 5 years ago, but now, given the exits and the current state of the industry, it seems like a riskier move than I thought.

Any thoughts?

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

29, corporate strategy/ops, just got an offer at fast-paced late-stage NYC startup

Current Role (Large Enterprise):
Compensation: Fully remote. Lower salary, but higher net cash take-home (no NYC taxes or high rent). I'm currently based in MD with my gf, so would require a move if i take the offer but would still be able to see her often.
Lifestyle: Low stress, high autonomy, zero commute.
Downside: Slow career growth, company not doing well this year (hiring freeze, promo freezes, etc).

Offer (Late-Stage Startup):
Compensation: $215k base + $225k RSUs over 4 years.
Cash Reality: Lower net savings than my current job after NYC taxes and rent.
Pros: High career velocity, healthy company financials, strong resume brand.
Cons: 5 days/week in-office mandate in NYC, full loss of remote flexibility, higher burnout risk.

1. Is sacrificing remote WLB and net liquid cash worth 5 days a week in NYC for startup brand equity and operator experience?
2. How would you evaluate this trade-off at this stage in your career?

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.

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.

I'd like to start using Claude in PowerPoint as somewhat of a magic wand. I would write the content of the slide in completely unformatted text boxes and have Claude then create the slide. I even envision a world where slides (like tracker or timeline slides) are fully done within an Excel table and you feed Claude the Excel to create the slide.

I'm not yet comfortable having Claude come up with its own wording and content, but curious how people implement this idea and what are some recommendations for this task. Somewhat new to AI, so don't roast me too hard

I’m not sure if this is a unique situation or not.

Before now I worked as a consultant in a very specific thought leadership field. I worked with many customers for this (basically an internal management methodology) and one of the customers liked me so much, they hired me to run their program full time.

Fast forward, I’ve worked for this company for 3 years. I’ve been asked by a vendor of my current company to participate in an interview, discussing my experiences holistically and how other subject matter experts can use my ideas. This vendor is the provider of the software we use to manage said program I manage.

This interview would be a pretty cool thing to have under my belt, just due to the extent the interview will cover my specialty (which is pretty niche). However, my current company has denied me this opportunity, because (in their opinion) it looks too much like my company is promoting the vendor itself, regardless of the actual content material.

While I understand my company’s concern, the vendor has gone so far as to offer that my title / place of employment would be anonymized in the article (referred to simply as a “global company”). Of course, a bit of slutheing on my LinkedIn would reveal which “global company”, but again the subject matter of the interview has almost nothing to do with the company I currently work for, and everything to do with the programs I build (and have built since before becoming an FTE for this org).

What do I do? Does my company really have the power to stop me from doing this type of interview, when it has no direct correlation with the company itself?

Also just to add a few last bullets that might be important:
- this methodology I specialize in is not industry specific; all companies can benefit from it so it’s not like this is some industry formula my company has figured out.
- the interview has no mention of the software, anywhere. While the content is being hosted by the vendor, the information they are getting from me is purely methodology & programmatic

I am a shell of who I was at the beginning. I’ve been the lead on the project the entire time. My team on the project has changed 3 times so I am the only one to retain continuity. Changed because the customer kept getting consultants removed and then because they didn’t have another project at the time, they were let go.
Management support has been non-existent. I can’t leave…if I did I would be abandoning the team and the project would NOT go live. I would feel too guilty to leave….but I have never been more miserable in my life.

As road warriors, we’re eating on the road all the time. Anyone else embarrassed by their expense report submissions?

I eat out all 3 meals (plus coffee or snacks), have the occasional McDonald’s or other fast food, and am on the road Monday through Friday so my expense reports are hefty. Not gonna lie, I feel a bit shy about my expense reports. Like they can make judgments about me based on what I eat ☹️

What does everyone here use for management consulting style slides? I find the slides from Claude don’t really produce solid/appropriate frameworks and chat gpt just sort of sucks. I tried gamma and it’s more like a bunch of templates than an actual intelligent content -> template/frameworks system. Also forget about citations?

What does everyone else use?

Edit: thanks for all the feedback. Testing a bunch and will report back if i find anything decent.