Do ex-MBB consultants thrive at start-ups?
The answer might surprise you.
I start working at Bain & Company full-time on October 2019.
After about 12 months, I knew I wanted out. Which honestly isn’t that surprising, considering most people only stay for 2 years (I ended up staying for about 2.5).
Part of the short lifespan is because there are so many appealing options after MBB consulting.
A fair few people, especially at Bain, were magnetized by Private Equity. Others were interested in Venture Capital. Some find good corporate jobs. And a large chunk of people used business school as a way to take a break and / or find their transition.
However, I knew very few people who jumped to an early stage start-up.
Looking back, that made me have the inherent assumption that start-ups just didn’t want consultants. Or that consultants didn’t do well at start-ups, perhaps because we focused too much on strategy or couldn’t properly roll-up our sleeves? Either way, very few people talked about this option, so I almost didn’t consider it.
Which would have been a horrible mistake.
Fast-forward 5 years
And I’ve just finished up a stint working for ~3 years at Australia’s most exciting start-up (you can read more about it here). And I can assure you that ex-consultants definitely can and do thrive at start-ups.
Let me explain…
As a quick intro, my name is Neel. I - along with my best friend Rohit - sporadically make YouTube videos to help people navigate their careers.
We initially started to help students like us successfully apply to the Big 3 consulting firms from non-target universities, just like we had struggled to do.
Now that we’ve both pivoted away from consulting into career paths more fulfilling for us, we want to share what we’ve learned from people who are miserable in well-paying, prestigious yet soul-sucking, meaningless jobs.
Why consultants can be fantastic start-up employees, and what they should unlearn too
I just made a YouTube video recounting all of the reasons and lessons I learned here, but I wanted to give you a snippet below.
Two (of four) reasons Consultants make great start-up employees
Reason #1: The Soft Skills
This one might seem obvious, but I can’t stress how important the skills of communication, relationship building, and feedback giving / receiving are in a start-up. I also can’t emphasize how frequent people did not have them as well.
I had a 1:1 with the CEO of Vow (an amazing human named George) who stressed this all to me. He loved working with good ex-consultants because they communicated crisply to everyone they interacted with and could take + deliver feedback very easily. This helped him to establish more of a culture of clear comms with feedback, something that’s not always the case with other colleagues, whether they be engineers or scientists.
Reason #2: Effective Generalists
At an early stage, start-ups generally cannot afford to hire experts. This is for two reasons:
(1) They can’t afford them. Not enough money in the bank.
(2) They don’t have enough awareness of the specific problem to have enough context to then hire the right expert or give them the right direction. And even if they did hire the expert, the expert might then become quickly obsolete if the company pivots.
As such, an early stage start-up thrives off of effective generalists in all domains, whether technical or nontechnical.
For the nontechnical aspects (e.g., go-to-market, sales, marketing, HR, etc), former consultants are a goldmine. They are used to working in environments where they are not the expert, yet still have to make decisions with confidence.
That ex-consultant - who might be hired as a Chief of Staff, BizOps person, etc - can then plug the hole for 3, 6, or 12 months. In the meanwhile, they are building an awareness of the problem they are solving and the kind of experienced person who they’d need to hire to truly solve the problem.
One (of five) things ex-consultants need to unlearn before working at a start-up
Watch-out #1: Hierarchy and Politics
Part of being a good consultant is effectively navigating the political and hierarchical structure of both your firm and the client.
As a result, this leads to people speaking in a way that diffuses responsibility in order to tip-toe effectively within the org structure. They will also always leave room for upper management or clients to input their opinions, regardless of how right or wrong it is.
These kinds of behaviors spell the death of any start-up. As a start-up, having a meritocratic approach to ideas is critical to even surviving. A CEO cannot simply be surrounded by ‘yes-men’ or people who are too scared to speak up when they observe a problem.
I’ve seen this personally with ex-consultants who started to work at Vow after I started. They had to unlearn their unconscious biases of always agreeing with the most senior person or of being overly concerned with what their boss might think.
But once they did unlearn that, they became absolute rockstars.
Like those reasons and watchouts? If so, you can watch the rest here:
Otherwise, hope y’all have a great day. Thank you for letting us interrupt your inbox. And expect more regular content to come your way.
Thanks for sharing, this was a great read!