My SA exprience continued….
It’s the one question that every candidate or person even slightly interested in consulting wonders about. It is asked at career fairs and interviews around the country even though it really shouldn’t be (hint-hint for those preparing for recruiting this coming academic year). It’s the question that even seasoned consulting veterans can’t really answer because, quite honestly, there is no answer.
The question?
“What is the typical day in consulting like?”
Asking this question of any consultant will usually yield either a slight head tilt accompanied by a pleasant chuckle or the response “Well in consulting there is no typical day” (a combination of the two has been spotted on occasion as well).
Having half-way completed my summer internship I do completely understand the “no typical day” response because it’s true. Though I go to the same client site every day, I’m always doing different things. Some days might be full of meetings, others are more focused on number crunching, while still others are preparing materials to brief partners on the progress we’ve made. So yes, there is no typical day, but I know when I was recruiting I think I would have liked to know just what a day, any day, is like. It doesn’t have to be typical, heck it likely would be all the more interesting if it’s atypical. So with that in mind I figured I’d run through my day this past week in pseudo-running diary fashion.
You think you know, and you may have some idea…this is the diary of July 15, 2010.
7:20 am: Alarm goes off. Really beginning to dislike the blackberry alarm. Kind of wish it wasn’t so jarring.
8:30 am: Arrive at the client site. It’s a good drive from my sublet and the Bain office but fortunately it’s in the opposite direction of traffic so I can get there pretty quickly. I listen to NPR on the way; apparently “Inception” is supposed to be pretty good.
8:45 am: After getting some coffee (which is subpar compared to the coffee at the Bain office), I begin working on drafting emails. The previous day we conducted two interviews with Senior Vice Presidents at the client. The goal of the meetings was to understand what the individual business units felt they needed in order to achieve recently formulated enterprise-wide imperatives. So basically much of the conversations revolved around, “given that the company as a whole wants to do X, what does your individual business unit need?” The emails that I am drafting are summarizations of the key takeaways, along with a “thank you for your time.” Basically my case team leader (“CTL”) wants to make sure that I am able to participate in an hour-long meeting and distill the key insights into a small number of easily-digestible bullet points (a consultant’s best friend).
9:30 am: After spending some good time reviewing my notes, I create the bullet points and send them around to the two other members of my workstream who were also present to make sure they agree with my takeaways and that I didn’t leave out anything big. They kindly review my work and send there comments back pretty quickly (foreshadow)
9:47 am: Comments arrive (see what I mean). I make the changes that they suggest and forward them off to my CTL.
10:03 am: We have a lunch meeting set up where we plan to walk through our approach as well as some our initial findings with a client working team. I have been tasked with getting together a few hypothesis slides where we basically incorporate everything that we’ve been hearing and start to formulate what we think the answer is. Clearly the actual “answer” will change as we get more data, more information, etc but, much like the scientific method (ya, I paid attention in high school biology), having a hypothesis helps us to focus our approach, and to make sure we’ve pushing in the right general directions. But trying to come up with the answer, even if it’s in a rough form is not easy. This will probably take some time.
11:18 am: I’ve been working on our hypothesis, but now I need to start thinking about our lunch-time meeting with the working group. I check with my colleagues to make sure that all the materials are printed out and ready to go (they are) and that the food is on its way (it is). We then begin talking about our roles for the meeting. This is pretty typical so we all are clear on who will be driving the meeting, who will walk through which slides, and who will play a more supporting role.
11:40 am: Food arrives. This is pretty nice considering it was late for last week’s meeting. I offer to head downstairs with the AC to grab it.
11:47 am: After setting up the food in the meeting room we realize we need drinks. I’ve noticed from previous meetings with this same group that most prefer water.
11: 52 am: No waters left in the vending machine on our floor.
11:54 am: No waters left in the vending machine on the floor above ours. I’m beside myself.
11:56 am: Finally find some waters and bring them to the room.
12:02 pm: The team arrives and we begin the meeting. It goes well and the group really seems to buy into our approach. We set up some opt-in meetings for next week where members can choose to discuss some aspects of the effort in more detail if they are available.
1:20 pm: After cleaning up and heading back down to our team room we debrief, or what my Marine Corps CTL likes to call “hot wash.” We discuss what went well as well as what we could have improved. Feedback at Bain is like sun in Los Angeles, it’s constant.
1:29 pm: Receive an email inviting me to Band practice. As part of our internship, all five summer associates have to perform a song and dance at the summer offsite. We have a practice scheduled with the Bain band on Sunday. We’ve successfully modified the lyrics to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way” to “I’m Just an SA”, this should be interesting
1:42 pm: We allow ourselves a brief mental break after a big morning. Then my workstream gets together in the client’s kitchen to discuss what we want to accomplish for the remainder of the day without bugging the other workstreams in our room. We have two more interviews coming up but we have already prepared all the materials for those. Much of the time is spent discussing how we will divide up the work following those interviews for Friday and what we want to submit to our CTL by the time we leave work the following day at 3 pm (to make sure we make it to a Bain sponsored BBQ at a nearby park).
2:15 pm: Prior to our 3:00 meeting with some clients in Finance, I spend a little time updating my hypothesis slides based on the input from our lunch working team meeting.
2: 54 pm: Our 3:00 is in a different building on the site so we all walk over together. No need to discuss our roles since we’ve been through a number of these interviews already and already know our plan of attack.
3:50 pm: Our 3:00 ends and my hand is definitely feeling the pinch of nearly an hour of note-taking. But we have another interview at 4:00 with some people in Sales Ops. Fortunately it’s in the same building so we navigate our way up a few floors, take our seats and make some small talk before everyone arrives.
5:02 pm: We arrive back at our team room and debrief about the past two meetings. After the debrief, I begin to draft some emails based on the recent two meetings as well as typing up my notes long-form to make sure we have a (more legible and organized) record of everything that’s been said.
5:46 pm: Fruit gummy snacks break. We have a cabinet full of snacks in our team room but unfortunately it’s running dangerously low. Might require a weekend trip to Costco to replenish.
6:15 pm: I finalize our Friday surprise with my fellow summer associates. Every Friday at Bain a class puts together a surprise for the LA office. It’s always food-related and in the past has included an ice-cream and cookie bar, fruit smoothies, breakfast burritos and so on. One of my fellow summer associates is a pretty skilled baker and has offered to make fresh cinnamon buns from scratch. We make sure that we have the accompanying juices and fruit covered and that everyone knows (and remembers) what to bring.
7:49 pm: After socializing my email drafts with the rest of my workstream I send off the bullet points to my CTL. I also place all the bullets from all our interviews in slide form so all the takeaways can be viewed together.
7:53 pm: Time to head home. Definitely been a long day but we’re right in the meat of the case. Looking forward to a little bit of a more relaxing day in the office on Friday complete with our cinnamon bun surprise and the BBQ in the afternoon.
Filed under: Case team experience, Week in the life Tagged: Bain, Bain & Company, Business, Coca-Cola, consultant, consulting, Los Angeles, MBA, McKinsey & Company, Question, summer associate, team, United States, Vending machine Image may be NSFW.
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