Author: Steve Shu

"It’s Not Easy Being Green" are famous words often attributed to Kermit the Frog. I think these words apply to not only famous frog puppets but also "green" management consultants (i.e., those fresh to the field).

Consulting can be a high pressure profession, and clients (as well as senior colleagues) often closely scrutinize new consultants, especially newly-minted MBAs during the first period when they land on a project. For what it’s worth here are some of the things that helped me get through my first few months when I entered the profession:

• Check out the dress code for the first client you hit – Consultants need to dress well (perhaps well enough) so that they don’t inadvertently give the impression that their skills are average or mediocre. While seemingly shallow advice, underwhelming clients is not something that is easy to overcome. All said about dress, it may not be desirable to overdress for the client either. Unless you carry your wardrobe like a model, overdressing can make you stick out like a sore thumb.
• Don’t immediately tell clients that you just started with the firm and just got your MBA – It can be tempting to say this because you think people will be easier on you if they know you are new. Not the case in consulting. It is much better to say something to the effect of "I am in my first year with the Firm". If you tip that you literally just started in the profession (too early before developing a relationship), you may be working yourself out of a hole with the client before you even get a chance to prove yourself. By all means, do not lie about who you are, but engage people the way they need to be engaged.
• Get your first win in the eyes of the client early on – I’ll be honest. I don’t think I did this the first time I hit the client site. I was more concerned with following my perception of firm procedure & methodology to the letter. I focused on activities to the exclusion of results and what was actually going to help the client in a tangible way. Fortunately, one of the engagement managers on the project was able to steer me in the right direction. He told me something the effect of "Forget about XYZ methodology. The essence of what we need to do is meet goal ABC." Compare my shortfall compared to an analyst on the project that on day 2 of the project, without any fancy "MBA-based" methodology, found uncollected revenue by the client of X hundred thousand dollars (I’m just pulling out some numbers here) by reviewing some customer contracts. The results exceeded the professional fees of the analyst by many, many times compared to the two days of work.
• Watch, learn, and work on developing "presence" – One of the unspoken areas about interviewing prospective consultants for employment is that consultants need to project and communicate with a strong level of confidence that carries right on to the client site. Being able to get through case interviews, being smart, being personable, and being a logical thinker is not enough when interviewing for a consulting firm. Consultants need to be able to facilitate situations, re-frame things, test hypotheses, and communicate in such a way as to drive things to closure. Projecting presence doesn’t stop after the interview process for employment.

I run into a lot of folks who use the term "management consulting" a lot more loosely than I would use the term. I often run into people who say things like:

"You should just go in there and start telling them what to do – go and consult."

"Go and give them your advice."

"I can do consulting. I can give them my expert advice."

"So you tell them how to start wireless businesses?"

Although I’ve not described the context for these statements fully, these types of statements make me cringe. Why? Because people who say these things often presume that consultants start dispensing advice without understanding and gathering an inventory of a client’s situation.

In some circumstances, maybe the consultant can jump right in to start making recommendations. For example, if a client is simply missing some basic fundamentals, e.g., sales or operational reports, written contracts, one can dispense some "advice" from the start. But I tend to caution giving advice so early in a consulting relationship. I tend to prefer to share perspectives as well as the factors or things I would need to investigate to either confirm or alter my initial read of the situation. This communicates to the client that I am not in the business of dispensing shallow advice. It also sets the frame for the consulting methodology that I am going to use to solve the problem at hand.

Now provided that a consultant is going to use a structured methodology for solving a client problem, at what point does the consultant make recommendations to the client? My timing preference is based on the fact that clients ultimately have to live with proposed solutions. As such, I prefer the recommendation process to be more iterative. For example, on one project I may have to first gather competitive marketing information about mobile operators and benchmark my client against those competitors. The next step may be for me to outline the options that the client has to pursue to close the gaps (say increase efficiency of distribution points versus increase number and type of distribution points) along with the tradeoffs. As the final step, the client and I jointly work to decide the best path. By involving the client in the recommendations process, the client takes more ownership of the solution, and hence, the solution will tend to stick better.

There is second school of thought on how to time recommendations to clients. Rather than the process being iterative, the thinking is that if the client is a large Fortune 100/Tier 1 ranking/etc. client that the consulting style should be more iterative. For smaller clients, e.g., middle-market/Tier 2 ranking/etc. companies, the thinking is that a consultant should take a stronger up-front stance on making recommendations and skipping a lot of the client facilitation and decision-making process.

I can see some benefits to the strong up-front approach as opposed to the iterative process:

• consultant takes more control by initiative
• smaller companies do not have as many resources as larger companies and need consultants to service as "interim managers" and not just as facilitators
• consultant may leave a stronger impression with the client by being strong up-front

As a consultant, what method do you use? If you are a client, what method do you prefer?

I am often contacted by people that are looking to get into management consulting. There are many reasons (confirming evidence) cited for going into the profession, some of which include exciting work, the potential for high earnings, and tremendous business experience.

But there are a number of overlooked reasons for not going into the profession. It is important to look at disconfirming evidence too – if one only looks for reasons to go into the profession, one overlook some important factors.

Some reasons for not going into consulting:

1. Without active career management, consultants are susceptible to becoming obsolete by lack of direct operating experience or subject matter expertise.
2. Entry- to mid-level consultants often lack a direct ability to control their futures in terms of getting assigned to projects.
3. Travel can take a toll on life, and consultants are more susceptible to having transient relationships (both personally and professionally). Some firms are known (through the grapevine) for having high divorce rates at the partner-level.
4. Consulting can create high stress along multiple dimensions. Stress affects one’s health, and it would not be unusual for a consultant, at some point in his/her career, to feel as if the world is caving in.
5. It is not unusual to run into persons at client sites that dislike consultants tremendously no matter what good work the consultant has done, who the consultant is, or how nice the consultant is.
6. High earnings associated with consulting "nirvana" (for lack of a better word) can tempt one to make future professional career choices only in material terms (e.g., money and prestige of position).

I’m sure there are many other items (six off the top of my head seemed like enough). Please feel free to add to the list by commenting below.

All said, if one takes a rational look at the upsides and downsides to consulting, one can make a better informed decision about a career choice in consulting. If one is fortunate enough to get an opportunity to go into consulting, I would suggest actively managing the potential downsides or creatively turning them into an advantage.