George started his presentation by introducing the landscapes of management consulting industry. The fierce competition in each subarea and PWC’s massive capacity to compete in all fronts drew great attention from audiences. Then, George moved on to the flat organization structure of consulting firms, which allow partners to assemble multidiscipline team to address complex business issues faced by the clients.After introducing consulting industry structure, George mentioned two main daily activities of management consultants, which are business development and project delivery. He linked the business development work to equity, which is rewarding but has unpredictable outcomes and timelines. Then, he briefly described the roles played by the mangers, directors and partners in these client engagements.Following the detail description of what management consultants do, George shared the presentation about the reality and challenges facing by the consulting firms. He listed the top challenges such as stiff competition, single source of revenue, non-mandatory service and lack of customer feedbacks. Also, high-quality talents who are willing to work hard are the keys to overcome these challenges and they are the biggest assets to the consulting firms.
As a top-performing consultant, George shared the key ingredients to become a successful candidate. Firstly, the candidate needs to think like a consultant. A good consultant should be a good listener who is able to understand objectives and challenges of clients. To come up with appropriate hypothesis, it is important for a consultant to distinguish symptoms of business issues at implement level, operational level or strategic level. Then, he/she should be able to collect the relevant information from different teams, analyze the data collected and create actionable solutions. Secondly, the candidate should be able to present like a consultant. A well-rounded consultant should be tailored the presentation to the audiences, so that messages can be effectively passed through. When talking to senior management, the conversation may start from the strategies and ends with operations, on the other hand, the middle management may be more interested in the issues in operations to implementations.
At the end, George indicated that his one-year of management consulting experience was transformational for himself, so that he can pull off such an elegant presentation. After a short break, with the help of Ben Sun, Senior Strategy Manager from Telus, George garnished the main presentation with a case interview demo showing a frame of typical management consulting though process. Their presentation attracted overwhelmingly positive feedbacks.
About writer: Elliot is an Associate Director from Aon, specialized in Actuarial and Risk Management consulting.