Confused by the various names and websites, a little help please

Hello,
I am an Economics PhD from a good B-School. I haven't done well in academia and must now look for options in the industry. I have a bunch of interviews scheduled with a few consulting firms and wanted to know what is what, as it is all confusing to me. I am looking at the following units:

A) Deloitte FAS - their financial advisory services
B) EY - Advisory role with financial services office
C) Deloitte - Transfer Pricing
D) KPMG - Transfer Pricing

My specific questions are.

1) What is the difference between A and B, and how do they compare to management consulting roles with MBB?
2) What is the difference between the advisory roles and transfer pricing roles?
3) What is the level of salary of MBA or PhD entering in each of A, B, C and D

Thank you very much in advance.

 
Best Response

I'll take a shot at this. No direct experience with most of it, just a second year MBA headed to MBB.

1.) No idea what the difference is between the two. However, they are not remotely similar to consulting roles with MBB. The MBB consulting roles generally put you on a generalist track (ability to specialize early is office specific) where you will do strategy or operations work in a variety of different functional areas and a variety of different industries. The A/B roles you mentioned are obviously specific to financial services; in addition, I don't THINK they are actually consulting roles. Someone who knows for sure can chime in, but both Deloitte and EY do have actual consulting programs/positions, and one of the functional areas you can end up in is financial services. So I expect that the A/B roles work with or sometimes support the consultants at those firms in financial services projects.

2) I have no idea, one reason I initially glossed over this thread.

3) Again I'm not sure. However, you can easily find salaries for post MBA CONSULTING positions (discussed the difference in first answer) at managementconsulted.com, which just posted 2015 salary data.

 

Came from a Big 4, can talk about this.

The first job is within the FAS devision. It is not S&O and thus not their flagship management consulting arm. You'll be doing stuff like valuation, restructuring, forensics, analysis, etc. purely within the financial realm. So for example, say there's a merger happening between company A and company B. The management consulting arm (S&O) might be pulled in to ask high-level strategy questions, such as: "How many people should we get rid of? What divisions are unnecessary in the new structure? What product lines can we combine? Is it profitable to maintain operations in Asia?" etc. FAS division will come in and ask. "Company A says their EV is $2bn, but is that really true? Why do they claim so much value for their goodwill? If we merge the two companies, how does capital structure change? Are we too leveraged? Do we care?" You're confined to the numbers on the statements as opposed to overarching strategy.

Second job... EY has a different corporate structure than the others and focuses on transactions instead of pure strategy play. You would most likely be advising (i.e. due diligence, valuation) on M&A, split-offs, and similar transactions.

C and D are Tax roles. Not management consulting at all. You'd better love accounting and legal jargon.

Salary: see http://managementconsulted.com/consulting-salaries/2015-management-cons… for MBA-level salary. PhD might get a little more but don't expect like, $30k on top of the MBA salary.

Currently: future neurologist, current psychotherapist Previously: investor relations (top consulting firm), M&A consulting (Big 4), M&A banking (MM)
 
wso_kwr:

Thank you. And I know this is a very subjective question. But what would you put as the order of preference for yourself if you had all of the offers, considering the pay roughly equal.

For myself? I wouldn't take any of them, because I'm not interested in financial advisory =P

Everyone has different preferences, so if the pay is roughly equal then pick what is most interesting to you! Do you want to work on tax projects? Then obviously the transfer pricing roles are your thing. If you like transactions, EY. If you want to do due diligence type work, Deloitte FAS.

Currently: future neurologist, current psychotherapist Previously: investor relations (top consulting firm), M&A consulting (Big 4), M&A banking (MM)
 

Sorry to break it to you but Big 4 advisory typically do not offer people with graduate degrees other than MBAs more money than undergrads unless your position is higher than entry level. And unless you have relevant experience, they will likely offer you an entry level position. Obviously, this is situational and varies on a case by case basis but I definitely wouldn't go in with anything close to MBA salary expectations.

 

@OP: have you looked at some of the economics consulting firms? Your econ PhD would be valued much more there than at a Big 4. Take a look at FTI Consulting, NERA, Booz Allen Hamilton (if you're into public policy type work), Charles River Associates, and maybe Oliver Wyman (Financial Services).

Currently: future neurologist, current psychotherapist Previously: investor relations (top consulting firm), M&A consulting (Big 4), M&A banking (MM)
 

@chicandtoughness Yes, I did consider them at first, but wasn't able to make it.

@ConsultinMonkey04 Yes, the positions are higher than entry level with pay likely to be higher or at par with MBA salaries. Although probably not too much more is the sense I got. Over the past years, the PhD's from my school heading into industry have commanded a average salary roughly 125% of the MBA students graduating from my school. Partly because it's a smaller cohort than the MBAs and partly because Econ consulting firm salaries tend to be higher. Although you may be right in the sense that most people don't join the big 4 after PhD, although they do come here every year to recruit our business PhDs. My issue is that I haven't done particularly well on the market and the econ consulting options aren't available to me.

 
devildog2067:

Stop saying "I haven't done well in academia and must now look for options in the industry." Stop even thinking it. That attitude will kill you.

Agreed. Thanks.
 

On a slightly unrelated note... are you not on the Job Market? There are plenty of government-level consulting jobs on there (unless this year is a dry year). I haven't yet met an econ PhD that graduated without getting a Job Market offer. And why didn't you do well in academia.... not enough papers published?

EDIT: Just looked at EJM listings for this years... seems like it's all academia, huh. Back to my previous question - why don't you like academia / why did you do badly? I can't imagine why someone would slave through the 5-7 years for a PhD and not want to dedicate themselves towards research. Consulting work will seem so damn boring to you.

I'm also surprised you came from a "top b-school" and weren't able to land even first rounds with the econ consulting firms. NERA loves advanced degrees....

Currently: future neurologist, current psychotherapist Previously: investor relations (top consulting firm), M&A consulting (Big 4), M&A banking (MM)
 

I would say I haven't done poorly in academia, but i haven't met my expectations and don't want to continue. As for a job offer, yes I am on the market and I'm sure I'll get some job offers from academic positions - teaching positions and research positions at lower ranked school. I will probably also get a few industry offers.

I was merely trying to understand what these other options were, since they had shown a keen interest in hiring. Specifically I was told by someone the Deloitte Advisory and EY Advisory are quite different things.

 
wso_kwr:

Specifically I was told by someone the Deloitte Advisory and EY Advisory are quite different things.

Depends on which branch of Deloitte's "advisory" you're talking about. The two companies are set up in completely different ways, so of course they'll be different.

Do you like academia? (Ignore how well you've done). Do you WANT to be a consultant? You spent like 10 years of your life getting to this point. Now is the time to get a job you actually like/want.

Currently: future neurologist, current psychotherapist Previously: investor relations (top consulting firm), M&A consulting (Big 4), M&A banking (MM)
 

Could you please elaborate on "The two companies (EY & Deloitte) are set up in completely different ways? I am also interested in applying the Transfer Pricing positions there. I am currently working in a consulting firm for a specific industry and have a PhD in Economics with a specialization of IO. After reading extensively on this subject, I think it is exactly what I want to do as a career in the long run and I could leverage my background and experience very well. I don't like the idea of switching between companies, so I want to learn about the differences between the two before I apply. Any insights will be really appreciated.

 

@chicandtoughness As I mentioned earlier, my reason for leaving academia is more of my disinterest in it. On the other hand, consulting is something I am genuinely keen on at this point.

 

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