I'm in IBD at a bulge bracket bank, curious to explore what life is like in consulting. I recently had the opportunity to go through a deck prepared by an MBB relating to a PE acquisition I'm staffed on. For reference, it looked a lot like this:
http://www.bain.com/Images/2011%20Bain%20China%20…
Since I've joined my firm, a lot of fancy formatting best practices, color codes and schemes, fancy charts, subtle bells and whistles have been drilled into me to the point of PTSD. So to be honest, the deck I saw rubbed me the wrong way - it was not very aesthetically pleasing/clean. Shape misalignment, bad color scheme, sloppy text, tacky/unprofessional use of images, etc. Now I'm sure it was VERY content heavy and insightful, but I would've thought that an industry like consulting that is very BS and client-perception heavy (very much like banking) would have juniors pay as much detail to this stuff as we do.
Not that this matters that much, but I'm genuinely curious, since I'm really thinking about moving over. Are all consulting decks at MBB more or less like this? How much time do you have to knock one of these out? Is it a firm standard format or something? Are you guys instructed to do it this way?
By the way, for those of you who are curious as to what a typical IBD deck looks like, these are pretty much it, more or less (random example):
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1403132/0…
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/00…
The main difference between a consulting and an IBD deck is the story line. The decks for a consulting deck can be read through the title lines only. For your IBD deck, you need to get into the slides.
Frankly decks will change based on the objectives the deck is trying to achieve: informative, decision making, recommendations etc.
Formatting and such will be the same standard across the board, it might be less important depending of the objectives of the deck
Its a matter of audience really. IBD will focus on the numbers exclusively, Consulting will focus on the story. Im my case I do digital strategy and a lot of sales work and our presentations are always shared digitally (none of that sit down with a stapled pile of paper stuff) and out decks focus even more on being aesthetically pleasing. They will be multi media heavy, flattened design, info graphic like.
There's also difference between the firms (I only have intimate knowledge of MBB). I didn't end up choosing Bain, but one of the senior partners that I talked to explained that the company spent very little time worrying about the aesthetics of the deck. (The topic came up because of my arts/humanities undergraduate major.) He didn't mean it as a comparative (against McKinsey or BCG), but looking at the decks of the MBBs, it seems that BCG is more design-oriented, followed by McKinsey and then Bain in a distant third. This isn't a criticism of Bain, by any means, only that they seem not to consider design a worthwhile use of much time. A BCG partner told me the exact opposite--that they had recently spent a lot of money on a design overhaul. In the end perhaps it's a matter of taste. You can judge for yourself by looking at BCG's slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/TheBostonConsultingGroup.
My experience as well. Bain decks tend to be really ugly and I've seen some beautiful BCG slides to be honest.
In my experience at McK: 1) Basic hygiene should be 100%. This means font size, alignment, color, chart labels, footnotes, sourcing, spelling and grammar, spacing, legibility. If something goes in front of a client with any of this lacking, it's bad news
2) Everything else varies dramatically + Type of work: PE diligence vs long slog branding work + People (Partners, EMs, etc. all have different styles) + Clients (I had some clients haggling over colors in decks, some didn't give two shits)
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There seem to be quite different audiences, purposes and priorities that go into consulting vs. IBD decks.
The example Bain deck is a market research deck rather than an actual Client deck. Therefore, it somewhat lacks the most important component of a typical consulting document, namely so-whats or actionable recommendations.
That said, I think pretty much any consultant, coming with the consulting mindset, would deem it far superior to CS deck you linked to. Any manager/partner, upon seeing something like slide 8 or 13 in this CS deck, would immediately ask: "What is the so-what? If there is none, let's get rid of the slide or (if they are German :)) put it into back up". That's what referred to as a "data dump slide" and any consultant with 6+ months tenure knows not to make those.
This does not mean I am saying these slides are not useful or do not serve a purpose - just that I do not see one upon having a brief look, and in consulting world these would not be valued unless at the very least a "take away" title is added (e.g., for 13, something like "Top 20 institutional shareholders own ~70% of Super" if that is an insightful message) and the tables reformatted as charts. The reason is simple - executives are busy people and by having them guess the message and look up the numbers to check you are wasting their time and risking your message will be missed. Consultants don't want to waste their Clients time or to lose their attention.
Slides like 6 would get the "let's simplify" comment from leadership - for the same reason, not to waste Clients time / risk obscuring the message.
I would be actually curious for someone with IBD background to comment on why IBD does not follow a similar "tell a story - one slide - one message - keep it simple - 3 seconds should be enough to grasp the key message - only create a slide if there is an important message to convey" philosophy. Is it that intended audience (CFOs / corp dev / PE guys) is more interested in diving into the numers and grasping their own conclusions? Or because having a lot of slides gives the audience more comfort / justification of the deal / justification of the fees (if so, why not put them into appendix)?
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