Actual work and down time of consulting vs IBD

Currently an asso 2 in IBD in Asia, have been rethinking my career goal since the layoff, seeing most of ex-colleagues didn't manage to find a job for months. Thought about doing an MBA and move to consulting once the market picks up. Just curious how much of the work and lifestyle is differ

Hours - I saw bankers often quoting 80-100 while consultants are talking about 50-60 per week. What is the intensity of those hours though? Personally I work 80 hours in IBD but I would say I have lots of downtime during the day especially when I have fewer than 2 actual live deals that I am the key person on it. Waiting for comments, waiting for our formatting or research team in India to come back with formatted ppt / data, standby during the day, etc.

I can't go home / take a nap / watch netflix / study during the down time. These hours are dumb and exhausting as I still need to sit in front of my PC pretend I am working (at most I am reading WSJ). Painful when you have to work 36 hours a week + 44 hours of this but intensity wise at least I am not staring at my ppt and keep aligning boxes or doing non-stop data analysis for 50-60 hours a week. Is it the same that consultants get quite some down time even during an engagement?

Work - I have never come across any real strategy work. During PE deals I have seen a few CDD reports being produced in 2-4 weeks though. And I would say they are horribly insane. 200 pages of CDD findings require endless data mining. In IB we have research teams to help finding data, but a lot of time we have to either DIY again or the data are so raw that we have to spent a few more hours on top of that to clean it up. Is it a lot more different at MBB? Data mining sucks so I rather not to become a full-time glorified data mining analyst again. Previously, I worked on a project which required me to find number of bank account customers and credit card customers for 5 banks in 8 countries. Annual report and company website didn't show the numbers and it sucked spending 2 whole day on it and you ended up guesstimating by using doubtful news source.

Also, most of the time I don't think the analysis are that "wow", but even if you give me the data, I would have a hard time churning 200 pages of texts and charts. Summarizing the findings in 1000 words are difficult enough and let alone put together 200 pages with 300 charts.

How is the non-CDD work in general? Do you guys get access to lots of proprietary data and leverage your clients' business teams to find the numbers?

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DrApeman

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1y

Hey,

Can help a bit for Bain at least (London though).

Hours

Total work hours per week do average ~55h here, including in PEG. We have had heavier weeks of 60-65h, but that's not super common
Intensity is definitely full on during these 55h, I don't have time to check my phone / email / socials or anything. It's non-stop work, with breaks for lunch/dinner (and the occasional 3min run for a coffee)
WLB is not bad though, since we don't work week-ends, we're pretty sure to finish ~10pm most days, 7pm on an early night, and 4-6pm on Friday

Work

CDD teams are usually 4-6 people working really pretty hard, but to be fair we leverage a LOT of internal resources for additional data mining
Nevertheless, we do a lot of it, all of us, but the work will usually be themed around Market sizing/forecast, Competitor dynamics, Customer analysis, etc.
- Hence need to be super 80/20 with evaluating how much something is going to help you and where your time can be best spent
In terms of "strategy" work, a CDD isn't super crazy, it's about proving (or disproving, depending on the mood) that the target is a good one.
VCP or post-acq work is more strategy oriented, we also do a fair bit of it now
- For that, we still have a big research component, but you do have to be critical and thoughtful about what you're looking for / finding
Most proper strategy work would be in our GP practice

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Authored by: Certified Consulting Professional - Associate ConsultantCertified Consulting Pro

DrApeman

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1y

Most Helpful

No worries.

And short answer is not at all.

PE
- Comp: ~£100-120k base + 100% bonus for Associates
- Work: deal sourcing, financial modelling for potential deals, preliminary due diligence, talking to firm management, and managing your own portfolio companies
  - I would actually argue that PE teaches you more about real strategy because you have to know your businesses inside and out, nowadays, in order to extract every single $/£/€ of value and EBITDA possible using every single lever you have at your disposal in a short amount of time
"PE" Consulting
- Comp: ~£100k base + 20-30% bonus for a Consultant (BB) / Associate (M), less at other firms
- Work: commercial due diligence primarily, consisting of market analysis (size, segmentation, trends, forecasts), competitive dynamics (who plays where, why, how do they win, what do they offer), customer analysis (purchasing behaviour, recommendation / customer experience, pain points, trends), and occasionally a VCP [value creation plan] (what levers can be used to generate value in the deal from a commercially sound standpoint)
  - occasionally you also have vendor due diligence (VDDs, same as above really but with access to management info and longer time frame), operational due diligence (ODDs, focused on how to operationalise the CDD team's recommendations and the actual operational impact on the business and the bottom line), and post-acquisition strategy work (varies a lot based on what the client needs)

PE funds hire consultants to basically outsource a lot of the commercial analysis above and vet their initial investment thesis. They already have a good understanding of the business, market, drivers, and financials.

As consultants, it is our job to independently verify every single point in great detail in a short time frame (except financials because the fund can do that better than us), and we have to be decisive and efficient. If we are going to tell you the business is actually not in the market segment you thought and the outlook is not as positive as you thought, we are going to make sure we're right.