Difficulty in breaking into turnaround consulting from IB?
How hard is it to exit to turnaround consulting (like A&M, portage) from an EB / top BB?
What is the interview process like?
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Breaking into turnaround consulting from an EB or top BB is a feasible transition, but it does come with its own set of challenges and considerations. Here's what you need to know:
Difficulty in Transitioning:
Relevant Skillset: Coming from an EB or top BB, you likely have strong financial modeling, transaction experience, and analytical skills, which are highly valued in turnaround consulting. However, turnaround consulting also requires a focus on operational expertise, crisis management, and cash flow analysis, which may not be as emphasized in traditional IB roles.
Networking: Like most transitions, networking plays a crucial role. Having connections within firms like Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) or Portage Point Partners can significantly ease the process.
Demand for Experience: Turnaround consulting firms often look for candidates with experience in distressed situations, restructuring, or operational improvements. If your IB experience includes exposure to distressed deals or restructuring, it will strengthen your candidacy.
Cultural Fit: Turnaround consulting involves a fast-paced, high-pressure environment focused on crisis management. Demonstrating adaptability and a willingness to dive into operational challenges is key.
Interview Process:
The interview process for turnaround consulting roles typically includes the following components:
Behavioral Interviews:
Case Studies:
Technical Questions:
Fit and Cultural Assessment:
Additional Insights:
In summary, while the transition from an EB or top BB to turnaround consulting is achievable, it requires targeted preparation, relevant experience, and a strong understanding of the unique demands of the role.
1 word answer: doable.
A more useful answer would be that it really depends on what group you're coming from. The biggest distinction is probs RX IB or non RX IB. If you're in the latter group, in all honesty, there's a steeper climb. The problem is that you’ll need to convince them you’re not just a deck monkey who models for vanilla M&A or whatever other group. They’re going to look for signs you’ve got the grit and operational & technical curiosity needed for turnaround work. That could mean side projects, ops-heavy client work, or maybe even some kind of workout experience that landed on your desk by luck. Without that, your odds aren’t great—these firms don’t have the patience to train you from scratch. IB has a more pyramid shaped hierachy, where there's a fuckload of juniors, and it narrows out towards senior levels. RX consulting has a more diamond shaped hierachy; more mid - senior level ppl. Translated, if you're trying to make the jump from IB at a junior level, there's a bunch of skills / technicals that you might need to learn, and you're competing for a small amount of spots. RX in general is very technical, more so than IB I'd say.
Then you've gotta worry about the culture. RX and turnaround work isn’t about pitching or smoothing over optics it’s blunt, often messy, and you’re in the room with management teams who are bleeding cash and sometimes in denial, and you yourself will probably be pulling 110+ hour weeks sometimes. They don’t care about your 100-page book. They care if payroll clears next Friday. Basically, there's a Berlin wall between you and RX consulting, and you've got to somehow get over it.
If you're in RX IB thought, that's different. There's much more relevant expertise, but there's still a hill you gotta climb bc there's still some skills that RX IB doesn't give you that RX consulting needs. Also, demand for the industry seems to be booming, which equals higher competition.
I know that people in IB are often told that they can exit into "whatever they want pretty easily" once they're in IB. Based on what I've seen, I would beg to differ. When you look at it, there's not a whole lot of strategic work bankers do, nor is the technical stuff they do really that difficult (barring RX); the difficulty in IB primarily comes from being on call 24/7.
TL;DR, yes, it's possible to go from IB to RX consulting. It's definitely not a cakewalk though.
Then why do I see people working at A&M and other top turnaround firms from backgrounds wayyyy less intensive and technical than IB.
From what I see on LinkedIn a lot of these associates are from MM banks or even Big 4 and not so impressive backgrounds. Would think someone coming from an EB / top BB would have less trouble getting an offer right?
Can confirm as a Big 4 hire, am not impressive
Illusion of mediocrity mainly. What you’re missing is that the hiring bar isn’t just about "pedigree" or "name recognition" like it is in IB. In turnaround/restructuring consulting, relevance and mindset matter way more. A kid from a Big 4 advisory team who spent three years working on cash flow forecasting, liquidity management, or actual bankruptcy filings is going to be way more useful to an RX consulting firm on day one than a GS M&A analyst who can model an LBO in his sleep but has never touched a 13-week cash flow or seen a debtor-in-possession (DIP) process up close. And that's being generous, for people in general IB groups, most of the time they're doing DCF, comps, precedent transactions, and sometimes a basic merger model (accretion/dilution analysis), none of which are really that difficult: DCFs are conceptually deep but the modeling part is straighforward, with comps you're just painting by the numbers, precedents are the same but for past companies. LBO (the only actually challenging) models only come up sometimes, like if you're selling a company and private equity buyers are bidding. Even then, you'll usually just tweak a simple LBO model to sanity check a PE bid, not build a crazy detailed LBO from scratch. There's other reasons for B4 people being hired, which are elaborated on in other posts on this forum.
During my time in RX I saw many RX consulting applicants, with all types of "prestigious" backgrounds (GS TMT etc). Most of them were complete trainwrecks - the gap in RX and operational knowledge and overall personality was noticeable.
Second, a lot of the Big 4 or MM people you’re seeing aren’t fresh hires; they’ve often already built up very relevant skills (in restructuring services, distressed M&A, creditor advisory, or even pro bono side gigs etc.). Even if their early training wasn't as "elite" by banking standards, it's aligned with what RX consulting firms actually need: hands-on, gritty operational skills, mixed with technical skills, not endless pitch books or theoretical valuation work.
Finally, as I've mentioned above and as numerous people have mentioned on this forum, RX consulting isn’t Wall Street — prestige signaling is less important. These firms want people who can execute in messy, high-stress, ambiguous environments, not just shine in a beauty pageant. Being a top BB/EB banker looks good on paper, but if you can't roll up your sleeves, deal with angry CFOs, and get a bleeding company through payroll next week, your fancy background means jack shit to them.
So yeah, coming from a BB/EB gives you some advantages (mainly in terms of basic modeling and general finance IQ, and sure, name recognition), but it's nowhere near a slam dunk. You still have to prove you’re tough, operationally curious, and adaptable, which are way rarer traits among banking analysts than most people think. Now, if you're in RX IB, disregard all the above lol, this is for other types of IB.
i don't understand, why RX Consulting is suddenly so popular around here. saw many posts in last days and weeks
what did I miss
Mr Tariffs caused interest in RX in general to go up, people realized RX consulting was a thing, people then realized RX consulting pays well & is interesting, people then realized not a lot of info on RX consulting is on here, people then make a lot of posts
People think the world is ending that that anything dealing with bankruptcy, etc. will be hot. I think the interest is from a lot of people from ivies thinking it's an easy job to get because "non-prestigious" Big 4 CPA have made the move historically (see post above in this thread itself). Then, they see the comp numbers from A&M and think it'll be an "easy" way to make similar comp to banking while working a bit less hours and doing sexy work.
I posted this in another thread, but I don't think a lot of people understand how detailed-oriented and tactical you have to be in restructuring. There are strategic aspects to the job, but most of the work is building very detailed spreadsheets/analyses and rolling them forward on a given cadence. You have to be this detailed in your work because the stakes are high and mistakes could screw over multiple parties. I've spent hours building customer-level models/forecasts for a bunch of working capital accounts, debt schedules, etc. and I've actually had to utilize my accounting background pretty heavily so I could understand how to model some of these things out as well as the cash vs accrual implications.
It is a really good job, but it can also be stressful and miserable sometimes. Everyone is pissed off/on-edge on the client/creditor side, and a lot of people on your team will be cranky from the lack of sleep and stress to crank things out quickly and accurately. I've learned a lot and think it's a potentially rewarding career path, but it's absolutely not for everyone and isn't just something where someone can skate by on prestige or making "high level" assumptions/models by any means.
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