Equity Research buyside vs Consulting
Hello,
I’m working in ER Buyside for a small/medium size shop (50-70) Billion in AUM. I’m not sure if I want to continue this route due to having a extremely toxic team with no one willing to give you the time to teach you anything. I am considering making the shift to consulting however, I am not sure if I know enough about the field. Can someone tell me more about the field?
I'm about to combine a few of my former posts into an Ultimate Guide. So... let's strap in.
What Do Consultants Do?
Management Consulting Firms and Practices
The thing with "management consulting" is that firms will call themselves management consulting firms despite their niche focus. When most people refer to management consulting, they reference strategy consulting, but there are a lot of niches in that.
Most times, when people refer refer to "management consulting", they imply strategy consulting, but many, many firms call themselves management consulting firms regardless of their area of focus.
Some management consulting firms:
Moving from Finance to Consulting
Finance to consulting is actually a lot easier than some people may think. The reason being a lot of the technical skills, mindset aside, is almost directly transferrable, on top of that, experience in IB is considered the gold standard as you're already familiar with the work demands, and variable nature of the work environment.
From a technical skill set:
Once you've polished your resume after checking a few positions to highlight your experiences, then you can begin reaching out to ~30-50 consultants to understand the firm-specific lateral hiring demand. This will help assess whether you'd be a good fit (technically and culturally) at the firms and help assess what practices, teams or offices you'd like to work at. By the end of this, you should ideally have some people vouching for you within the firm, either in the immediate short term, or just to notify you the next time an opportunity becomes available.
The differences exist in the scope and mindset of consulting: IB analyst ask how much is this company worth in a year, Consulting analysts ask what problems are they facing from reaching that value today?
To have a better understanding of that, I'd advise the usual circuit of Consulting Interview Prep: reading Case Interview Secrets and Case In Point, going through Crafting Cases, PrepLounge, RocketBlocks, Mock Interviews via University Consulting Books.
I would like to highlight that the consulting mindset is best captured by Case Interview Secrets (more useful for on-the-job in my personal opinion) and the consulting interview components are best captured by Crafting Cases (legendary free 7-day crash course). I'll dive into the resource list specifically next.
The Interview Process in Consulting
The Interview process in consulting often follows this format for the top shops:
The Resources I ALWAYS Recommend Folks Look Into
Resources list:
Here is my proposed breakdown:
There's no one size fits all for casing and the breakdown above is assuming (1) you have an abundance of time and (2) you have no prior consulting exposure. Over time, candidates move on from reading frameworks/concepts to simply doing x number of cases a week. Those that pass MBB do anywhere from 10-50 cases, of course, there are exceptions with some people that are naturally skilled in casing, not me of course - I did 40-50 myself.
Sounds like you need to switch company, not role necessarily?
My bad maybe, I should have given more detail. The culture is one of the reasons. I do enjoy the financial analysis part but I am not big fan of working independently 100% of the time. I think I would enjoy a role that has more team work and client facing
Have you considered sell-side ER? Just throwing it out there.
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