How much do you bill in RX Consulting?
Hi all,
I’m looking to enter RX consulting (T1) straight out of undergrad and had some questions about the billable hours system. I’ve seen a lot of discussion here about how firms like A&M and Alix pay really well due to billables, however when looking over their fee documents, there seems to be some drastic differences in the hours employees bill when staffed on deals (between 800 and 2800 annually)
Do you have any say in how many hours you bill? For example, can you ask for more work if you want to hit higher billables or would you have to compete with others for it? If there is a competition, how fierce is it internally? What factors actually determine if you bill 60 hours vs 20 hours that week.
My guess is that people who bill fewer hours might be staffed on more than one deal, so their time gets spread out more evenly across different projects, but that’s just my assumption. I’d love to hear if that’s actually how it works or if there’s more to it.
Thanks for any help in advance!
It depends on commercial needs.
You generally do not have a say in how many hours you bill.
However, if you've built rapport and lined yourself up with seniors you like working for, you'll have more sway in what types of deals you work on and the folks you work with, which will indirectly determine your hours.
Under the above assumption, unless your ask is unreasonable (i.e. working 100 billable hours already, quality of your work product or equivalent deteriorating), don't see why firms won't give you more work, especially if asked for.
And yes, you can be staffed on multiple deals, depending on time commitment of each - Personally have been staffed on everything from 1 matter to 4 at the same time.
Hi VP, Thanks for the insight.
Would you say it's common for employees to ask for more work from the firm, or are most content with their hours? How about when times get difficult, and there aren't many deals, what happens then?
Also, how is it working on 4 deals at once, compared to 1? I always assumed Rx consulting work required you to commit your full time to studying one company (two max), and helping it turnaround, instead of spreading yourself super think across multiple deals.
There's too many variables that will affect the level of "content" each person feels. Disregarding firms with strong imbalances (i.e. long hours / toxic with no commensurate pay), most folks will probably land somewhere around indifference - Stemming from the fact that the longer / harder they work, they receive an appropriate level of recognition (i.e. battleground promos, higher bonus %, ability to work on cooler deals in the future due to proving themselves to certain seniors).
At most levels under MD / SMDs, you have little to no control over your hours, so it's moot to worry about difficult times whether it's from too much or too little work.
In general, if you're spread thinly across multiple deals, you'll have a more general knowledge across all deals, up to date with latest developments. If you're on fewer mandates, you'll be owning several workstreams down to the very granular details (i.e. knowing that a negative variance of $5K for Vendor X last week in actuals vs. forecast arising from an earlier payment than anticipated to mend relationship with key Vendor X).
Depends on the work you're doing. You see those 200-300 page long fee statements that get published to the dockets? Fun fact...a consultant/bunch of consultants have to work on creating those, it's not like a machine spits them out. You've gotta track every tenth of an hour or so, and then someone's gotta make sure it gets allocated to the correct expense category. Back breaking work, but guess what...billable hours baby. Whereas if you're on some sort of back office type stuff, then you won't be getting much. Same goes for the DIP models etc (though those are extremely interesting and fun imo).
Also, given that most of the work that you do will be ad-hoc, it takes as long as it takes, and you bill it for as long as it takes. The bar's pretty low when it comes to reasonableness of hours you bill, and I'll be honest, your MD is gonna be asking you "where's my deliverable" long before the ppl who build the timesheets start questioning how long you're spending on a single task. I've never seen a situation where people have to eat their hours, and I highly doubt any RX consulting firm worth their salt asks their employees to do that.
Finally, there's an aspect of who you know in this. If you get into a "critical" team, good for you, that translates to more work hence more billable hours. Examples would be the critical vendor team etc.
Also quick piece of advice, if you're on a debtor side deal, think twice before asking for more work. It goes from 0-100 in a matter of hours, and you'll get stuck very fast.
Just upvoting for the "critical" / critical vendor team pun, intended or not.
Thank you for the input.
I was kind of shocked to find out that clients are really flexible when it comes to how many hours you bill. Always assumed that the courts and the owners would fight and verify every minute of work, especially given they are charged $500 per hour for some 22-year-old straight out of undergrad.
Could you expand more on what you mean by "critical" team? From your experience, would you say there are teams that work drastically more/less than others?
Usually nobody that actually cares is left at a co by the time it's distressed...
Critical meaning teams that are extremely important. Usually ends up being the vendor team and the cash team, because everything ends up at them. Obviously every single team there is important, these are just super important.
That's amazing that you don't have to eat hours. The most frustrating part about working at many consulting firms is that I sometimes have to work pretty late/on weekends to get stuff done, but can't book all my time because of Partners trying to meet their realization goals. It especially sucks when the bench is deep and you're now having to choose between vacation or hitting your target for the year since you didn't get any buffer while you were staffed...
You've had to eat your hours? Are you in Rx co or a different consulting?
I think eating hours is typically unique to Big4, which is strange considering the more established HR/controls departments internally compared to smaller firms. Most teams at T1 and smaller T2/3 players in the RX industry typically don't do this - because (while the client is distressed) they usually aren't scrutinizing the surgeon for how long he takes when the downside is death(ch 7). Also, the implicit fiduciary responsibility to keep the company running, especially if there's a "succession" fee tied to the turnaround engagement, will ideally instill an atmosphere of mutual trust. Of course, this isn't always the case, but I've never heard of anyone having to underreport hours worked on a RX engagement. However, strategy engagements see this pretty often, especially in government and public sector engagements. Point is, if this is happening to you in RX, I'd find a different firm asap where you'll be compensated based on the amount of work you do (A&M/Alix/PPP/M3/MERU/FTI/Province?/BRG?).
That's very very unlikely to happen in RX consulting, and I'm from a T1 firm. Doesn't mean that it's all sunshine and rainbows, but eating your hours is not something to be concerned about in RX co
Don’t enter Rx consulting problem solved
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