Received an offer from an MBB firm in Riyadh at the Consultant level. Base is 125K USD, 35K housing allowance with 25-50% bonus and $15K sign-on. I know this is a lot of money but I am not sure what the benchmark is.
Questions
- Is this compensation on-par for a consulting firm in Saudi Arabia for the Consultant position?
- Any thoughts on consulting in Saudi Arabia in general? I have worked in consulting in London for the entirety of my career with some projects based in Dubai but never in Saudi Arabia. I would highly welcome any thoughts on working hours, culture, skill level of consultants, type of work etc.
- What % are bonuses normally? I have been given 25-50% as a figure, which is quite broad.
- Is there much travel involved? I would assume not if you're based in Riyadh because I have heard most consultants travel to Saudi Arabia.
Thanks
I'm guessing this is Bain. They've been aggressively growing the Riyadh office and routinely target intermediate hires like yourself. The salary is in line with UAE region MBB, I don't know much about the bonus paid out, but the dollar figure range I got from the folks I spoke with confirmed 20-30% paid out which I thought was quite myself since the benchmark is usually 15-20% in North American regions.
For Bain, ACs earn $100k Base and that scaling to $125k for 2-4 yrs experience checks out. For housing, I've been quoted $20k USD to $30k USD, yours seems to be on the higher end.
I should mention, Riyadh earns a 30-40% premium (perhaps in the housing allowance?) over the Dubai office to attract candidates to work there. That would explain the greater bonus variance and the greater housing than what I've historically seen for Dubai and other UAE regions (Doha, Abu Dhabi).
On an unrelated note, would you have any insights into partner salaries within mbb (rough breakdown)?
Thanks a lot for your insights, much appreciated!
Do you have any thoughts on my other two questions?
- How much travel, if based in Riyadh?
- General trends/dynamics in consulting in Saudi? What are the hours, clients, colleagues and work like?
For Travel, MBB have a lot of business within Saudi public sector. It makes up the majority of the business in the region and is one of the reasons why these firms are building out their Riyadh offices. I would imagine it will be mostly domestic within SA region unless you get staffed internationally.
The general trend I've noticed: UAE region tends to be more hierarchal and have a serious work hard, play hard culture. The firms in the region work ~12+ hrs daily, I've even heard stories of people working one of two weekend days (might have just been bad staffing on that one), but in exchange, they have incredibly lavish parties in hotel casinos, or yachts. This is all historic, so how true this is going forward is hard to say. The people there are incredibly blunt compared to their NA counterparts, this is just my observation from my conversations and interviews in the region.
Person above likely gave a more accurate answer than I could re compensation; just to add that some T2s (e.g.: OW, Kearney) may actually pay above MBB for managers and below.
Re travel: To give a rough estimate, probably 80% of your work is going to be in Riyadh (so no travel). The other 20% may be in other GCC countries, or other KSA locations (e.g.: most Aramco work is in the Eastern region, many large corporates have offices in Jeddah, a lot of public sector work could be at the province level (e.g.: regional health clusters), and there are some funky places (e.g.: mining, tourism - think AlUla and MDLBEAST etc. Also, NEOM's HQ is actually in NEOM)
Re culture: I have personally found that Saudi clients are often very respectful and deferential on day 0 / 1. The respect and deference, however, is easily lost - either consultants flop by delivering bad product or having terrible communication skills, or the clients themselves are under immense pressure and start pushing their stresses on you. I found the variance to be huge - the good clients are *great*, the bad clients are *horrendous*. At MBB, I found that bad product is almost never the case, and it's either bad communication (incl. ignorance of culture) or client is drowning and needs a punching bag.
Party culture of firms has a lot of variance; e.g.: BCG is very public about their parties. Check their instagram stories to see complete degeneracy (not judging) at their big events. Other firms seem to be more conservative. Any Riyadh Office event is of course going to be much more family friendly than a Dubai / all of Middle East event.
Hope this helps, best of luck :)
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