What do you actually do in consulting?

Consultants tend to help solve business problems, develop new strategies or rubber stamp existing business plans before they go ahead. It's tough to say the day-to-day work of a consultant as it depends on the type of project and the stage of the project you are at. I'll give you an example of a project I was on and the timeline of how things went along.

Project: Looking for a licensing partner for a large pharma that couldn't market their drug in certain geographies

Stage 1: Partner Scoping: The daily routine at this stage was to initially filter potential partners based on the criteria the client set out (this could be presence in X number of countries, that they've done X deals of this nature before or whatever they want).

Stage 2: Deep Dive: Here you start narrowing the list down to perhaps 10 or so companies and apply your own 'strategic' criteria to see which would fit best. You also start getting an idea of which firms would want to license in the drug and how they could make it lucrative.

Stage 3: Target Selection: The list further boils down to 2-3 companies which would be game and you start actively working with the client to discuss the deal and see how it could shape out and what terms can be struck for the deal (length, geographies, royalty structure e.t.c). At this point the client is usually taking the lead and once the papers are signed you're done.

Throughout this entire process you could be doing competitor analysis, market research, financial due diligence, primary research, data analysis, speaking to experts, sales forecasts and running through deal structure scenarios.