Q&A: Corporate Strategy Manager at F100 Entertainment Company (came from Non-MBB Management Consulting)
I've been a Corporate Strategy manager at a large F100 studio (not Disney) for about a year now (and it's had its ups and downs). Just figured there isn't too much information on here about corporate strategy paths from non-MBB people, so I thought I'd throw my chex into the mix here. My background is 2011 undergrad at NYU Stern majoring in Finance & Accounting: * Started off at a boutique financial services consulting firm for 18 months * Went to join a large, Indian tech consulting company in their management consulting group (but really a lot of change management, business analyst work, requirements, project management, and the occasional business cases) in the financial services vertical * Worked my way into strategy in entertainment through a website resume drop (process took 3 months over 5 interviews) - HR Screening, 2x phone calls, 1 Skype super day, In-Person Super Day I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about the work, how I got there, and what I plan to do next (looking to lateral into a similar role in tech)
I think there's a few schools of thought on this, and each industry, company and inter-company, handles these groups differently. In my mind, there are 3 functions that typically get grouped together because there is some level of overlap: Corporate Strategy, Corporate Development, Business Development
Corp Strategy vs. Corp Development vs. Biz Development You'll get groups that combine corp dev & biz dev together, corp strategy & corp dev together, etc. with any combination of the three. It's really how the company structures its organization. Another (generalized) way to think about how the teams function is that corp dev teams are usually comprised of ex-bankers, biz dev from sales teams, and strategy from ex-consultants. I see that you're in Corp Dev so you're already well aware it's more M&A work, while Business Development (at least here) concentrates on sales and account/vendor management. Obviously I'm not in those groups and I'm sure others here have a better understanding of it.
As for corporate strategy, we typically focus on initiatives set by executive management at the beginning of the year and work on ad-hoc projects that accomplish these initiatives. To that extent, yes, I'd consider us internal consultants. I would split up the work we do into 2 broad types: strategic and operational improvement
Type of Work Strategic is the work you typically think of in a strategy group: analyzing market research to identify trends, competitive analysis, doing business cases and projections on new products/product lines. Operational improvement is analyzing current performance of various groups within the company and identifying ways to affect the bottom line (read: cost cutting or process improvement measures). I'd say it's probably a 30/70 split strategy to operational work that I do. Note that in both, it's a lot of heavy excel and powerpoint (with the occasional use of Access for large data sets). I live in graphs and charts to try and best show the data in the most simple way possible for management. Again for both types of strategic & operational work, 25% of it is building out the excel models/business cases, 25% is putting together the presentation & formatting (and reformatting and regraphing and reformatting), 25% is looking at the data in different ways and reformulating our answer (which in turn forces us to re-look at excel and re-do the PPT), and 25% is meetings with other groups and actually presenting the slides. In our group, there is 0% M&A work. We may do a quick & dirty financial model to get a conversation started, but it's handed off to the corp dev group.
Our biggest project is preparing and updating a long-term strategic plan that gets reviewed by the company's president & CEO and we spend probably 3 months of the year prepping and doing analyses for it (an accumulation of all the small projects we've done throughout the year packaged into something palatable for executive management). As a manager, I'm personally not in there for the presentation (that's our SVP of Finance who is 3 levels above me - and she's the least senior one in the room).
Structure I think the reason there isn't a lot of transparent, granular information here about corporate strategy is because every company defines and structures the group differently. Some are placed under the COO, some under CFO, some under a specific strategy division. Our group specifically is under the CFO and so the work that we do intertwines us with the FP&A groups, which sit right next to us (group of 4) under the Finance Head. In addition, some of the projects we do are related to financial & strategic planning, which means forecasting company health or for a particular product, line, etc.
We have a small group (as are most strategy groups) of 4 people. I'm from a tech consulting firm, the other manager is from Accenture, and the 2 directors came from IBM & BCG (and both have MBAs). For work hours, I typically get in between 8:30 - 9am and get out between 6:30 - 7:30pm. During the 3 months we're prepping for the long term plan for the CEO, I leave anywhere between 7:30 - 8:30 and work throughout the day gets noticeably busier.
Exit Ops For exit opportunities, I think it's a bit of a shot in the dark as to what's next for me. I definitely don't think those in corporate strategy go into (or back into) consulting or investment banking. Private equity also sounds like a long shot without M&A or banking experience. What I find is that you either stick it through to try and get promoted internally (probably difficult considering the teams are so small with limited budget) or you go to a competitor (another entertainment company) and get promoted through your move in a similar strategy function (next step would be a director role). For me, I'm aiming to move into a similar strategy role but in a different industry (tech) as it's growing significantly faster, has higher impact projects, and generally pays better. You'll see a lot of job postings that cite the "strategy" buzzword in job experience requirements, along with previous consulting experience etc. which definitely helps with getting interviews. I think the biggest hurdle at that point is having the correct industry experience (e.g. it's much easier for me to jump to a different entertainment company than it is proving that I am just as viable for a strategy director position in high tech as the other guy who did corporate strategy for Google)
I'd say from my experience reading the forums and in this group, the hiring managers typically look for consulting experience first (and our team being all consultants), but that's not to say it precludes you from applying. The previous guy before me was a Senior Financial Analyst at Disney with more of an FP&A background. Even for me, the position I applied for stated that it required an MBA (which I do not have). What they're looking for in your resume qualifications (and is assumed when you're a consultant) is that you exhibit 3 things:
High-level thinking: Are you always aware of the overall objective? Or do you tend to work in the weeds and get caught up in all the details
Ability to deal with ambiguity: Projects are often kicked off because an exec has a question that they want answered, but don't really clarify how to get there (e.g. How can we get 35% margin on a particular set of products?). There's thousands of ways to get to this answer, but it's up to you to be able to sift through data, question results, and present it in a meaningful fashion
Get-It-Done Attitude: You should be able to show you know how to deliver. This is where showing you have consulting experience helps a great deal. You'll make the right connections and talk to the right people to get the information you need to do your job.
Coming from any other role besides consulting, it's definitely, definitely doable but you should be able to reflect these 3 things in your resume up front in your work experience (and call them out clearly)
Thanks you for doing this. Couple of questions hopefully you can provide insight on:
You mention both the Directors have an MBA. As such, is there an expectation that you need one to move up, whether directly communicated or passively implied? Nonetheless, do you have any intention of getting an MBA? What are your general thoughts on getting an MBA for someone who wants to do Corporate Strategy longer-term?
You mention you work various angles of strategy such as long-term strategic planning, adhoc projects, operational improvement, and traditional market/competitor strategy. How much of your work/insight/recommendations actually see "the light of day" and get implemented/executed?
At my company, some of our GMs / Operators, being experts of their domain, are offended/insulted when our Exec team decides to bring in external consultants to try to come up with a solution for an operational issue or initiative in their respective domains. Sample GM reaction: "They tell me what I already know, but they put it into nice slides". I wonder how the relationship dynamic is for Corporate Strategy / Internal consultants who work with the GMs / Operators. Are they more friendly / receptive or do they have to deal with "Corporate"?