Miserable in consulting, how to improve situation?
Hey guys,
Quick background: In college, I interned at BBs (S&T), but went into consulting after graduation. Drudged it out for 2 years; it hasn't been my slice of pie, to put it politely.
I miss the pace and simulation of finance, and miss the amount of interaction I got there, but don't want to hop on a trading floor again. I'm thinking that investor relations / BD might fill my itch, but I'm open to considering other possibilities, like PB/PWM, too.
Is this sort of thing feasible? And if not, where else in finance would consulting and communication skills be valued?
Best,
Dan
You have a background very similar to a friend I was pretty close with for the year before and after graduation. He had a HYP degree, interned on a top BB trading floor in a non-revenue role (research, structuring, etc.), had back luck getting a return offer, and moved to boutique consulting where his experience sounds very similar to yours: a slower-paced environment, no institutionalized resources, poor visibility on career progression, and a shortage of transferable skills.
Take heart, your cause isn't lost. What I recommend below isn't what my friend did, but the point I'm going to make is that anything you've been through can be sold as a positive if you speak from a place of humility, sincerity, and conviction.
Let me quickly get this one out of the way:
In the current recruiting climate (past four cycles, so class of 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019), anyone who wants a banking job coming out of business school gets one. I'll quote myself from another thread: So, if you want an investment banking job for any of all of the reasons so well outlined on these or any other forums, you can take the next seven months to get your candidacy ship-shape to apply R1 for as many of the top-20 programs as you feel interested in. They will get you a banking job.Yes, some of the EBs have a preference for candidates with strong prior financial experience (the old BX groups were like this, they took people who were finance lifers [their associate interns often had 2+ years of banking experience and 2+ on the buy-side, albeit in MM or LMM roles]). Few take candidates like that to the exclusion of others. There is just about always someone with no prior finance experience in the intern class.
Reading everything you've written here, I'd recommend you look into portfolio operations roles. They combine some of the most interesting parts of private equity, venture capital, and consulting into one role. It is not a collection of the very best of each, but you get bits and pieces of the better half of each of those roles while enjoying a much higher floor in terms of volatility (safety on your career prospects).
Look at KKR Capstone. They were the first to really institutionalize this, and by that I mean to invest eight figures into wooing away superbly qualified partners from McKinsey et al. to build out a brand new franchise. Firms have long done that same sort of thing (slotting operating or consulting executives onto a bench that the portfolio companies can access if they need it), but (a) those executives weren't selecting that at the apex of their career as the final thing they wanted to do for the last 15 years they worked, (b) the executives weren't often supremely prominent in their fields, they were often strong social connections of the partners at the PE shop, and (c) there was no emphasis on institutionalizing it into a business of its own.
KKR did all of that, then used the platform to begin billing the portfolio companies and thus created an entirely new revenue stream for the KKR management company. The logic was sound; why have the portfolio businesses you own giving away tens of millions annually in consulting revenue to MBB firms when you could build a quasi-MBB shop in-house that captures that same fee revenue?
Blackstone is another good one. Dave Calhoun runs their portfolio operations group. He spent two or three decades at GE (ended as Vice Chairman), then ran Nielsen for a decade after its PE takeover (Blackstone was part of that deal) before joining to lead the group.
I'm running out of time so I'll wrap this up. Take some time to look more into this field. Most of the megafunds have this type of thing internally, though the title of the group will vary.
I can think of two paths that would be doable for you and a booster for your career.
One: you could consider trying to lateral as a consultant to a better franchise (even if it's a specialist platform like Capco or a Big 4 shop) to get another two years of experience, and 15 months from today apply for admission into b-school for the class of 2022. Your resume would have two-ish years at your current shop and one-ish year at your hypothetical new shop.
You'd be bang-on target given that the median amount of prior experience for b-school students is now 3.4 years (last time I checked), meaning everyone has either four or three years of work under their belt at matriculation (and thus only three or sometimes even two[!] at application). You could then recruit out of business school for these PE portfolio operations jobs.
The downside I can see to this is that unless you were at an HSW school, you may struggle to attract the big MFs as a candidate. Ultimately though your experience would match what every MBA student faces: the career component of school is one of those 'you get out what you put in' things. You are in the driver's seat, if you're chasing anything other than banking or consulting where everyone shows up and force-feeds you, it's really self-directed.
Two: Get whatever portfolio ops job you can now, sit in it for 2-3 years, then apply solely to the MBA business schools">M7 bracket by selling yourself as the guy that loves the pairing of financial wizardry, operational excellence, and complex project management who can use the platform the school offers to gain the management skills and polish plus the network that will help you as you transition to a more senior role in portfolio ops.
That would let you recruit very specifically for the sterling ops programs like KKR and Blackstone, and you could even try your hand at consultant-friendly PE shops like Golden Gate and Bain for a traditional PE investing role.
Either way, from all you've shared the first thing that leaped to my mind was portfolio operations. Explore it and see if it could work for you. Keep your head up.
You're welcome. I have a positive perspective because I've seen firsthand how the unconventional is actually possible.
Don't be surprised about people returning to banking. For the people who know they want to make a durable career out of banking, a two-year hiatus that allows them to (i) develop the very sort of network that creates dealflow for the following decades and (ii) upgrade the caliber of firm they work at for that duration, it's a no-brainer.
One guy I know did two years at a Wells Fargo / HSBC / Standard Chartered type place, then three years in LMM PE in a regional city. He attended a non-HSW MBA business schools">M7 and went into one of the two legacy banking groups at BX. They loved him because he possessed both the sell-side and buy-side perspective, had exact experience in the cap range the group made its bread and butter in, and was not a flight risk at all. He knew the what and why behind his decision to do banking for the long run.
Yes, the bespoke-clad, prestige-dripping budding titan of the universe who progressed steadily from Yale to Morgan Stanley to Carlyle is highly unlikely to pursue a banking job at Evercore or PJT after attending HBS. The MM guy who did three years in an industry group then two years in a product group at a solid shop not in New York is probably going to be pretty happy to use Columbia as a stepping stone to Goldman or Moelis.
I'm not privy to your resume, but anytime someone tells you 'reapply with more experience,' there's at least a 50% chance you have what they're looking for but are simply failing to demonstrate it.
That comment you made about loving the process of finding a consultancy engagement more fulfilling than the actual work of the project is really interesting. Maybe you need to rewrite your resume from top to bottom.
Seriously, start with a blank file and do it over from scratch without looking at the old one. You'd be surprised how differently you convey the highlights of your experience when you're doing it anew. No shit though, you're looking at it with today's eyes (and all your accumulated insight on the world) rather than being complacent with how you wrote the language with yesterday's eyes.
If you're really at the two-year mark in your current role (and not the 18-month mark thanks to graduating in the class of 2016 and starting in September that year), you ought to have fully checked the box for an experienced hire in the MBB at whatever they call the second tier of employee after undergrad. At this point it's likely not a question of whether you have it, it's whether you're able to articulate that you have it.
In terms of whether you can stall yourself out of MBA success, yeah, that's a real threat, but it manifests itself differently than how you evidently think. You write as if you believe simple years of experience can make you look bad. That's true, but only indirectly. It's about your trajectory.
Someone who applies with six years of experience but only one promotion looks worse than someone applying with three who has already been promoted and gained responsibility. Someone with six years of experience but three promotions and three separate events that weren't promotions but were clear expansions of responsibility (e.g. project lead, increase of headcount supervised, bigger budget oversight, whatever) is by no means locked out of top-flight MBA programs.
Again, it's about your trajectory. If you look like someone whose career has flatlined, yeah, that's the MBA application equivalent of the desperate 36-year-old guy who's throwing himself at every eligible single woman in his social circle because he's trying to get married before it's too late. If you look like you were thoughtful in why you waited as long to apply as you did, you're the 36-year-old surgeon who chose not to settle down because he knew he had medical school, residency, one or two competitive fellowships to pursue, then a rotation in a competitive hospital before he found out where he'd actually wind up living.
I don't know enough about how private banking works as a career to offer any informed comments. The extent of my knowledge ends from what I know being a client.
"Family office role" is far too ambiguous of a term to mean anything. The only rule about family offices that holds true is that no two family offices are alike. Seriously. The delta within that category is unreal. It's also incredibly challenging to break in, whether as an employee, a prospective GP trying to raise capital, or a new family office trying to find like-minded parties to syndicate dealflow or share best practices.