We must rise up against the MBBs
I will start off by saying that I am not one to support the common man. I will go as far as to say I look down my nose at them like bitter clingers on my subway ride to work — their hungover looks, their bloodshot eyes, their pocket change swishing in their dusty jeans, their ability to take up mass in general. However, I will stand up for grave injustices (especially when I’m the one who’s being wronged).
People love to complain that banks waste tons of money and time with pitches that never transpire, technology that never works, and claim that bankers are overcompensated for the value they bring to society. Yet, the glazing that occurs when the topic switches to consulting, particularly MBBs, is absurd.
“Oh you’re in IB at a BB, so you caused the Great Recession”
“Oh you work at an MBB, please fuck me (these are two guys talking to each other)”
Consultants, specifically MBBs serve one purpose, and they are in direct conflict with the well-being of the common man: THEY EXIST TO WASTE OTHER PEOPLE’S TIME AND CASH.
The only time this purpose is helpful would be when you’re a corporate executive and you accidentally realize your liquidity ratio is 10x larger than your peers and Carl Icahn comes in out of nowhere to incinerate your cash. Oh let’s just throw our money at McKinsey to lower our cash balance - problem solved hurray!
However, around $50 billion is spent on outside consultants each year by the US government. Within that $50 billion you have $4 million going towards McKinsey who is studying whether trash bags should be put in trash cans in NYC. The federal government paid Bain millions of dollars to fix the VA (which was already failing), and their conclusion was “further analysis needed.” And don’t get me started on the various times when MBB’s solution to problems was “cutting costs and increasing revenues” such as when Amtrak hired them to fix their profitability and their solution was “Decrease train cars, increase passengers.” Yeah no shit thank you so much here’s 50 million dollars for something that an 8th grader can tell me.
Especially at the state and local level, consultants waste tax dollars. Why? Because government agencies are incentivized to use up their budget and purposely be inefficient. If a division was efficient and fiscally responsible, the manager would be compensated less due to the lower headcount and their group would see a massive cut in their funding. So when budgets run high, consultants come knocking.
I know this is going to upset the uptight community of consultants on this forum, but I think it’s time to call out the individuals who scoff at others and justify their passive aggression and entitlement with "I am extremely passionate about leveraging innovation to build products that tackle the most pertinent issues facing our society." NO — I WILL NOT GIVE YOU A MOMENT TO STRUCTURE YOUR THOUGHTS ON A LOOSE LEAF OF PAPER. In the words of our demented president — “Just shut up man.”
Governments when McKinsey exists:
I mean I kinda agree with you dude but you gotta chill a little bit
Sir this is an Equinox
Please can you explain the joke?
Please can you explain the joke?
So basically he’s saying
Lemme break it down for you
Yea bro he’s more or less saying
So the consultant has small wee weee
Sir please pull up to the window, we have your fries ready
Sure there are bad examples in every industry. But I think to generalize that consulting or MBB adds no value is a bit odd and shows you don't fully understand what they do. I don't know anything about public sector consulting, but on the private sector they come in and get the job. Same for Big 4.
Is the job serving as a punching bag for decisions that their client’s board already made and just need someone to put the decision into a pretty slide deck?
This.
Yes.
I have no idea how to read the last half of this
Consultants do nothing more than validate decisions made before they were hired and spew meaningless buzzword jargon. The most USELESS profession in the world, especially when you hire a fresh 23 year old grad as an “industry expert”. Change my mind.
Nobody claims their analysts/associates are "industry experts". 23 yr olds come in to get the grunt work done. Consultants are either coming in as 1) execution (get s*** done) or 2) strategizing (to validate decisions, flesh out nuances, provide benchmarks/best practices, etc.) They're hired as outsourced brainpower as the CEO and team could be too busy or too deep in the internal politics. They're also independent and usually are up to date with best practices and successful case studies of competitor firms (potentially former clients) and so they can provide first hand knowledge to a business problem. If you're a CEO thinking about expanding operations into a new territory and potentially spending USD 100M on that venture, why not hire a consultant who has done the exact thing for your competitor to help you execute/strategize efficiently?
Stopped reading when consulting and execution were used in the same sentence
You’re not wrong.
This explains what I saw during undergrad. We beta finance club members would practice our technicals and rep out paper LBOs, meanwhile the alpha consulting club members would practice wasting money and sucking off MMB and public sector alums at networking events.
They're also taking our PE jobs! Horrible.
Dey took our jerbs!
how, please kindly elaborate
As an ex-consultant this couldn't be more accurate. Absolute circus, I was on a months long project (multiple phases) where effectively the net end result was we took some money from a developing country and put it in our partners pocket. And during this time we also managed to advise on a deal that ended up destroying about 1bn in value. Still got fast-tracked for that
Ah yes, consulting, the beautiful business of risk laundering.
I could at least think of a couple companies that MBBs ruined by giving them bullshit advice from the top of my head
I've worked at one lmao. Fuck McKinsey, that's all I'm going to say.
Sir, this is a strip club and you have been here for 4 hours
This may be true but MBB have a wider set of exit opps and have more c-level alums than top banks. Best you can do as an ex banker is be head of corp dev then CFO and even then there are fewer seats. Consultants can be COO, CSO, and develop more soft skills dealing with the Csuite.
Exception may be those with both IB + PE experience. Those guys are arguably the cream of the crop. Have seen many of them get really cool jobs that rival MBB exits (maybe even better in some cases).
Gotta whip out this classic
Sit down lil banker bro. Don't you have to adjust a ton of financial statements for operating leases to prepare some useless multiple valuation for another pitch that goes to the dustbin?
Meanwhile I've been traveling on the company dime to Madrid, Amsterdam, London and Barcelona over the last weeks and have stayed in the nicest properties you could imagine. Damm - life is good starting my day with a nice breakfast at the Ritz, finishing at 9 latest to get some gym and hotel spa in. Have fun turning some comments until 2 AM.
This is honestly one of the most homosexual statements I have read on this forum
Lmao this is not the flex you think
Facts! These bankers just don’t get it. Last month I traveled on the client’s dime to some of the dopest spots on the globe(Kansas City and Sioux Falls BTW) and stayed at some of the most insane places of ALL TIME (Hilton Garden Inn, one night at the Regis that I had to cover).
seriously, what kind of hotels do MBB stay?
I mean... the purpose of MBB-level consulting isn't really to actually add value. It is for the company to CYA.
You spend the time to write up this whole shitpost about how terrible MBB are, and all you can come up with to knock McKinsey is that they wasted $4 million of taxpayer money to find that trash cans are good?
Son, you need to up your game. McKinsey has helped:
Yeah but these are times McKinsey has actually been effective. When it comes to PR and legal controversies, yes hire MBBs immediately. They know how to blame the victim so well.
Observation: Common man hating on self to try and pass themselves off as an elitist misanthrope
Directive: Your job is to figure out how to get some of that government waste, that's the function of business
Side thought: representative government is obsolete given A) they don't represent anyone but their own interests and B) real time digital referendums are possible
Digital referendum?
Just waiting for the comprehensive study the gov’t pays McKinsey for to tell them where all our tax dollars are going and how to actually cut spending…..(it will never come)
On MBB, I hire them to 1) do work that I don’t want to do myself 2) put on paper analyses that I already did or information I already know, and 3) get free stuff / convos from them when diving into new sub-segments or learning about new areas.
I also can't believe how poor / basic the analysis these firms do for their PE clients is. I feel like they also like to use deliberately obtuse charts / graphs when they could present things much simpler, because they know how badly they are bullshitting?
We literally hired a top-tier consultancy to help us get down to ONE number for forecast mobile network penetration at one of my previous firms (total waste of cash). They produced a 92 page deck triangulating that one number, with major errors in assumptions that even our most junior analyst could point out, and the output was obviously completely wrong. Don't get me wrong, I know its normally a circlejerk /rubber-stamp kind of thing, but I couldn't believe the lack of basic competence - the project team was all proudly HYP undergrad / HSW MBA btw lol
The business of management consulting aspires to be value add, but you need to accept that its core business is executive ass covering. You can hate it, but there's a good reason why it's lucrative.
Let's say you're a CEO with a $20mm annual comp package. There is a key decision on the horizon - the binary kind that could have the board throwing you out if you get it wrong or waste money in the process. So you don't use your brain, you hire McKinsey. If they're right, YOU were right to hire McKinsey, and you keep your job. If they were wrong, how can you be a bad executive for listening to MCKINSEY? You keep your job. For a few million dollars of company money, you keep $20mm of personal money. Makes sense to me.
But I do see McKinsey brand value starts to degrade, after people on the board and investors found out that it is often wrong and filled with non-sense assumptions. In the future, I believe some companies’ board will start to ban the use of MBB. Such as setting a hard rule: do not hire consultants. CEO cannot violate the rule because CEO does not hold majority shares.
Hiring MBB essentially protects the CEO’s interest at the cost of harming the company’s interest ( aka harming the board and investor interest ). I don’t see how board members will keep being as gullible as they are now. It’s very possible that using MBB will become a red flag on CEO performance review, as more people are now aware of what MBB is all about.
😂🤣
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
This comedy is too brilliant. Must be an investment banker at a leading firm. A consultant doesn’t have this amount of wits about him.
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