"Walk me through a deal" for consultants
Hi WSO,
Though the "Walk me through a deal" question has been covered extensively for bankers, **how should consultants prepare to answer these questions? **
At my firm (MBB), we typically do not have access to much of the financial information (e.g., multiples, expected IRR, etc.) nor focus on many of the financial line items (gross margin, EBITDA margin) explicitly in our work. Often, we are focusing on some variation of three questions:
Is the market big, growing, and insulated from competition?
What is the target's competitive position, and what do customers think about them?
What are the potential growth opportunities (organic or M&A) and how big might they be?
As such, I am often comfortable talking about the business from an strategic and operational perspective but am struggling with which insights are helpful to share and which are less important. I would appreciate any insights or feedback on:
Initial structure of the answer (i.e., talk about these 5 things in order)
What are the most common questions or follow-ups the interviewer might ask
Any pointers or watch-outs from monkeys that have recruited in the past
Thanks in advance.
"Can you walk me through points to deal on resume please?"
"Sure. To give a bit of context, the target company does Blank. Our client was interested in buying them because Blank, but they needed our help to answer question. We ultimately found that answer."
"Great. How was the team structured and what was your role on the project?"
"The team was X people. I was in charge of market modeling and slide creation/messaging. To do this, I did [high level tasks]."
"What were your findings?" You can also just jump to this on your own
"With respect to the market, we found that the market is [big/small] and [growing/shrinking]. With respect to competitive positioning, we found that the competitor has a [large/small] share over the overall market and is [growing/shrinking]."
Then, they might ask you how you found out the above. Or they might ask you why you think something is growing/shrinking. This is where the script generally goes into the interviewer asking questions based on your answers to make sure you really know what you're talking about.