Hi all,
I am an economics graduate with one year of EY Advisory experience mainly in project management of large international projects (got an IPMA-D sertificate). During my study years I was quite interested in finance (scored 590 on Bloomberg Assessment Test- this puts me among top 10% worldwide). Recently I left EY to take a break / seek better opps and now I am faced with few interesting offers (hopefully more will come) and have trouble deciding:
1. Associate at Deloitte Financial Advisory with low salary, small team, good managers, location and reputation.
2. Putting together and leading a sales team + advising owner/CEO on strategy and marketing in small no name manufacturing company with big growth ambitions. This comes with 30-40% bigger salary when compared with Deloitte and in my opinion plenty of challenges and opportunities.
I understand that these positions are quite different and require different set of skills but at this point I feel that I am quite fit for both but at the same time could use some advice from people with more experience. Please let me know your thoughts and arguments. I would really appreciate them!
Thanks!
Do you have equity/profit sharing in the manufacturing company?
Salary in this scenario is trivial as sales holds the business together. And the stress/visibility of the role should be paid well on the front end and the back end.
No profit or equity sharing. Do you think I should try to negotiate it? The thing is that I have 0 sales and people management experience so the company is basically making a bet that I can run their sales.
I would probably get the same amount in Deloitte only after 1-2 years + I really doubt that few years of M&A experience beats experience in sales and mid management.
I would be curious how old this manufacturing company is and if they are sub $10M in sales. SE or Midwest/Pitt area?
I'm actually from Europe. Baltics to be more exact. And yes they currently have under $10m/yr sales and operate since 2005. Sales used to be around $20m/yr when they had a contract with one of the top distributors but managed to lose it several years ago and want to rebuild. Since then sales have been growing around 30% every year with their flawed sales strategy.
Sales for a manufacturing company. In what industry?
It really depends what type of sales opportunity this is. If you have a realistic opportunity to grow sales at a high rate, I would take the sales job. Not many people one year out of school get the chance to have that meaningful of an impact on any sort of business. Also, growing and managing a team like that would be an incredible experience.
Some factors to be aware of that you should take into consideration. 1. How's your funding? Are you realistically going to be hire as many people as you need? What about sales budget as far as travel, dinners w/ potential clients? Make sure you're not handicapped before you even take your acceptance letter. 2. The industry in which you're manufacturing. This will have a huge impact on the lead time to sales / how easy it is to onboard a product to start manufacturing it. 3. The people. Completely unrelated to point #1. Make sure they're people that will have your back during the first few quarters when you are just getting everything figured out. I've been in aerospace manufacturing for 1.5 years now and I've seen quite the turnover within sales managers. Sales are down or flat? First one blamed. Every single time. 4. Overall company forecast. Take a step back, look at everything discussed above and the forecast for this business. Is it realistic? Can this actually grow to a meaningful sized business with or without your guidance? You don't want to be busting your ass off for 5 years and realize you had no chance from the start because a multitude of other macro/micro factors.
Those are some things that I would take into consideration. People working in Big 4 advisory are a dime a dozen. Having meaningful business experience at such a young age will rocket you years ahead your peers. Good luck!
Thanks, CorpFinanceGuy ! The more I think about it the more I believe I should give it a shot.
They are in furniture manufacturing and mostly sell to foreign distributors so the position will involve a decent amount of traveling (which will be covered by the company).
Smaller businesses give you the opportunity to have more impact and more ownership, but the Deloitte role seems to be with a good team. Draw backs to consulting are once the project is over you have nothing to keep or show, everything is turned over to the client...
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