Anyone worked in both consulting and finance (hf, pe, etc)? What was more interesting?

Consulting seems awesome because you actually work on solving issues, versus finance is more identifying a dislocation. But what do I know...

 

Would you say this holds true as a junior? My current perception of PE as an associate would be similar job functions to IB, which tbh doesn't sound all that appealing. I guess my question is, does the buyside nature of what you're doing in PE more than make up for the IB-like PPT / XLS work? More so than ops / strategy nature of Consulting?

 

Can you elaborate on this?  What makes PE so much more interesting?

 

for me PE has

- more travel, more interesting projects (up to 100% travel for me pre-pandemic)
- more diverse projects to work on, not just exactly what you are meant to do like in IB
- very interesting investment partners and people to meet and discuss plans with
- I am now more senior, so I get line management, bigger team, more responsibility
- I can finally use my soft skills more, IB had slightly more focus on hard skills

 

You will almost always have ppt/slide ware to produce, regardless of what you do. any management job has that part and that is the only way to present something to your management. On some days it will be just slide ware, on others you get to travel to distant countries to meet a startup or you hangout in NYC or you meet some really cool business partners. For me, it does make up for the boring work. But with the pandemic it really changed. let's hope we'll all be flying again soon.

 

Hard to say. "Interesting" means different things to different people.

First off, there's a lot of variety in consulting from case-to-case. Strategy case for an extremely visible F50 consumer brand? That's pretty interesting. Post-merger integration project management for a small mining operation in Nevada? Probably less interesting. No 2 paths in consulting are exactly alike. So PE is certainly less variable on a quarter-to-quarter basis. And to a lot of people, variety is interesting.

On the other hand, you definitely get more line of sight into results in PE. You're a lot less likely to spend time making slides for the sake of it and navigating corporate politics vs. doing shit that has a more tangible dollar impact. And to a lot of people, that's more interesting.

I could list more pros and cons for each side, but at the end of the day, different people are going to find different things interesting. Might as well ask what's more interesting, sports or movies? It depends on what you like.

 
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I'm assuming you're asking from a junior/mid-level person perspective, so let me just phrase it crystal clear. PE and consulting have one thing in common, they blow banking out of the fucking water.  And I'm saying this as a partner at M&A shop.

I've worked with plenty of junior guys across all backgrounds and if you put consultant and banking analyst next to each other, usually the consultant is well-spoken, able to analyze big picture, think strategically, wheras a banking dude just sweats nervously because the model doesn't balance and he has no idea about the big picture anyways. 

Banking skills are very limited to technicals, that after certain point don't matter at all. If you have a sales gene, then you might wing it, but otherwise consultants are much more 'useful' to real business situations. No one cares about modelling anyways. 

As for PE, there is definitely less bullshit there and you need to know your shit at some point. You learn to analyze and actually think vs. just doing meaningless slides. 

Banking culture as we know it really is cancer. I love deal work and as I'm running a small shop now - I try to flip the whole working model I learned in the past, because these old school inefficiencies are just ridiculous. 

 

Your small shop might be based in Iowa or you run a penny stocks brokerage in Hoboken if the pool of your banking juniors come across as that

Consulting has its merits but to say that bankers are not "well-spoken, able to analyze big picture, think strategically" but somehow manage to work with the largest companies in the world on issues that make the front pages of the news shows how stupid your statement is. If your comment is targeted at the junior level, it then truly is bizarre as to how they're able to exit to PE/big tech/MBA/pretty much any path that is available 

It is fair to assume what type of talent the caliber of your "firm" attracts to work for a peon like you   

 

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