Anyone out there leave early and regret not staying for the promotion?

I’ve gotten high ratings while at MBB and will very likely be a manager come January. At the same time, I have a good strategy/ops role at a startup in hand that would be about the same base/bonus as I make at a non-manager level, but with equity.

I guess the big question is: how valuable is the title on a resume?

My hesitation is that I’ve done very well while at MBB, but if I leave now and someone looks at my experience down the road, they won’t know if I got managed out or if I crushed it in my time here. Manager promotion tells that story clearly.

Important context for the offer I have - it’s in an industry I worked in previously, but I don’t want to get pigeonholed there. I could see myself pivoting in a few years, and am thinking that the manager title would help give me credibility to pivot if I changed industries later.

I have to share this story because I was many years a friend to the CEO and owner of the company and I really loved his leadership style, which was demanding and motivating at the same time.

It was a company in high voltage energy infrastructure installation, the company was a major regional player in buying and installing infrastructure products at the customer site. Hard working and very handsome people working there and many women in the workforce because of their skills in complex cable mounting with many different colors and cable types. And the CEO was like a Marine Officer in his leadership style.

My PM wanted me to conduct an anonymous employee survey to identify market and productivity opportunities. One section in the survey was about „working culture and collaboration“ and the results were disastrously - no material coordination, people having no plan, just mounting by gut feeling, etc. - only one statement was confirmed positively by 90% of the workforce: „I have fun doing my work.“
The presentation went in absolute silence, no one dared to speak out and I thought it was due to the bad statements on coordination and material and the critics in management skills. But when the fun question results were presented a rumour came up, obviously no one expected this result. Then the CEO said: „I am shocked about this result, I don’t pay them for having fun during work!“ Turned out that everybody started to laugh out loud and that I didn’t present anything new to the audience - the company was how it was and everybody knew about the deficits, but they simply loved each other and their boss.

With execs running everything through Claude before a meeting even starts, the old $200k deck-building exercise feels completely done. Curious if anyone who left pre-AI is seeing pre-AI strategy consulting as actually dead, or if clients are just realizing faster that AI gives you answers, not execution.

Hello.

I recently started in consulting after my MBA and my goodness I feel so dumb.

Got put on a 6 week revenue growth engagement, and the first two weeks was working 8 am - 11 pm. The last couple weeks have been able to leave office around 630 pm and have time to grab dinner and then get back on.

But my problem is I feel so useless. If my manager asks me to do something, I have to process for a few mins before I can even do it. Meanwhile, the analyst on my project, who is a year out of undergrad, built a 11 tab excel model in a week, and I understand about 10% of it. At a high level it sort of makes sense, but like how did he just know what to do?

They had me starting on deck work and competitive research primarily, which I have been able to do somewhat decently. But I just feel so out of sorts and swimming against the current.

Any tips for Excel/slide improvement? And any tips for just understanding wtf the client or my manager are saying a bit better. It feels like these people talk a million miles a minute yet understand each other so well, and I have to keep telling them to slow down and explain it to me because I just "don't get it" as well as they do. Ugh.

Now if I could stop procrastrinating...

I'm trying to learn more!

I see that there are many McKinsey strategists who have been a lifer at the firm since getting an MBA

If they only network, sell and manage projects once they get to the partnership level, wouldn't it be a waste of time?

There are also global-firm CEOs such as Jane Fraser of Citi who used to be a McKinsey partner, who said something in the similar vein that she didn't want to just advice but wanted to own a business end to end, that's why she accepted the Citi job offer

May you please share your thoughts?

Looking into MBB pivot after years of in-house consulting team of Fortune 500 company.

A senior consultant in London makes 70k a year?! Hello?!

I checked Accenture and it's 62k a year?!

What's with these salaries? Why would anyone work 9am to 9pm in the office, 5 days a week, to have 3 flatmates?

I have Hiscox now and am facing an insane wall to climb to raise my PL from $1M/$1M to $5M/$5M per a client's requirements. Will do what I need to right now, then start shopping around before my policies renew. Any recommendations?

FWIW I do supply chain analytics / strategy so combination of GL, PL, and cyber.

Curious to hear from former consultants who successfully moved into roles with real revenue or P&L ownership.

Brief background: I spent 5 years in strategy consulting at MBB, most recently as an Engagement Manager, and recently moved into a Director-level strategy and transformation role at a large, well-known financial services company.

The role gives me exposure to senior leadership and major enterprise initiatives, but long term I don’t want to remain a pure strategist. I’d like to eventually own a business, product, customer segment, or meaningful revenue line.

I’m trying to understand the best bridge from strategy → commercial/operator role → P&L ownership.

Hi,

I call myself a customer data architect and I run a tiny consultancy / implementation company with a few freelancers / sub contractors.
We're working with sales and marketing departments to get their tech and processes implemented.

The last years, there has been steady growth (all from content marketing & inbound).
This channel has dried up this year. We currently have more work than we can handle from existing clients. However, there are no new notable requests since a few weeks / months and therefore the forecasts look dim.

Do I need to start active outreach / sales and everything is good?
Or did the demand fundamentally change and companies are suddenly doing everything by themselves with AI support?
And if so, do you see something similar and how do you pivot now?

My dad was diagnosed with a terminal illness last year. He has ~3-5 year expected timeline and will gradually decline as time goes on and will need a full time caregiver.

I am in my twenties and live across the country. I have been at my current job for a few years and have received high ratings. I work at a big company with offices across many cities, including the one where my family is.

My current goal is to go visit once every few months and work remote from there. My office is two days a week in person. I usually only am able to see my dad a few times a year because I am busy working.

I am conflicted whether I transfer offices because it is a smaller office and I would be uprooting my entire life and all my friends. I don’t know how to balance my demanding career and being able to spend time with my family. I haven’t told anyone at work because I don’t want my family situation to be weaponized against me if I make a mistake and they say I am distracted or something. Despite being sad
I try my best to maintain a happy composure. I don’t want people to treat me differently. I enjoy the work I do and the company I am at but it is definitely hard when I work late and have unpredictable hours (example: not being able to go to family dinner).

My dad really doesn’t want me to move because he doesn’t want me to uproot my entire life but I keep missing him even when I am sitting right with him.

I don’t know if I will have regret if I keep at my current job while my family is across the country and I can’t see them. Has anyone managed this situation and has any advice?

2 years ago I was clocking 70-80 hours a week minimum doing double materiality assessments and ESRS gap assessment work.

It’s not quite right back to what it was, but I sense q4 I’ll be doing a lot of sustainability software implementation work and all next year will be companies at various stages of DMA refresh, IRO Mapping, either aligning to the revised ESRS or me doing conversions from the old to the new. Then XBRL tagging and EU Taxonomy work.

Then layer it all with every version of ISSB under the sun in statutory filings.

Anyone else work in this realm?

We have a ton decks and other documents sitting in SharePoint and other content systems.  Prior to AI we never had the man power/interest to curate these.  I know the big firms had people and processes in place to do this.

 It seems like AI might provide options to do this more automatically.  But I'm wondering if we need to.  Is there a benefit to curating and potentially preprocessing documents to extract knowledge? Especially if its going to be consumed by agents more and more. Or is a RAG system sufficient?

My worry with RAG is that we have a crazy amount of duplicates that may clog up the results. And intuitively it seems to me that knowledge repositories (though they may need to look different) are more important now than ever to feed AI the right context.

I get overwhelmed by work. It’s all consuming. But I genuinely feel even worse when I don’t have much going on in my projects or am not actively working towards something. No work life balance.

Any one feel this way?

I've been consulting for about a little over a year. I've been gathering clients very slowly. My first client was actually a decent retainer and somewhat interesting.

On the other hand that client's company was very toxic and there was definitely one executive that didn't understand why they needed me. I've been working with them for about a year, and I had a couple run-ins with that executive who tried to talk down to me. It was great to have the freedom to tell them to never talk to me that way. This was about 2 months ago.

Today the client let me know that they're not going to continue next month. Honestly, they are super toxic internally, the main guy doesn't really want to listen and is somewhat adversarial, so it's whatever. I saw this coming and it actually means I don't have to deal with them but then I don't get paid.

Despite being pretty much okay with it, it still feels kind of crappy. Kind of like I got fired or something.

I guess that's normal?

I spent a year at MBB nad I feel like my managers just don't communicate what they want

But they're very quick to shred pages or whatever

So I end up in this loop of stuck where I try very hard to do something without actually producing anything of true value

I don't know if it's me not understanding the basic skills of consulting

Or

If there's a trend with managers and partners these days being more clueless and delegating all to juniors

But my manager doesn't give me direction and doesn't point me to anything just says we need xyz make it more 'visionary' and random stuff like that

No, not the show, but the clothing.

I see so many bankers and fellow consultants walking around in suit jackets in the office and I just cannot understand how they survive the heat.

They are SO HOT!

For context, I have been a consultant for 10 years now and I have reached a level of competency where noone can ask me to wear one for my current job level (manager), but I get a feeling if I want to rise up from here on out, I need to start dressing up.

My customers are very traditional European banks, so they do not appreciate wearing t-shirts in the office (they accept it cause they dont want me to leave, but it doesnt help with sales lol).

Do you all have some secret to keep your bodies from boiling?

I mean its not just the heat, it also means sweating so much that no deodorant can survive this.

TLDR: I've developed a recurring work dynamic with a PL/EM/M where I find it very difficult to say no to requests. I've tried setting limits, but they often get pushed, and I'm worried that involving other leadership will just result in me being asked to help anyway. How do I break this pattern without creating unnecessary conflict?

I've been working with a PL/EM/M for over an year, and I've become someone they rely on heavily for certain work. Although I recently rolled off their project, I’m still being pulled in occasionally.

The problem is that I'm not good at holding my boundaries with someone I've known for long once the conversation starts. Something that begins as a small request can become much more time-consuming, and I end up agreeing because they are under pressure.

If I try to decline, I'm also worried the request will be escalated to previous project leadership/my current leadership, who may see that I have some capacity and ask me to support "just for a bit." That makes it difficult to simply say no without creating a bigger issue.

I'm also being asked to participate in an upcoming CXO meeting related to the old work. I don't want to be involved anymore, but I'm worried that agreeing to even attend could turn into me driving the discussion, which I'm already being pushed to do.

I don't think the PL/EM/P is necessarily acting maliciously (very smartly though). We've just developed a working dynamic that I'm finding increasingly difficult to get out of, and I know I also play a role because I struggle to hold firm once they starts pushing.

For people who've dealt with something similar: how did you actually break the pattern? Any practical ways to handle the next request without either getting pulled back in or turning it into a confrontation. Please don't suggest me to "build boundaries" when I am clearly struggling with this person. It is a specific scenario where this PL/EM/M does not respect my boundaries. I have not really faced this with most of the other leaders/managers

The whole situation is quite complicated. Happy to share more context over DMs, since it is quite fresh and I don't want to include identifying details.

UPDATE: I ended up discussing this with my project leadership. They were surprisingly supportive and asked me to loop them in if anything like this happens again.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I didn't want to involve the project leadership before since it's my first time working with these folks (I found it uncomfortable to drag them into this fiasco during the first week itself) and this PL/EM/M has negotiated their way through similar situations before (one actually happened to me last year). I just wanted to move on from the ghost of past (projects), especially during a project where I finally have some time for myself

Most scope-creep discussions focus on clients asking for more. My clearest recent example came from me.

In one strategy session with a founder, I offered to make an introduction and sound out a few other contacts on their behalf. By the end of the call, my own offers to help had committed me to outreach and follow-up well beyond the session.

None of it was unreasonable, and I'd offer again. But it made me realise how easily a single conversation creates work that nobody scoped, including me.

For those of you who advise or run engagements: how do you handle follow-up you volunteer in the moment? Do you treat intros and outreach as part of the service, set a limit, or keep them as goodwill? And if you've learned to phrase these offers differently, what wording works?

Still relatively young (joined straight out of undergrad, promo'd straight through).

Is it still doable at this point in my career? I'd of course be ok taking a step down the ladder to an Associate / Sr. Associate level, but wondering if just being at that title will be an auto-reject.

Wondering especially just given I could have gone to B School then pivoted to PE/Growth Equity/VC after, but chose to get managerial experience & working with MDs/Execs instead - so hopefully that experience and choice can be spun rationally.

I’m so sad…