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It’s great to be a consultant

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Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#111

Post by vasili111 »

cm2012 wrote: post #110

If you're good at it and have a good network, consulting is always better than FTE work. You make more money, grow your network faster, have more flexibility, etc. I was a consultant for 5 years and now run an agency, and I currently have ~50 consultants I work with across various projects. That "if" is big though. If you're not good at it, you won't keep clients. If you don't have a good network, you'll be stuck wit…

How to grow network when you do not have it? Any advices to person who wants to get in to consultancy and do not knows where to start?

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#112

Post by belter »

leeter wrote: post #75
franze wrote: post #14

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame.…

This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trus…

Another classic Weinberg...

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#113

Post by wink »

franze wrote: post #14

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame.…

This is sound advice in general but it depends a little on your exact role. If you're the sole "important consultant" then this is true, but if you're sent there as part of a team doing a mix of consulting/bodyleasing/developing stuff for the customer it seems to happen quite often that someone at the customer will pretend (or not) to listen to your advice, do the exact opposite, and in the end blame you that the project didn't finish on time/on budget/whatever. And I think the problem is that you might be invested a little more as a temporary cog in the machine than when being strictly on your supposed high consultant horse.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#114

Post by dboreham »

vasili111 wrote: post #111
cm2012 wrote: post #110

If you're good at it and have a good network, consulting is always better than FTE work. You make more money, grow your network faster, have more flexibility, etc. I was a consultant for 5 years and now run an agency, and I currently have ~50 consultants I work with across various projects. That "if" is big though. If you're not good at it, you won't keep clients. If you don't have a good network, you'll be stuck wit…

How to grow network when you do not have it? Any advices to person who wants to get in to consultancy and do not knows where to start?

If you are willing to invest your time, open source projects can be a low barrier to entry route. Show up, work on a project for free, now you have a network. Probably you don't actually have to work for free either because there are some open source projects with funding.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#115

Post by tiffanyh »

Counter argument for those who think consulting is "great" (because it's not - at least from a business owners perspective).

TLDR: consulting has huge variable costs, you have to float A LOT of money, no reoccurring revenue, difficult to differentiate since people are your "product".

- the business model of consulting is extremely grinding, difficult and exhausting for business owners

- your "product" is your people, which causes all kinds of business problems

- the only way to scale revenue is to hire more people

- more people means you need more billable hours, which means you need more customers in an industry that DOES NOT HAVE REOCCURRING revenue. As such, if you try to sell your consultancy - you get extremely low multiples on revenue.

- cash flow becomes a MASSIVE PROBLEM because there are hard costs to pre-sales actives to win business, and even after business is won, you have to float your staff salaries typically 45-90 days until billing kicks in. (think about that for a moment, if you have 10 employees who you pay $120k/year/each, if 90 days is the float time, that $300k in cash reserves you need just because of float (3 months * $10k/mo * 10 employees)

- when you're not billable, that's literally costing you money in order to pay your staff. You can QUICKLY become unprofitable in a matter of just a few months.

- You're margin is inverse rated to billable time. E.g. if you are marking up your staff's salaries by 30%, that means to breakeven - that staff needs to be billable 70% of the year. (And that is assuming $0 presales/marketing/etc costs)

Again, consulting is a brutal business to be in.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#116

Post by jasonkester »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #81

This is purely an advert for the company. I don't count any of these to be "Great": * You are outside the company hierarchy - That means you actually have 0 power normally. Most consultants / contractors I've worked with have to do exactly what they are hired for no more or less. Permies generally have a bit of wiggle room and you should get more the further up the pole you go * You have to keep learning - That's rig…

You have to keep learning - That's right slow down for even a year and you can be left behind in consulting.

That's not what this means.

You're not being brought in for your knowledge of new tech X. You're there because you've demonstrated that you're smart.

They know that they can drop you in sideways to a broken project in an unfamiliar stack, with confidence that you'll be committing code the first day.

That's where the "learning new things" comes is. Fast, and on the fly.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#117

Post by wojciii »

I like being a consultant.

Prior to becoming one I discovered that .. I get bored easily and shitty management makes me change jobs (unless I get fired first for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time).

I work for a consulting company. They pay could be better but at least I get paid for the time that I spend instead of expected to put a "reasonable" amount of time per week no matter what the problem that I need to solve is.

Now I ask for a new assignment after a year or two and avoid having to look for work.

There seems to be a continuous need for people who can write embedded software..

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#118

Post by adwn »

scrollaway wrote: post #85
adwn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control Although this might sometimes be a good idea for diplomatic reasons, it feels just as wrong and "bullshitty" as accepting praise for things that are outside your control. And it might lead to a loss of respect by people who see through this fake humility.

You're not wrong, but there's two situations that can call for it. 1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chan…

1. I think we're assigning different meanings to "out of one's control": If you can "have a plan for it", as you say, than I wouldn't call that "out of your control", even if it's not your fault. In your example, the unfolding of the sunshield wasn't out of NASA's control, even though a failure might not have been anyone's fault in particular, so NASA would have been the one to blame. In contrast, an untracked meteorite hitting the JWST after launch would have been out of NASA's control.

2. Yes, that's what I meant by "for diplomatic reasons" :-)

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#119

Post by hungryforcodes »

franze wrote: post #14

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame.…

I thought the secret to being a consultant was to get a client to feed you a number, you do an analysis, and then feed that number back to them in a report :)

Seriously though, what you wrote is a great operating principle.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#120

Post by eastbayjake »

mettamage wrote: post #108
eastbayjake wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't characterize great consultants as "not worrying" about politics or history -- a large part of the job is change management, not just finding the "right" answer but helping ensure it is actually acted on and has impact. But McKinsey does include "maintain an independent perspective" as one of our core values, and entrepreneurship (i.e. not just "staying in your box") is a common expectation across all our p…

Unfortunately, I am not a senior software engineer. I have 2 years of experience in different stacks and a master CS. As far as I understand it, that makes me medior at best.

There are lots of digital roles available in "Search Jobs": https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs?interest=Digita...

Software Engineer may be a better fit, you'll need to select your preferred region but here's a representative US role in client consulting: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs/jobs/softwareen...

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