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(There’s no such thing as) a typical day for a Consultant

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As Management Consultants, people often ask us what we do on a typical day at work. The common response is “it varies” or “there are no typical work days”. Even though these responses are far from descriptive, they are so true – during my almost four years at Bain, I have still not experienced a typical work day and I doubt I ever will. Not only do the types of tasks I do each day vary, but so do the types of cases, clients and industries as well as the team setups and my roles on the cases. In an attempt to be a bit more specific, this blog post will reveal what at least one of my non-typical work days looked like.

Let’s start with a bit of context…
I am a Consultant in Bain’s Stockholm office, currently working on a three week commercial due diligence for a private equity client. On my case team there is a Partner and Manager and two other Consultants. One of the Consultants is from our Copenhagen office and is responsible for the market work stream. The other consultant, from Oslo, joined Bain a few months ago and is working on the customer work stream. My role is to coordinate across the workstreams and handle the daily interaction with the Manager and others.

8.00: Getting ready!
This work day starts an hour earlier than usual, which also means that my 5 minutes’ walk to Bain’s Stockholm office is a lot darker than what I’m used to. One song later, listening to Spotify on my smartphone, I arrive at the office and grab somee breakfast before heading to my desk.

View of morning commute

View of morning commute

As part of my “empty-inbox-concept”, I often start the day by going through my Outlook inbox, sorting all the mails into different folders and subfolders and adding tasks to my to-do-list (yes I’m very J in Myers Briggs’ Type Indicator). My colleagues are often scared off by the 10 different colour codes I use in my Outlook calendar, but the colours help me give an overview of what the day will be like. Today is a day without client meetings so we make progress on all work streams and align as a team.

8.30: Aggregating latest version of the deck

Last night, the other Consultants sent me their latest sections for our final deck including both actual and blank slides. Blank slides, or “blanks”, clarify what we want the slide to include and/or look like once we have the data or insights. A collection of slides is often referred to as a “deck” at Bain, and eventually the deck turns into a presentation.

I paste the slides I have received into a latest (and greatest) version of the overall deck. Next, I go through each section to grasp the latest insights and provide feedback on both what the rest of the team has produced and what they intend to do. I thereafter circulate the deck to the team.

The market outlook section is getting into shape while the customer work section is mainly blank slides at the moment as we are awaiting data from an online survey we have launched.

9.00: Coffee break
My manager arrives to the office and I give him a quick download on the status of the case, the plan for the day and latest insights. It’s then time for a quick coffee break in the kitchen chatting with Sofie and Jon before starting a mini-marathon of meetings.

Coffee break in the kitchen

Coffee break in the kitchen

9.20: Customer work stream meeting
My first meeting is with the Oslo consultant, discussing progress and plan for the customer work stream. Large part of the insights will be based on the customer so we also went through best practices on analysing survey data as I have done several customer surveys during my Bain career. For instance, we go through how to make the raw data understandable and how to use pivot tables effectively.

10.15: Workout competition results
In between my meetings I take a quick glance at my inbox and realized that I have received the workout competition results from last week. Bain’s workout competitions were something I founded in the Nordics 3 years ago, where our regions gets together in teams and collect points from working out and even more points from working out together. More than 50% of our employees in the Nordic region typically participate and the dedication is impressive during the 6-8 weeks that the competition typically lasts. After running the competition 5 times, I have now handed it over to Katja and Oscar who are responsible for this season’s competition. This week, my team “Team Sport-if”, managed to collect 4.1 points which was not enough to beat the “Three Girls & the Quota Guy” team who had 6.6 points. Better luck or more workouts this week!

10.20: Market outlook meeting
My next meeting is with the Danish Consultant on the team, responsible for the market outlook. We discuss how to structure that section and refine some of our assessments on how the market will likely develop. We also realize that there are quite some slides that need to get into shape before a meeting this afternoon, to be able to have a good discussion about the section.

11:00: Twitter time!
I am tweeting along with other Bain Consultants across the globe about my personal experience at Bain via @BainConsultant. This is a great way to explain what management consultants do for students who are considering this career option and also an opportunity for me to learn more about social media and connect with fellow Bain folks across the world.

Follow me on Twitter!

Follow me on Twitter!

11.20: PD chat and review delivery with an AC
An Associate Consultant whom I worked with two cases ago just came back from ACT (Associate Consultant Training) in Cape Cod. We now have time for an end-of-case professional development chat and I also walk through her review from that case.

12.00: Lunch with colleagues
We have a lot of great take-away lunch places close to our office, why most days we pick up food from various places and meet up in our kitchen for lunch. Today, a few colleagues and I go to a semi-Italian place called Panini and pick up some delicious salads. During lunch we discuss what it was like to study at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) as well as other various topics.

Lunch with my colleagues

Lunch with my colleagues

13.00: Assessing competitive landscape
I find my way back to my desk and spend some time assessing competitors of the target we are looking at, browsing through market reports and other secondary resources. I put some of these insights into slides for the competitive landscape section in our presentation.

14.30: Stockholm office discussion
We have an initiative in the Stockholm office where we are defining what we want the office to be like in terms of principles and behaviours. This is something that the entire office is involved in, coordinated through a core team with some partners, managers, associate consultants and myself. Today we have a meeting to discuss initiatives and agree on next steps.

15.00: Fika!
One of the great traditions in the Stockholm office is Wednesday “fika”, which is a full-office coffee break with lots of delicious stuff. Today’s treat is fantastically fantastic mini-cupcakes! After the fika, I make sure to aggregate and develop materials for our case team meeting and deck review.

Mini cupcakes at office wide coffee break

Mini cupcakes at office wide coffee break

16.30: Case Team Meeting and deck review
It is time for our weekly case team meeting where we discuss the case progress as well as how the team is feeling. We go through the results from our Nordic weekly case team survey and discuss start/stop/continues that we should focus on for the rest of the case. One of the key takeaways from this was that we should make sure to have more frequent interactions with the full case team.

Next, we walk through the market outlook section discussing the insights and getting input from the full case team. Our manager has some great suggestions on how to further detail the market outlook for some of the regions we are covering. He also draws a creative but not understandable graph on the whiteboard.

18.00: Aggregating all the input from today’s meeting
The next two hours I spend at my desk, aggregating all the input we received during the case team meeting and adapting our work plan and blank deck accordingly. Unfortunately some yield loss, i.e. slides that we have created that we now have decided to remove, but that’s quite common on private equity cases unfortunately. I also have time to go through my inbox, realizing that I have way too many mails to be able to respond to all of them so I only read the urgent ones and spend some time talking to my colleagues instead, neglecting my empty-inbox-policy for a while.

20.00: Case team dinner!
Our case team then decides to join another case team for a spontaneous dinner at a great restaurant in Stockholm! We have a fantastic evening chatting about the different Nordic offices with Bain folks from Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, as well as weekend plans and other casual topics. After dinner, additional more folks join us as well.

It’s now time to catch some sleep to be ready for another exciting day at work tomorrow!


Filed under: Case team experience, Week in the life Tagged: Bain, consultant, Management consulting, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Oslo, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Twitter

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