What being a “free agent” consultant taught me about the importance of choosing who to work for
Intro
Earlier in my career, I spent several years working for one of the world’s largest management consulting firms. Consulting is a pretty unique career, even among most corporate jobs. You travel extensively (often up to 4 days each week, every week), have to learn new industries on the fly, and perhaps most strangely of all, you don’t have a permanent direct manager or boss.
This last point is the hardest one to explain to those who haven’t worked in consulting themselves. But as a consultant, your team (and your boss) changes from project to project. Your job is to ensure that you are staffed often enough on client work that your “utilization rate” (# of hours you’re working on a client proposal / # of total available hours) doesn’t dip below a certain percentage (usually 80-85% when you’re starting out).
In many ways, it’s similar to being a professional athlete. You join the league and then sign a contract with a team for a few years. Once the term of your contract is up you are a free agent and need to find another team to sign you to a new contract (otherwise you’re out of the league). The better your reputation (e.g., you’re talented, have good stats, are known for contributing to winning, have a good reputation as a solid “locker room presence”, etc.) the more likely that future teams will clamor for your services.
Consulting is much the same, except that:
- The league = your firm (ex: McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, Accenture, etc…)
- The Teams = the various client projects
- The coaches/GMs = the consulting partners
- Being a free agent = not being staffed to a project (aka being “on the beach”)
- Your agent = the person at the consulting firm tasked with helping find you a project to join (each firm has these)
The typical consulting engagement can last anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months +, which means that you will have a new boss (partner) and team (project) on a regular basis. This unique “free agency” model is different from the rest of the corporate world where you have the same org structure & boss every week.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but one that has worked well when I try to explain to others what being a consultant is like and how career progression is very different from other corporate roles where you have a permanent team and boss.
What I learned about Career Progression from being a Consultant
The unique nature of how consulting teams are set up meant that I (and all the consultants I worked with) had to make some personal decisions regarding our career development at the firm.
There were generally 3 strategies used:
1) The Focus by Industry Approach
One school of thought was to pick an industry (ex: healthcare) and try to only get yourself staffed to projects/clients that were in that industry.
For example, if you decided you wanted to brand yourself as a “Healthcare” expert, you would focus on networking with partners who focused specifically in this area and only served Healthcare clients. You would turn down offers to work for any other types of clients (ex: auto companies, aerospace & defense, tech firms, financial institutions, universities, etc.) and only focus on Healthcare clients like J&J, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Massachusetts General Hospital, etc…
This approach worked well for consultants who were absolutely fascinated by and in love with a particular industry. It was great for people whose “intellectual interest” was the most important criteria in choosing a job.
2) The “Find the Sexiest Project” Approach
Probably the most common (though rarely acknowledged) strategy was to pursue the most glamorous project possible, regardless of who the partner/team was, whether the work itself was interesting or not, or whether the work/life balance on the project would be good vs. terrible. The more “hip” or “cool” the client the better.
At my consulting firm, clients like Google, Lyft, or famous universities (ex: Stanford) were in this category. Competition to get on these client projects was fierce because it was a chance to not only get a glimpse into what these companies were like but also put the fact that you consulted for them on your resume (and potentially network with the client and land a post-consulting job at their company afterward; we had multiple people leave our firm to join Google as an example).
This approach worked well for people who were industry-agnostic “resume fillers”. The group didn’t care about the skills or expertise they were gaining as much as the prestige of the network/resume they were establishing (in the hope that it would pay dividends down the line).
3) The “Choose the Best Boss” Approach
As you can tell from the title of this article, this is the approach that worked for me and is one I heavily recommend to others.
As someone who was fairly industry agnostic (I’m interested in a lot of things!) and who valued work/life balance (I have a wife and 4 children) I wasn’t particularly drawn to the “Industry” or “Sexy Project” staffing strategies. Instead, I decided to try something different.
I spent a lot of time researching within the firm to get the answer to this question: “What Partners have a reputation for (A) regularly providing a great work/life balance for their team (B) being great mentors, and (C) going above and beyond to take care of the team members at Year End Reviews”? Then I went and networked with those partners and did everything I could to get staffed on their projects regardless of the industry they worked in, the type of project they were running (boring vs. interesting), or how “prestigious” their client project was.
This meant that I ended up working across a HUGE variety of industries (my clients included a home appliance manufacturer, a technology reseller, a clothing retailer, a ridesharing company, a military defense contractor, and an electronics manufacturer). On the surface, there didn’t seem to be a common thread tying it all together. But there actually was a commonality: the partner on each of these projects was someone I had purposely chosen to work for because I deeply respected them.
I found that this strategy worked wonderfully for me. One of the top reasons most people quit/hate their jobs is their boss. I found the inverse to be true as well. When I purposely chose to work for bosses I enjoyed, there were some very tangible benefits:
- I had a much better work/life balance (the partners I worked for had a reputation for being very careful to not burn their teams out)
- I got great mentorship (by working for partners who were known to invest in teaching/coaching their team members) and got better skills as a result
- I got promoted faster (the partners I worked for didn’t just “check the box” when it came to performance reviews, they went to bat for their team members)
- I got a wide variety of clients across a ton of industries (as I was basing my staffing on the leader I wanted to work for, not an industry I wanted to work in)
The Key Takeaway
When I left consulting to join the corporate world I decided that (again) the single most important deciding factor in choosing my next role was “who would my boss be” (even over pay, location, company, industry, etc…).
This meant turning down several very interesting (and lucrative) post-consulting opportunities. But I patiently waited until I found a boss who I was confident I would enjoy working with. That decision has been one of the best of my professional life and the past 2+ years I’ve spent at my current company have been a joy as a result.
Consulting gave me the opportunity to do something on a regular basis that most people don’t get the chance to do as frequently (choosing my own boss). The key lesson for me was that a good boss matters far more than almost anything else in your career if you’re trying to optimize for the best balance of personal happiness + career success.
I know a lot of people who have better titles + make more money than me but are far more unhappy because they work for jerks/tyrants (which is a tradeoff I don’t consider worthwhile). I am increasingly convinced that finding and working for a great boss who champions your growth is ultimately the best “hack” you can find to accelerate your career.
If you don’t have a good boss now, I’d start looking elsewhere for one immediately. If you have a good one, stick to them like glue.
