During the recruitment process for consulting internships and full-time positions, I went to countless presentations given by consulting firm representatives who explained the consulting industry and made sales pitches about their firms. They brought up important points, such as diversity of work opportunity, mentorship structure, and even frank conversations about work life balance. Yet, what always amused me was the lack of conversation about how consulting firms actually conduct the work of consulting. Understanding how consulting projects are approached by an organization is important in order to better evaluate whether a consulting opportunity really aligns with how you work best. There is a lot of value to be gained from an organization that nurtures your project execution strengths rather than getting in the way.
Broadly speaking, there are two distinctly different approaches to consulting:
- Bespoke: This approach is like making a custom-tailored outfit whereby the focus is on what is unique about a client’s situation and then crafting a customized solution for the client. The mindset in this approach is to think about what might be possible to best fit the client’s needs.
- Precedent driven: This approach is similar to the way you bake a cake using a cookbook; following the recipe, but making adjustments as time and available ingredients necessitate. The mindset is to find proven precedents and use them as a guide to provide reliable client recommendations.
In reality, no one does purely one or the other. Firms that use the bespoke approach still consider some issues using precedent, such as when analyzing an industry or examining best use cases. Similarly, firms that use the precedent driven approach will incorporate novel solutions when proven precedents don’t exist for the entirety of the problem set. However, appreciating the customary approach used by a firm will give you a sense of what drives their consulting engagements. If it leans more towards imagining a new reality, then it is bespoke. If it leans more towards walking a well-worn path, then it is precedent driven.
Consulting approaches may not necessarily be uniform across a firm. During the recruiting process, I found that generally speaking, a dominant consulting approach seems to manifest itself across the practice areas of a firm. However, I did encounter firms which explained to me that consulting approaches varied not just by practice area but also depended on the team and project that I would be assigned to within a practice area. This level of detail of where different consulting approaches manifest within a firm is important to know in order to understand what type of consulting environment you are likely to encounter.
It is worth mentioning that no one approach is better than another. It is both a matter of personal preference and how a project is managed. I have worked with two different sets of consultants who subscribed to the precedent-driven approach and had drastically differently experiences. With one, my team was essentially handcuffed to make edits to a historical slide deck template to reflect our client and micromanaged along the way. With the other, precedent served as a roadmap that gave my team structure along a well-established pathway, but we were trusted with opportunities to be creative within clearly identified boundaries. Similarly, the bespoke approach can have its own pros and cons. I have known people having fun imagining a future possibility and building a creative pathway of how to get there. Yet, I have also known people who burned a lot of time trying to truly grasp their client’s unique circumstances in all of its complexity and became swamped in the struggle of fully understanding the problem.
Ultimately, you are the biggest determinant of which working style will allow you to perform at a high level and best facilitate your professional development. What I have noticed in speaking with numerous consultants along my recruiting journey is that the consulting approach they became accustom to early on in their career has endured with them as the approach they are most professionally comfortable with. Obviously, not everyone really knows what they will truly enjoy until they are in the thick of the experience. However, if you feel like you know yourself really well, I recommend you take each firm’s consulting approach into consideration when deciding whether it is the right opportunity for your career.
Hall Wang is a dual degree MBA and Master of Public Policy candidate at Georgetown University. He has worked at America’s most innovative companies including Blue Origin and Facebook, as well as having done two combat deployments as a US Army Officer.
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