Internal Strategy: Lessons Learned (1 of 2)

I initially started out my career in management consulting, exited to an internal strategy team in industry, and pivoted back to consulting.

This two part article series will provide valuable perspective for those who are considering internal strategy teams as their next career option as I unveil my personal thoughts and experiences.  In this article, Part 1, I will describe my experience of working in an internal strategy team and some of the main projects and activities I undertook. In Part 2, I will highlight 7 key differences between internal strategy and management consulting.

Experience in Internal Strategy

Internal strategy (or corporate strategy) is a common exit for management consultants. I was one of the many that joined this movement to work at a large financial institution, specifically their Global Wealth & Asset Management (GWAM) Strategy team. The strategy team consisted mostly of ex-consultants where our primary role was to execute and coordinate all key activities of the GWAM business, spanning six business units and eight functions, in areas of strategic initiatives, M&A, and corporate finance.

From a cultural point of view, everyone was super easy to work with as teamwork was fundamentally embedded in everyone’s DNA from our previous careers in consulting. While every strategy team is built differently, my time was allocated 50/50 where half of my time was spent on consulting style projects and half was spent on executing business-as-usual (BAU) activities.

Consulting Style Projects

Some notable consulting projects included:

• Planning the 5-year global strategy for the CEO across geographies, customer segments, products, and distribution channels with heavy emphasis on the post-COVID trends and profit pools
• Performing sum-of-the-parts (SOTP) analysis to estimate the firm’s valuation in 2025 following a shift in the business focus and its overall contribution to the enterprise
• Defining and identifying emerging disruptive business models (e.g., fintech, wealthtech, and large technology firms) in the wealth and asset management markets in which the firm operates to provide a baseline inventory and analysis to further enhance as part of the strategy setting process
• Driving the initial due diligence and financial analysis on the potential acquisition of a US$1.1B US multi-asset manager with quants and alternative investments capabilities to grow both the public and private markets businesses
• Owning and expanding the competitive intelligence effort by building a competitor database that tracks 20 peers’ financial results, market share, analyst expectations, and M&A activities

Business as Usual Activities

The BAU activities were to support the executive leadership team with strategy and business development by facilitating meetings/workshops and providing periodic (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual) reporting on KPIs, progress against projects/initiatives, and ad-hoc requests where I was accountable for the presentations to the CEO, Board of Directors, and external stakeholders (e.g., rating agencies, equity research analysts).

Internal Strategy vs Management Consulting

While this experience was extremely valuable for my own personal growth, specifically around building my industry expertise and learning the core soft skills to manage multiple stakeholders, there are some major and critical differences I noticed working for an internal strategy team versus working at a management consulting firm.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where I unveil the 7 main differences between internal strategy and management consulting.

Jason Oh is a Senior Associate at Strategy&. Previously, he was part of the Global Wealth & Asset Management Strategy team of a large financial institution and also served EY and Novantas in their strategy consulting business with industry focus in the financial services sector.

Image: Pixabay

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