The more familiar you are, the better prepared you’ll be. Ask your friends and do internet research. It helps if you have an idea – particularly in unfamiliar cities – of the fun/popular things to do. Take the opportunity to demonstrate your diligence and attention to detail. Know a few good places for team events and dinnersĪs the newbie consultant, the responsibility of planning team events (such as dinners, team-bonding activities, etc) will fall on you.You should also review the “sales documents” that led to the project, including the project proposal and preliminary research Pay very close attention to the work that’s been done before – this will help your team avoid re-creating the wheel (which can happen surprisingly often). When you’re starting a project, you should mine that library for information related to your client, its competitors, and even functionally similar projects (eg, if this is your first cost-reduction case, you’ll find plenty of introductory material on running a cost-reduction project including examples of analyses, suggest output, etc). Most consulting firms have internal “knowledge libraries” that store information about past projects and the firm’s latest thinking. Thoroughly review previous client-related work.It’s especially likely when you have multiple partners, visiting “experts”, and rotating teams. This is when having all those numbers programmed into your phone comes in very handy. But on every 2-month project, there will be at least 2 times where a client meeting is about to start, the partner can’t be found, and no one has immediate laptop access. Some of you may think this is overdoing it. Secretary email and direct line (if applicable) Program the following into your Blackberry for all involved parties, from interns to senior partners:
Store the contact information for all people on your team, especially partnersĪvailable through your firm intranet/database. Staying current on innovative practices is one way to be a thought leader The best way to identify them is to scour Google and Techcrunch for your client’s name and industry-related keywords. While it’s important to know this info, it’s even more important that you don’t confuse one competitor with another.ĭon’t ignore the small, innovative guys. Periodically review this information to make sure you’re fresh. 
Analyst reports (eg, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, etc) Internal firm research reports (if available) Good ways to get a quick handle on this include: General grasp of their strengths and weaknesses – Key products/services (especially what differentiates each competitor from the client) – Relative sizes (eg, number of employees, overall revenues) This shouldn’t take more than a few hours.
Familiarize yourself with the competitors. Not only will it prevent foul-ups like the above, it will also help you understand and manage client relationships. Read them thoroughly and become familiar with the faces. You can find most executive profiles on the client website. There are many stories of newbie consultants having a casual conversation with an employee in the company cafeteria, only to realize a week later that it was an Executive VP. Familiarize yourself with the client CEO and senior management. You want to be the one that can provide an accurate answer, as opposed to “Oh, I think it’s something like $10-20 billion…let me check.” I can’t tell you the number of times basic questions like “What’s Client X’s total annual revenue?” have come up in internal discussions. Know basic financial data for your client. If you don’t know your client’s key competitors, use tools like Yahoo! Finance. Many people are too pre-occupied to do this regularly, and it’s a quick win for new consultants to add value. This will help you stay current on client and industry developments, which will come in handy through the project. Set up these alerts for your client and its top 3 competitors. Google Alerts feed you the latest online information (collected primarily from news sites and blogs) related to keywords that you specify. Set up Google Alerts for your client and its competitors. Follow the 11 steps below and you’ll be a management maven in no time. To that end, here’s a tactical list for getting off to a fast start on a new project. A former manager once said to me, “do well in your first project, and you can write your own ticket for the next few years.” Today’s post is on practical tips to being successful as a new consultant. This week, we’ll focus on the consulting lifestyle. After releasing a few big products last week, we’re back to regularly-scheduled programming.
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