I often get asked how management consultants spend their days and if they are really as long as everyone says. Apologies in advance if the title of the post is a bit misleading, but an interesting aspect of consulting is that every day is different. There is no one daily pattern, but quite a few similarities. I’ll look at the days from different angles. Just to introduce myself: I have spent five years within MBB consulting and am now working freelance. There is another thread with questions on consulting https://www.canarywharfian.co.uk/threads/i-am-a-management-consultant-ask-me-anything.695/ as well.

The Lifecycle of a Consulting Project

You might have heard it before: consultants work on projects of usually 8–12 weeks. There are longer projects as well, often outside of strategy, e.g., for digital transformation or when implementing a strategy (some of these projects might not be worked on by MBB firms, though). As a junior, you will get staffed on these projects according to your qualifications, experience, appraisals from previous projects, and sometimes through the partner responsible for the project who might know you from previous projects or collaborations. A project will run through a number of stages that are quite similar.There is a preliminary stage (sometimes called week 0) for planning, initial research, drawing up questionnaires, looking for similar projects in the past, but also practicalities like booking travel. The first week is the kick-off with the client, getting to know key contacts, conducting first interviews, and developing hypotheses. In the following weeks, you will do less research but start testing your hypotheses and putting them on slides to gather feedback from the client and incorporate this into your findings. Over time, you will spend a lot more time preparing and communicating the results and less on research. Then the big day of the final presentation will come. Clients will usually have some questions and remarks, so the team might spend another week to finish everything off and sometimes have another presentation to stakeholders. If everything went well, you are going to have a nice celebratory dinner and then be off to your next project.

Periods Between Projects: "On the Beach" or "On the Bench"

That being said, you will not always be on the road, hopping from project to project, but might work for a week or two from your company’s office, do some internal training, or work on business development/pitch decks to allow some time to recharge and take care of personal affairs. Going straight from one project to another is rather the exception. If it takes longer, you will be "on the beach" or "on the bench", meaning you are not working on a billable project. During that time, you might help a partner with business development, work on internal projects like publications (a great way to get your name noticed), do training (some mandatory trainings have strict deadlines, so you want to get them out of the way when you are not stressed—failing to complete some compliance training would result in your email access being shut down at one of my employers), assist with recruiting, or maybe even help an ongoing project for a bit (e.g., check calculations, review slides). It is still work, and you are getting paid, but not as stressful as being on a project. You will have time for friends, family, and maybe even some sports. You could also start working on your MBA application https://www.canarywharfian.co.uk/threads/how-to-get-into-a-top-mba-programme.723/ or even take some time off for a long weekend.

The Pre-COVID Travel Routine

Before COVID, you would usually spend Monday to Thursday on the client site—early travel start on Mondays (or sometimes even on Sunday evening) to get the first available travel option to the client. You would then travel back on Thursday afternoon and work in your company’s office on Friday, quite often more on internal projects and tasks, and only answer a couple of emails on the project or have a quick call or two. Since everyone started early on Monday, you would not work long hours that day, but check into your hotel in the evening and then do an hour or two of work. Tuesday and Wednesday are the long nights as you start to receive input, and there are often meetings with senior clients scheduled for Thursday before the team leaves that will need to be prepared. The partner on the project would quite often arrive on Wednesday evening to spend some time with the team and then meet the client on Thursday, so you might have a team dinner that evening, usually in the second-best place in town (the best place might raise eyebrows with the client when submitting expenses). Once you spend more time with PowerPoint than with research, you might spend less time on the client site and only travel if there are meetings to attend in person.

Post-COVID Changes: Less Travel, More Home Office

That has changed with COVID. With clients at least partly working from home, the advantage of being on-site is somewhat diminished. It is less likely that you bump into someone for an informal chat, or can drop into someone’s office for a quick question. While projects might not be fully remote as they were during COVID, there will be less travel. Some of the clients will also look at the carbon emissions in their supply chains and question the need to ferry a number of consultants around every week. This is a blessing and a curse—less traveling also means less downtime. Thursday was almost half a day with a cab to the airport/station at 15:00/16:00, some drinks at the airport, and then taking the last flight/train home. I got quite good at plane naps after a while to use that time to recharge the batteries ;-). If you are working from home on your own, you might feel the need to be constantly available but miss the interaction in the team room (despite all the tools like Slack). This has increased stress levels quite a bit with five long days rather than two, and consultancies paid more attention to time management and are also quite strict about not working during (at least parts of) the weekend. Some companies host project teams in their offices now if they are not on-site to ease collaboration.

Consulting Days Can Be Long, but There's Downtime

Consulting days tend to be long, but there is quite a bit of downtime involved as well, waiting for input from stakeholders, data from your client, seniors to review slides, and so on. This can lead to a lot of "facetime," consultants trying to look busy while actually just waiting for something to arrive in their inboxes. That does not necessarily mean surfing the internet, though; you might answer some non-urgent emails (zero-based inbox is a tool consultants use), do some background reading, or even short training sessions.

Quieter Periods and Holidays

Throughout the year, summer and the Christmas period (early December to mid-January) are usually quieter periods—some companies even close their offices between Christmas and New Year. You can take holidays fairly easily during these times. One good thing about consulting is that you can extend your holidays by asking not to be staffed on projects at certain times (if you are willing to accept a pay cut).

Specialization in Consulting: Later Career Stages

Later in your career, you are likely to specialize along industries/verticals (like financial services), topics (sales optimization), or geographies (or a combination). That will mean that you won’t work on projects full-time anymore but on several projects and give input and guidance to the core project team. You will thus not spend the whole week at a client site anymore, but in the old days, you would travel there for a day or two, so spend much more time on the road. While this may sound quite exciting, you will also need to plan calls and time to work on presentations in a quiet environment.

Conclusion: No Typical Day, But Recurring Patterns

You might have guessed it by now—there is no typical day in the life of a management consultant, but there are definitely recurring patterns.