After graduating from Columbia Business School, I spent five years in management consulting before co-founding Visual Revenue, a Predictive Analytics company helping customers like Forbes, InStyle, and Fox Business to best promote their content. I want to share with you my perspective on transitioning from consulting to startup.  First of all, let’s put it out there that the best way to prepare for Startups is to build your own or join a Startup. If you know Startup is exactly what you want to do, don’t let anyone (including yourself) talk you into doing an MBA or joining a consulting, banking or Fortune 500 company.  

Since consulting is in the title of this post, let’s focus on that.  I’ll start with the Cons of beginning your Startup journey as a management consultant.  First, many entrepreneurs and VCs I know have a negative bias against consultants (and worse, a consultant with an MBA.) The stereotype is that consultants can’t execute anything but create high level strategic vision decks.  Startup is all about executing.  Second, you develop this highly paid, everything on the client lifestyle that strongly contradicts the lean Startup environment. You are going to miss those 500,000 Starwood points and team dinner at the world’s finest restaurants. Finally,consulting is one of those “safe” professions. You are guaranteed good pay, interesting work, and interactions with some of the most powerful corporate execs. All you need to do is work hard, be smart, and kiss up to the clients and partners.  Contrasting this with the high volatility, extreme outcome nature of Startups, people who self select into management consulting might not feel a fit as much as you might “want it.”

With that said, if you are already a consultant, don’t despair.  Consulting isn’t all bad for startups.  Many of us transitioned and some were even successful.  Consulting projects are generally done in small teams with high intensity and short timeline, much like what you see in a Startup.  Your work ethics will fit right in.  I worked every Saturday for almost a year and a half when we started Visual Revenue.  Comparing that to the hours I and my consulting friends worked, they are about the same.  As much as a segmentation analysis for a Fortune 100 tech company is interesting, I couldn’t wait for the weekend when I can take a break from it, though. When working at VR, I never get the “case of a Monday”.  

Many of the fundamental skills you pick up from consulting like problem solving, data analysis, communication, and teamwork are incredibly valuable for a Startup.  There are plenty of problems and data in the uncertain world of Startup that would benefit from the methodological approach that is second nature to consultants.  The trick is to getting to know the settings and tools required to understand the problems and collect the data.  Not many consultants (if any) are master of Google Analytics or can manage a Hadoop Cluster.  Separately, all of those late night “deck building” have honed your design and communication skills which apply well to product design.  The bottom line is that you are trying to communicate an idea and drive the audience toward actions you desire.  One of the big similarities between consulting teams and Startup teams is that they are filled with driven, smart people.  It is about how to get them to work together and produce great results.  It doesn’t matter if it is a M&A strategy or a Predictive Analytics solution.  If you work at a B2B startup like me, added bonus. Your client facing/management skills directly translate to enterprise sales. Depending on the industry, your sales target might even start with your old clients and network.  Finally, you worked on many projects that served the real needs of big companies.  Some of these needs might even seed the product ideas for your next Startup.    

Management consulting is a great job and great career for some.  Though if you are planning it as a stepping stone for joining or starting a new company, you should be aware of its baggage.  Weighing the pros and the cons, if I could have done it again, I would have started the Startup path much earlier in a strict career planning point of view.  Let me know what you think in the comments or drop me an email at alex (dot) poon (at) VisualRevenue (dot) com.    A shameless plug here.  For those of you I convinced to join a Startup outright, Visual Revenue is hiring: http://visualrevenue.com/aboutus/jobs

- Alex Poon