What I wish I knew before quitting strategy consulting

0:00What's the difference between freelance consulting and strategy consulting at firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bane? I want to explore that in today's video. My background, I spent nine years in the strategy consulting industry. I loved my time in it early in that path, but eventually I didn't want to be a partner. I didn't want to be someone that spent so much time reacting to client demands and selling consulting projects, but I still liked consulting in the underlying work, so I left and started my own practice, which I called "Divo Strategies" in that first year in 2017 on my own. I didn't really know what I was doing and I've learned a lot on that journey. The interesting thing for me was that after I left, my experience was far different than what I actually expected. I expected that I'd sort of just have a shift in title, strategy consultant one day to freelance consultant the next. It was much greater of a difference than that. In this video, I want to explore four main differences in how I experience strategy consulting and freelance consulting. These four things are the scope of projects and types of things

1:17you do. Second, the general support you receive in a firm versus on your own. Third, the mental game and the mental challenges of working on your own versus being in a career mode in a consulting firm and fourth, the potential future opportunities. In big consulting firms, you actually work in a much narrower type of project than you imagine. You sort of get tricked by working in different industries, different types of companies and different geographies that you're actually seeing a vast diversity of the business world. However, if you're working at the biggest consulting firms, you're mostly working on projects that happen in your clients or VP or higher levels. What this means is you're seeing sort of a top-down perspective of companies and you're only working on problems that can be approached at a high level of complexity and scale from the top of organizations. You're often looking at problems which are the problems of a thousand plus person divisions and things like that, or even global networks of factories and offices, which can be hundreds of thousands of people. The level of abstraction of how you're conceiving of these problems and approaching them

2:37is very different than the work you do as an independent freelancer. Counter-intuitively, though, as a freelancer, you often get to work at higher levels of the organization than you would in a big consulting firm. This is because in a big consulting firm, you often have managers and partners above you. You're often only interacting with the lower levels of the organization in a deeper way. You might get exposure to those senior people and I definitely didn't some of my roles, but you don't get to work deep and close with them. As a freelancer, I've worked with presidents of companies, founders of startups, and I worked directly with them.

3:21I am the partner, the manager, and the analyst in those roles. Also, because they're hiring me and not a firm to solve a large-scale problem, I'm often much more in the weeds, hands-on, getting involved in things. One of my first projects was for the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit out of the MIT Sloan School of Management. I helped them shape how they were thinking about their launch, but I also got very in the weeds. I helped them design new logos. I helped them redesign their website. I even got my hands dirty and taught myself some HTML and CSS to help them get up to speed. It was much more interesting, ultimately because I was owning, delivering and solving a very specific thing, and to end, I had to take responsibility for a lot more things. I like this responsibility, but the downside brings us to our second thing, which is the support you receive.

4:21This is probably one of the biggest differences. As an employee of a big consulting firm, you are quite coddled. You have enormous resources at your disposal. You have knowledge teams that can do research for you. You have teams that can do design and slide structuring. You can literally sketch something out on a napkin, send a picture of it to somebody, and you can get a perfect slide of your vision an hour later. You also have the ability to take time off. You have work retreats, you have work events that can take the pressure off the constant work. You also have teammates that can pick up the slack for you if you're struggling with something. As a freelancer, you literally have to do everything of everything you do. At first, this was really exciting for me, but it was also overwhelming. I didn't have as many reps, selling, and managing those client relationships. That was the hardest thing for me. One of the things I struggled with in that first year was I leaned too much on my tendency to do research and analysis, rather than focusing on that relationship with the client. Eventually, many freelancers start hiring some of these services

5:37as contractors, so you can find through services like Upwork, like Slide Design Services. You can find virtual assistants which can help you manage your calendar. I'm still pretty independent. For my freelance work, I still do everything on my own. I manage this by trying to work on very few projects at once. I typically don't do more than one project at once. This is also unique to my path because I'm also working on many other things, but I found this very energizing, and it works for me, and I only try to scope projects which I actually can deliver on my own. In a full-time job, you have a lived experience that everything is sort of figured out at a service level. Everyone around you is sort of doing similar things and marching in the same direction in their careers.

6:31You see paths ahead of you for how to get ahead, how to make more money. When you're on your own, you have none of this, so in addition to trying to find your own work, trying to make money, trying to figure out what kind of work you want to do, you also have to figure out how to structure your life. With full-time work comes constraints. That tells you to work Monday through Friday these hours because that's when your fellow co-workers are working. As an independent worker, it doesn't matter if you work Tuesday night or Saturday morning, but over time you need to figure out what is the right balance for me, how can I actually engage with my work, take rest and take breaks, such that I can keep going on this path. Often independent workers need a lot more rest than a full-time worker might. This is often because when you're busy, you're super in the zone.

7:27You might work 12 to 14 hour days, not because you're forced to but because you're fully alive and connected with the work you're doing. I've experienced this in many stints on my path over the past five years and it only is sustainable in that I'm able to disconnect after those periods and rest and reconnect with myself and make sure am I still engaged with this kind of work, do I still want to structure my life in this way? And I constantly am able to make tweaks, which is another one of the upsides of such a path. It's harder, you have more responsibility for structuring your life, but you have more degrees of freedom for managing and experimenting with that.

8:13The final thing is the future potential options. At first, when you become self-employed, you start something like freelancing, often your economic opportunities are less than they were when you left your job. Over time, however, if you're able to find many things you actually like engaging in and working on, you start to see that the possibilities grow and the opportunities to do a wide range of things and make money from a wide range of things only increase and exponentially expand over time. This is in contrast to when you're in a career, especially if you're leaving something like strategy consulting. It might seem like you're giving up a lot of income, which in the short term is true, but over the long term, you may actually be leaving more on the table by staying in a career path. The reason is some of the risks are just hard to value.

9:15Some of the risks are not as much about money, but your energy to stay motivated. I talked to so many people who are deep in careers and have solved their financial problems, but because they've been on such a path that they never really loved for so long, it's sort of undermined and short-circuited, their capacity to find things they actually want to engage in and commit to. These are the trade-offs, and I've been surprised at how big the opportunities have grown. Every year on my path, I think I've underestimated the emergent opportunities that were right in front of me. This always means that the path is uncertain. You don't know what's next, but ultimately I've found this path worth it. So these are the four big differences between strategy consulting and freelancing. There are many more differences. If you have further questions ask them below. I'll try to answer more about some of the differences I've experienced.

10:18I also think many strategy consultants should take a shot on freelancing. I think it's a tremendous opportunity to learn about yourself, to learn about what you're good at, to really test yourself for taking ownership and responsibility of making money and trying to make it work in the world. Even if you don't make it or it's not for you, you can go back into work seeing more possibilities in the world and also having a better connection with what you're doing because you know the trade-offs. You know what's at stake if you were to have taken your own path. Hope you found this helpful.

10:58If you want to see more videos and freelancing, you can watch them up here. Also, you can subscribe and follow along. Don't forget to click the alerts to get alerted when I post new videos. I'm having a ton of fun on YouTube. Leave some comments below. I want to engage with people, answer more questions and see what other things I can help people with.