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You are here: Home / Archives for Management Consulting

June 19, 2019 by Eric Butts 5 Comments

How to Take Notes in Meetings Like The Rich and Powerful

 

How to take notes

Do you ever feel like your day has so many meetings they all start to blend together?

So many details to capture. And sometimes not even knowing anything about the meeting topic.

It’s a real struggle. And because of this, one of the most important things you can do in your career (especially management consulting) is make sure you know how to take notes in meetings.

Working on consulting engagements, it’s not uncommon to have multiple meetings to prepare for the “real” meeting with the client. If you’re lucky, the meetings will yield some useful information.

There’s a huge problem with all of these meetings though – people have short-term memories. By the time the participants leave the meeting and get back to their desks, they remember minimal pieces of the discussion.

And even worse, when you ask people later about their commitments made in the meeting, they act like you’re speaking in a language they’ve never heard before. (Maybe accountability could be considered a language and that’s why they’re not familiar with it.)

That’s exactly why you’ll find the rich and powerful to be avid note takers.

When it comes to meeting notes, you’ll want to email those out to all invitees and be sure to focus on capturing the 6 following pieces of information.

Don’t worry if you’re having trouble following along in meetings. I’ll show you what to do in that situation too.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: client management, consulting, how to take notes, management consulting

December 27, 2018 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

The fastest way to build strong business relationships that will endure the test of time

stronger relationships

I recently took a training on advanced networking and one of the things I talked about as my desired outcome was more techniques on forming stronger relationships faster. The training was with Performance of a Lifetime, a program which involved a lot of improvisational work as the primary method to work on those networking techniques. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: consulting, professional networking, relationship management

October 9, 2016 by Eric Butts 2 Comments

What to do when you hate your project

Consulting Project Exit Plan

I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen so many colleagues leaving the firm. Some people are jumping because of a unique opportunity not available within the firm. Others quit go to a competitor (ouch!). I remember when I made a change to a competitor and there were a whole lot of questions about the why. Part of me just needed a change but I also knew that the firm’s timing wasn’t going to work for me, so I acted accordingly.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: career, career advice, career management, consulting

October 2, 2016 by Eric Butts 4 Comments

Life as a Consultant: The 10 Best Pieces of Advice I Ever Received

10 best pieces of consulting advice

One of the many things you learn in the management consulting business is there is no one path to success, so it’s interesting to hear what people remember as the most useful information or advice they’ve picked up so far. What better way to highlight this than to ask consultants from different firms what’s the best advice they’ve gotten. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: career advice, career management, client management

September 17, 2016 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

ESPN Violated One of the Major Rules of Consulting


ESPN fantasy delay

In case you don’t like sports or somehow manage to interact with zero people who like sports (or maybe you live in a place where American football isn’t so popular), something pretty interesting happened this past Sunday. The worldwide leader had a “not top 10” moment of its own that I bet they won’t be replaying for the entertainment of its millions of viewers. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: client management, espn, management consulting

September 6, 2016 by Chloe Hull 4 Comments

Three Things I’ve Learned in One Year of Management Consulting

 

Management Consulting Skills

Most people will tell you that college is the time in your life when you learn the most, but I have to disagree with those people. While I agree that college is an amazing time for learning (and a heck of a lot of fun, too), both in the educational sense and the social, interpersonal sense, the real learning comes after you walk across that stage.

While you may know how to calculate EPS or how to use Lagrange multipliers in macroeconomics, there’s so much more you need to know to be successful in your career. Being only one year into my management consulting career, I’m well aware that I have many miles to go before I can claim any real knowledge on how to attain career success. That being said, I’ve learned a thing or two in the past 12 months that I’d like to share for those of you who may be on the first few steps of your career paths as well. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: career advice, guest post, management consulting

June 7, 2016 by Eric Butts 3 Comments

How to Calculate Payback Period in Excel (with Automated Updates)

How to calculate payback period
Click if you want a copy of the Excel workbook and video

You’d be surprised how simple the calculations are that sophisticated investors rely on. Payback period is one such example. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Excel, Management Consulting Tagged With: abs, countif, excel, excel formulas, index

June 7, 2016 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

How to Calculate Payback Period in Excel [Video]


In case you missed, the set up for this video, you can read some additional information about payback period here. I literally just had to pull something together using this, so this isn’t just random Excel functionality.

If you’re interested in downloading the Excel workbook you can get that by clicking here.

Let me know what you think of the video in the comments.

Filed Under: Excel, Management Consulting Tagged With: excel, excel formulas, excel videos

May 27, 2016 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

How to Use Excel Wildcard, Sumifs, and Randbetween [Video]

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Filed Under: Excel, Management Consulting Tagged With: excel, excel videos

May 27, 2016 by Eric Butts 4 Comments

How to Use Excel Wildcard With SumIFs Formula

Excel Wildcard and Sumifs work wonders together.
Click to see the wildcard functionality in action.

Do you know about the Excel wildcard functionality?

You know, the one where you put an “*” before and/or after something you’re searching for and Excel executes a search based on what you input. For example, imagine you have a spreadsheet with a lot of data. Maybe it’s an export of transaction activity for the month. You have hundreds of account numbers ranging from 1xxx through 9xxx. You want to spend a little extra time on the 8xxx accounts because that’s where the bulk of activity gets posted. You can do one of two things:

Option 1: Add a filter, go to the filter drop down and unselect all accounts, then scroll down to the accounts you want to look at and manually check them.

Option 2: Add a filter, go to the search in the filter drop down and type in “8*”. Not only is option 2 faster (Under option 1, you could be scrolling for days through a bunch of accounts that show up because of one row of data in your file.), but it’s also more reliable. Using a manual approach, you could easily miss a box that you meant to check and skew your analysis.

Pretty sweet, right? And it gets better.

You can also use Excel wildcard functionality in formulas, and I’m going to show you how with another example. Say you have this small table of data:

Use Excel wildcard and sumifs to save yourself some time

Note: “X” represents contractor and “E” represents employee in the grade column and the number represents level with the respective contractor or employee category. Now, let’s say you want to use formulas to summarize a few different pieces of information:

1. Salary paid to employees and contractors, respectively

2. Salary paid to employees and contractors with the last name “Brown”

3. Salary paid to employees whose names contain “Brown” in them.

How would you attack this problem? Looking at number 1 above, you might be tempted to just add a column to flag each employee as a flag and then use a sumif formula, but that strategy quickly becomes cumbersome and impractical as the number of extra columns needed in your dataset increases.

This is where the Excel wildcard function comes in handy. Here’s how to take down each of the above:

1. For salary paid to contractors, type =SUMIFS(E4:E11,D4:D11,”*X*”). For employees, do the same thing but replace the X with an E in the formula.

2. For salary paid to contractors with the last name Brown, type =SUMIFS(E4:E11,D4:D11,”*X*”,C4:C11,”*Brown”). Again, for employees, do the same thing but replace the X with an E in the formula.

3. For salary paid to contracts with the last name containing Brown, type =SUMIFS(E4:E11,D4:D11,”*X*”,C4:C11,”*Brown*”).

You notice the slight difference between 2 and 3? Trust me when I tell you adding this functionality to your repertoire will save you a lot of time. There is one other formula I used to put this example together.

Click the button below for the video or join my free content library and then navigate here.      

        Click Here to See Excel Wildcard in Action

Filed Under: Excel, Management Consulting Tagged With: excel, excel formulas, spreadsheet, sumifs

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