Never Less Than Success

Career Tips for Aspiring Management Consultants and Accountants

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4 Ways to Win When You’re Against the Odds

4 Ways to Win When You're Against the Odds

After being in management consulting for so long, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m wired to identify problems. If you think about principles of performance management and project management that are large parts of what consultants do, it makes sense that you get the most bang for your buck by spending your time addressing things that aren’t going well and need attention/change more so than the things that are going just as you planned.

The downside of this exception-based management is that people who are performing well don’t always get the recognition they rightfully deserve to encourage them to keep it up.

This brings me to Tom Brady, a guy who by most accounts is winning at life. He’s rich, a pro athlete, has a supermodel wife (also rich), and may have just solidified his status as the greatest quarterback in the history of the National Football League based on the outcome of the Super Bowl (his 5th championship).

And what did I do? I sent you an email about the train wreck that was the Atlanta Falcons. While the lessons to learn from the Falcons’ collective shortcomings were legit, we can also learn what it takes to beat the odds by looking at what the Patriots did during that same game. [Read more…]

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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…]

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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…]

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The Art of Crafting the Perfect Executive Summary

how to craft an executive summary

One of the hardest things to produce as a management consultant is an executive summary.

The more effort you put into a presentation, the harder it is to summarize.

I’ve been there and I get it. After all of the iterations, you made it so that every word had to be justified. Every single word is important to telling your story.

This is where people have things all mixed up. [Read more…]

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How to Get People To Prioritize Meeting Deadlines

How to get people focused on meeting deadlines

Not every deadline you have to hit is going to be reasonable.

Sometimes deadlines won’t even feel possible.

Part of your job as a consultant is to make the unreasonable possible. This often entails assigning a ton of action items and dates to people who probably would prefer you faded away into oblivion.

Part of having an action item that’s worth anything is making sure you have a mutually agreed due date.

But there’s another piece of the puzzle that’s frequently overlooked – the respect for the deadline. [Read more…]

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How to Take Notes Like The Rich and Powerful

 

How to take notes

In the management consulting world, you go to a lot of meetings.

Because of all of those meetings, one of the most important things you can do coming into consulting (or any other career) is make sure you know how to take notes.

Working on consulting engagements, it’s not uncommon to have multiple meetings to prepare for the “real” meeting with the client. If you play your cards right, the meetings, at least, yield 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, that discussion will have long faded from their memory.

And even worse, when you ask people about their commitments made in the meeting later, they act like you’re speaking in a language they’ve never heard before. (I suppose accountability could be considered a language, and I know there are some people out there who aren’t familiar with it.)

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

When taking notes for yourself, you should consider adding structure for searchability using a tool like Evernote.  When it comes to meeting notes, you’ll want to email those out and be sure to focus on capturing the six following pieces of information. [Read more…]

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3 Unforgivable Mistakes Consultants Make When Pitching a Client

 

3 Common Consulting Mistakes

Management consulting was different back in the day.

It used to be about selling some solution you developed to a prospective client because you knew it worked.

After all, you spent countless hours developing pristine PowerPoint presentations to showcase how great a service you provide. How could you let it go to waste?!

It’s a natural response, but one that does both you and your client a disservice.

Consider the three points below next time you have the opportunity to pitch a client. [Read more…]