Category: Book

The Big Firm You will occasionally hear the term “the big 5”, which is a leftover term from the earlier days. Today, there are many players in the large consulting space. These firms span the globe with offices in most major cities and employ hundreds of thousands of folks. These companies recruit heavily out of…

The case study job interview is where the applicant is given a scenario or situation and asked to present a solution by detailing all the steps and processes the applicant would need to put into place. The scenarios are usually a business case but sometimes are off the wall questions that involve filling empty rooms…

The details of this section will vary wildly based on region, time, economy, firm size, role and a million other factors, but I wanted to create some high-level buckets you can plan around. Most of these are opinions from the perspective of working in North America, but the processes and structures will exist in most…

Getting your resume clean and prepared is going to be the first step to getting hired on as a consultant. Colleges usually offer resume writing help for current students, but if this is not an option for you, there are plenty of templates you can find online. The usual advice you will hear for resumes…

If you are an independent consultant, you are your own boss, working for yourself and keeping what you earn. Sounds great, right? It can be, but it comes with more risk. You will have to find your own work, pay your own benefits and pay self-employment tax. You are on the hook for your laptop,…

Projects billed by the hour for the work performed are called “Time and Material” projects. This style of billing structure is where the cost of the work provided represents hours worked multiplied by the rate per hour of each resource. For example, if a consultant’s rate is $100 per hour and they work 160 hours…

Margin and Margin Percentage The term “margin” is a key benchmark of a project’s financial success. To put it simply, margin is the amount of profit earned on a project. To get to this number, you simply sum the revenue and subtract the cost. Margin’s close friend “margin percentage” is simply margin divided by revenue.…

For most of this book, I speak from the perspective of working for a consulting firm, not a staffing agency. A consulting firm usually hires, trains and invests in employees like any other company, while staffing agencies gear towards independent contractors and temporary staffing. A lot of valuable lessons in this book will also apply…

Consultants can usually run a rate of anywhere in the range of one hundred to two hundred dollars an hour. Some larger firms in the “Big Four” can charge up to six hundred dollars an hour for senior resources. Multiply that by the average of forty hours a week and fifty or so weeks a…