How To Be a Consultant

A script for your first client consultation

In the final year of university everyone suddenly had jobs lined up in a field I’d never even heard of: consultancy. For a while, I enjoyed mistaking McKinsey for Macy’s and asking Economics & Management students why they wanted to transition into retail, but then I realised that this consulting business wasn’t going away and began to ask what the job actually entails. And none of these gifted young graduates know. Maybe they dumbed it down for me, but I got the distinct impression that they were just parroting back the answers that they had received when asking the same question a year prior. “You help companies get better.” “It’s all analysis and optimization.” “It’s like being a doctor but for businesses.”

Despite the girls’ school attitude that I could be pretty good at anything that I give 6 months of focus to, I have actively chosen not to take this career path. However, for anyone uninspired enough to choose this route, here is a foolproof script for your first consultation. You can follow it regardless of what the client says.

[enters the office]

Consultant: This is good. This is really good, I like the natural light. We should paint this room yellow because happy people make more money.

[everyone performs the team handshake and shares their shares to start the meeting on a good note]

Consultant: Thanks for being here. Now in order to reinvent the wheel this quarter you need to drill down inside the box. 

CFO: Do you think we should invest a million pounds in Qatar?

Consultant: That is such an excellent question, thank you for asking me that question. You should. In fact, if you invest a billion instead, I’ll consider you cool enough to attend my 22^nd birthday party.

CFO: I can’t believe you’re only 21. Who hired this underqualified child at vast expense?

Consultant: That is such an excellent question, thank you for levelling up with that question. In order to illuminate and streamline this issue we’ll all watch this clip. When it ends, YouTube might go to auto-play and try to show a video called “Make More Money by Thinking For Yourself and Trusting in Your Industry-specific Knowledge.” Definitely don’t watch that in your free time. It’s not relevant to you.

[the video ends and everyone punches the air and chants ‘Big 4! Big 4!’ while you, the consultant, skip through 74 PowerPoint slides]

Consultant: This is another key takeaway. I’m about to switch to the slide that will teach you how to integrate high-quality visuals into your financial-strategy-communication-strategy. Did everyone see that? One more time. That’s called the honeycomb slide transition, and I think it will be really lucrative if you use it in your annual report. It’s great if the investors like beekeeping so make an Excel spreadsheet that keeps tabs on that. Now I’m wondering where your CEO is. Has anyone seen Janet?

[20 frantic minutes pass]

Consultant: Okay team, I’ve done a bit of a deep dive and it seems like your CEO Janet actually died six years ago. So we should consider taking her off the payroll.

Treasurer: Thank goodness you noticed that! Should we stop paying her multi-million-pound bonus too?

Consultant: I’ll do some analysing and feedback next time. Until then you should check if any other colleagues are absent or in witness protection. Maybe also consider whipping the interns for optics.

[a female analyst coughs in a non-ambitious, poor way]

Consultant: By the way Brenda, your hair looks shit like that and you need to lose ten pounds to boost team morale. If anyone else here wants some one-on-one consulting let me know. I’ve got bandwidth on Friday.

Head of HR: Thank you so much for consulting us. We’re all going to go and hold £9 pints and stand on the pavement in Farringdon if you want to join.

Consultant:  That sounds great. But even on non-office hours, we all have to stay aware of the bottom line. So if anyone finds any cash lying around on the street or in the pub’s tip jar, don’t inquire about who it belongs to. That’s company property now.

[you leave the office at the front of a raucous conga. Everyone including P, W, and C gets involved]