Chapter 2
Finders, Minders, and Grinders
The Business Development Imperative
When Russell Davis first heard the news, he flew home from Switzerland early. Word had come to him from all directions—the foreign edition of CNN, urgent phone calls from home, and emotional email bursts from friends on campus.
In a convulsion of violence, a mentally disturbed student shot and killed thirty-two students in the Norris and West Ambler Johnston halls at Virginia Tech. It was mid-April of 2007 and Russell was studying abroad, but he was also class president and a dyed-in-the-wool Hokie.
“I felt I needed to go home and be with everyone.”
The next few weeks were filled with emotions for Russell and for his fellow students, a complicated stew of anger at the shooter, grief over the lost promise of those who had been slain, and relief and guilt over having not been a target. Russell remembers trying to frame the right words for his address to the graduating class in May.
“I wanted to be careful; it was a commencement, not a funeral,” he said. In the end, standing in front of five thousand graduates at Worsham Field, he spoke from the heart, “You only live once. Never waste a moment.”
Russell showed leadership in the way he chose to be with those whom he had decided to serve. It wasn't like Mel Gibson on a stallion, rallying of the Scottish tribes in Braveheart, but a quieter call to duty, which becomes the standard against which the rest of us measure ourselves.
At Virginia's Darden School of Business, where Russell earned an MBA after Virginia Tech, roughly half of the students apply for jobs at the big consulting firms. Of those, half get interviews, and then half of them get offers. It is the same at all the leading business schools.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the country's premier strategy consulting firms, has a mission to “go deep to unlock insight and have the courage to act.” For that, they need leaders and strong thinkers who have the courage of their convictions. When they first met Russell on the campus of the University of Virginia, they must have known they'd found a real leader, recruiting him to be a summer intern in between years at business school. Later, when he graduated, BCG asked him to sign on, full-time, as a consultant.
Getting hired by one of the big consulting firms is, for many, like winning the lottery. “BCG and the others would come in and make presentations to the students and talk about the cool strategy work they did for clients. I knew I would learn a lot in consulting and that it would open doors. Those of us who got offers were pretty excited. BCG, McKinsey, and Bain have a line out the door to get in. They get the best and brightest.”
Consulting
Consulting draws some of the best business school students because consultants are called in to do challenging and essential work. “Since working at BCG,” reports Russell, “I've worked on growth strategy, cost reduction, and operations projects in consumer products, transportation, and industrial goods. I've learned a lot in two years. I travel a fair bit, but the firm treats me well and I make good money.”
Really good money.
The average starting salary for a post-MBA graduate like Russell at BCG is $147,000 with another $50,000 to $70,000 piled on top in bonuses and 401(k) contributions. This wage is not the exception but the rule at the most prestigious firms like Bain, McKinsey, Oliver Wyman, L.E.K., and A. T. Kearney. It's the same with the Big Four professional services firms, where KPMG, Deloitte, E&Y, and PWC all pay total compensation north of $150,000 for recent MBA graduates, as do the big IT consulting firms like Accenture and IBM.
I'm Not Even in That Universe
If you are a sole proprietor, work for a small CPA firm, or have just hung up your shingle as an attorney, Russell's world may seem distant and vaguely exotic, like GN-z11, the galaxy Hubble just discovered at the far reaches of space. Interesting but not really relevant. You hear about hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay, and you think to yourself, “hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue would be good.”
We understand. Both of us have been sole proprietors. Tom remembers launching a private equity firm and wondering if the deals would come in. “I'd lie awake at night thinking about the kids and the next mortgage payment and see blood dripping from the ceiling.” Doug remembers flying out to New York to make a big client pitch and wondering if he had made some sort of tragic mistake leaving the security of a job at General Electric to launch his fledgling consultancy.
Stick with us. We're digging into the world of high-end consultants for a reason. It turns out their problems are the same as ours, and in their experience, there are clues as to how clients buy.
The Ladder
Russell learned a few things about consulting while working at BCG. “There's a distinct ladder. As a new consultant, there's an expectation that you get up to speed quickly, and that you contribute quickly. If you join BCG right out of undergrad, they call you an associate. If you get promoted from that or join post-MBA, you're a consultant. After consultant, you become a project leader where you manage a team and probably have a couple of consultants and maybe an associate working with you. Two years after being a project leader, you might get promoted to principal and have two project leaders working under you. If you work as a principal for between three and five years, you'd be eligible to stand for election to the partnership. Then as a partner, you might be promoted to senior partner and possibly to the firm's leadership.”
While the titles might be different if you are in an architecture or law firm, the idea is the same. First you toil with the rest of the recent grads, and if you are good, you advance one rung on the ladder at a time. And the firm makes it worth your time. Partners at BCG make seven figures with bonuses and profit sharing. If you're a kid from Staunton, Virginia, like Russell, that has your full attention and absolute dedication.
Up or Out
The second lesson Russell learned at BCG was harsher. “It's up or out here. The messaging starts as soon as you get here. ‘Look around you,’ they say, ‘there are not as many partners as there are consultants. Do the math: not everyone can be partner.’ Everyone talks about it,” he says.
“You know you'll either be promoted or you'll get the boot, though no one ever really gets fired. Instead you hear someone left the firm to take on an ‘opportunity in industry.’ What you don't hear is that it wasn't 100% their choice. And it happens on every step on the ladder. There is constant pruning.”
Everyone who enters into BCG is taught this basic lesson and so begins to ask the natural question, “What do I need to do to succeed here?” It is a Darwinian meritocracy in which only the best survive. Everyone else is “counseled out.” It's all very polite, but large consulting firms are built to be unforgiving pyramids in which not everyone can succeed.
The Three-Legged Stool
Over beers on the weekend, Russell and his newly minted colleagues would talk about what it takes to get ahead at BCG.
The first leg, and everyone agrees on this point, is you must be good at the work. This goes for every kind of professional service: law or IT consulting as well as the more rarified world of strategy consulting. No one gets from the first to the second rung without doing a good job at delivering the service that is embedded in the promise of their firm. Accenture is the largest IT consultant in the world. If Accenture says it will produce actionable data from multiple sources in and outside of a business, you must be able to do that for clients, or Accenture (and you) will get fired.
The second leg is team leadership. You must be able to rodeo others on a team who are delivering the work. If a Seattle-based CPA firm sends a group of professionals to audit the books at a cannery in Alaska, they'll send a team leader to keep everyone driving in the same direction. She'll also get to pick where everyone has drinks after work.
Both of these skills—doing the work and leading others in the delivery of work—have beginning, intermediate, advanced, and master versions. Fixing the e-commerce site of a $30 million dollar retailer of sporting goods is hard. Our friends at Accenture tell us that fixing HealthCare.gov was harder. The first job was a blue square groomer, the second a black diamond pitch off the backside.
The third leg of the stool is the ability to generate new business. It's one thing to be able to do the work well and to lead successful engagement, but someone in the firm has to be the one who spoke with the client in the first place, inking the deal that got the work.
Art Gensler, author of Art's Principles and founder of Gensler—the premier design and architecture firm that designed the Apple Store—says, “Business rarely falls into your lap. You must go out, explore, and find clients.”
The Commercial Imperative
They say in consulting and professional services that there are “finders, minders, and grinders.” Grinders do the work. Minders supervise the grinders. Finders bring in the work on which everyone else delivers.
Russell is clear on this rainmaker imperative. “By the time you are a partner, you need to have a commercial focus. You need to come across as credible and be able to sell a multimillion-dollar transformation to a company.”
But to know what to do is not to know how to do it. “If I had one question for a senior partner at the firm,” says Russell, “it would be ‘How did they find their best clients?’ Most of the work at a big firm like BCG comes from repeat business and from referrals, but I would be interested in knowing what the partner did, especially in the early years, to find those big clients that hire us over and over.”
We find this question interesting as well.
The Rest of Us
This question of how to find new work is not limited to the big firms. It's common to all consultants or professional service providers. While website designers or freelance cybersecurity specialists might not be working in the Cravath salt mines at a 10,000-person professional services firm, they experience their own version of “up or out.” They either bring in new work or they fail.
“If I don't sell, I am out of business,” says Megan Armstrong, the owner of a three-person marketing communications company. “Without clients, there's no work.”
It's really just a variation on the same theme: to be successful in consulting and professional services, you have to be a grinder, a minder, and a finder. It is the platform on which all of us stand. If you're weak at any one of these three disciplines, the stool will not support your weight. If you're at a big firm, it means you'll wash out and not make partner. If you're a sole proprietor, your enterprise will fail.
Okay, I Need to Sell; How Do I Do That?
Saying that those in consulting and professional services need to think about where their next meal is coming from is not a controversial statement. How to do that, as we will see, is controversial. Some see expert services as just another product that can be sold like a pen or a load of lumber. Others, and we are in this camp, see consulting and professional services as very different, requiring a unique approach.
Russell knows that he has to learn how to go out and find business if he is going to make it in this world of consulting. He also knows it's going to be hard. It's a skill he didn't learn in business school. So we took his question to the best in this business. We interviewed some of the most accomplished pros and learned why selling consulting and professional services is a challenge. In the next chapter, we will work to better understand how consulting and professional service practitioners engage with would-be clients is different from the way other goods are sold. The goal is not to sell what we do but to be invited by clients into their projects as trusted partners.