Boutique consulting firms. What are they and how do they differ from MBB firms?
I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the Management Director of Management Consulted, and I'm
here today to talk about boutiques. How wonderful they are, how they're different,
and what you might want to stay away from in boutiques, as well as why you
should run straight for them. And so we have a lot of information to cover, let's
get started. The first thing that I'm going to talk about is how boutiques are
different than MBB and Big 4 firms. There are two primary ways. Boutiques
either focus on a different business problem they solve. So for example, not
strategy but risk, and operations. Or supply chain. Or sexual harassment
training. One key element, one key topic of training, or coaching, or consulting. Or,
they focus on an industry. They're an aviation practice. They're a TMT, tech
media and telecom practice. They are a retail practice. And some of them even
cross section the two of those, they're even smaller usually, but they'll
cross section the two of those and they'll be like sexual harassment
training for the aviation industry. So they're really specifically
focused on one industry and one practice area. So because of this, there are thousands
and thousands of boutique firms in the world. And boutique consulting firms are
amazing in the way that they apply those specific targets for what they do.
They're also amazing candidates for sale to larger consulting firms, and they
could be really great places to work, so we're gonna talk about a few of those things.
Now, first of all you need to understand that these firms are different than MBB firms.
And there are a lot of elements through the way that they're different. I'm gonna
take you through a few of them. Number one for travel. Usually for boutique
firms they travel less. Now there are some exceptions, Galt Consulting for
example, their travel is a hundred percent, because they don't even pay for
offices. So you are always on the road with Galt. But for other ones, you're
working on very similar projects, with a very similar team,
and you're able to gather the information in a limited fashion from
the client, you don't have to travel as much. The client interaction is actually
pretty similar to MBB. You're gonna have pretty good
client interaction, usually from a pretty junior level, and you'll have
exposure to clients. Now your clients might not be as senior as they would be
at MBB, but you're still gonna have a good client exposure. The duration of the
projects are usually longer. The focus is on selling fewer but selling longer,
deeper, higher revenue per project, projects in the consulting firms. The
type of work usually has less variety because the firms themselves focus on an
industry, a practice area, or even a practice area inside that industry. The
culture is, I would call it- smaller families, smaller world. Which means that
you're closer usually the people you work with directly, it's not this loose
organization of a very large group. So it's not just like a Deloitte for
example where you're close to your team, but you're not necessarily close to
the rest of the organization. However when you leave or when you're working on
your broader network, I also call it smaller world, just because these firms
have smaller networks. So the power of loose ties, says that actually knowing a
little bit and having some commonality with them, gives you the broadest network.
And so this network will, by nature, be smaller. In addition, there are lots of
exit opportunities, but the exit opportunities that are the closest and
easiest from a boutique firm, are the ones in a similar industry, or similar
business problem. So again if you have a really limited subset of industries and
business problems, that is going to limit the scope of your exit opportunities.
Professional training is also different inside most boutiques. Most boutique
firms, while they have onboarding processes, have a mentorship process, but
they don't do as much training off-site, and they don't do as much repetitive
training. There either aren't the budgets, or there aren't the time, or
there's higher utilization, so less people that are able to go
through trainings in any given time. The cost of the consulting services is
usually less than MBB, but occasionally more. The more specific and things that
MBB doesn't do, then you might find those things outside of it. But usually,
they're around 20%-40% less than MBB per month. The analyst pay commensurate with
that is usually less than for MBB firms. Now, why would you want to work at a
boutique firm or a big 4 firm. There are a lot of good reasons. Number one, it's a
great stepping stone. So if you don't come from a target school, if you didn't
have a perfect GPA, but you're able to network into, or have some experience
in one of these consulting firms, that's a great place to start.
They're also amazing places if you're in your sophomore or your junior year in
undergrad, and you're looking to transition maybe from an initial degree
where you started, into a consulting space. Good brand name
builders without actually ending up there. In addition, if you know what you
want to do, you know you want to work in the healthcare space, then go to a healthcare
boutique consulting firm. You're gonna get jobs later in healthcare and your
whole pathway is gonna be very linear, and you're not gonna have to sell
somebody on the fact that you, "Oh yeah, you did this great retail project, but
sure it applies to consulting." So you don't have that story murkiness that you
have to explain. Finally, just a couple of examples of boutique firms and
how they focus their work. We highlighted a few of these just because there are
some that will help you see the differences between a couple of those
areas. So first of all, Booz Allen Hamilton, really focuses on government,
government consulting, they're Federal, and they do work with large Federal
contractors as well, but they focus on the US then even internationally, their
focus is really on public sector work. LEK focuses on healthcare and life
sciences and they're strategically focused in healthcare and life sciences-
great firm, really cool culture. But again, smaller and different from a lot of
the MBBs for that reason. However, LEK does pay really well, so pay
attention to that in our salaries report. In addition, Marakon. Marakon focuses on
highly regulated industries. They focus on industrials, and health care, and
energy, and financial services. So they really focus on those high regulation
industries, navigating through those with strategy and some implementation. And
finally, Oliver Wyman has really focused on financial services. Although they have
a large range of other practices that's really what they're known for.
So in conclusion, boutique consulting firms, first of all there are thousands
of them, so you've got some research ahead of you if want to get to know them. But
they really are characterized by the industry that they focus on, or the
business problem they solve. If they're not clear about that, get good at asking
questions about it, so that you can know whether a boutique consulting firm is
right for you. Thanks for joining this YouTube video, we
hope that you really enjoyed it. We've got tons of great content over at
www.managementconsulted.com and we really love to help. Thanks so much!