Consulting Career Opportunities

Consulting Career Opportunities

Taylor Milner

Stroud Consulting

Introduction

• Taylor Milner • Cornell 1998

• I have worked in the consulting industry since I graduated; specifically in operations consulting • I have been with Stroud Consulting since its

Some questions we will attempt to

answer

• How did you get here?

• What is consulting?

• Who will enjoy it?

• What do consultants do?

• How to choose a firm?

• Some final thoughts

Some questions for you…

• Why Cornell and the major you chose?

• What have you liked about what you studied? • What have you disliked about what you studied?

• What have you liked and disliked about your co-ops and internships?

10 Years Ago…

• I came to Cornell to study engineering because

I enjoyed understanding how things worked.

• I did a co-op with Lockheed Martin in CA.

• As I learned more and more about the path I

thought I wanted to pursue, it appealed to me

less and less.

10 Years Ago…

• I wanted to use my natural analytical ability plus what I had learned at Cornell (I had spent four years

working hard!)

– I enjoyed it

– It was a strength compared with other individuals

• But I wanted to add:

– Working with people. – A faster career pace.

– The sense that I was making a difference each day – I wanted to do something interesting

I chose consulting

It looked to satisfy these criteria.

The consulting industry is very broad and diverse.

There is probably a career path for anyone with

any background within the industry.

I am going to highlight some of the points that

differentiate career paths and firms so that you

can make a more informed decision.

The importance of differentiation

• If you only remember one thing…

– 100,000 firms and 950,000 consultants in 2007 – $125 billion in revenue

– 75% of firms are 1 or 2 people

– 75% of consulting revenue is earned by the top 50 firms

– 75% of consultants work for a firm with more than 100 people

What is consulting?

• Webster’s - Consulting:

Why does consulting exist?

• At times, companies require a level of expertise that their current employees cannot provide.

– Deciding whether to enter a new market

– Improving the effectiveness of the current business. – Software implementation & training.

• The company can hire and train individuals to address this lack of expertise, or….

Who will enjoy consulting?

• Beyond the work you do, what are some of the

characteristics you want to have in your

career?

What does consulting have to offer?

• Potential for a massive challenge

• Exposure to many industries

• Broad business knowledge and skills

• Specific industry knowledge and skills

• Development of skills that are transferable to

other occupations

What is required to succeed?

• Consultants must:

– Be ambitious with a strong work ethic – Have a strong analytical ability

– Have great communication skills – Be energetic and inspirational

– Be able to work in teams – Be willing to travel at times

The Business of Consulting

• What are some of the different industries you

are looking for jobs in?

• What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Consulting Businesses

Industries – Finance, Manufacturing, Healthcare, etc

Focus –

Strategy, Operations, IT, etc

Finance Healthcare Energy Non-Profit Operations Management Strategy IT Engineering Highly technical Non-technical

Different areas of Focus

1. “Strategy” – Define the future direction of the business

2. “Operations” – Making the existing operation more effective

3. “HR” – Maximize the leverage from their human assets

4. “IT” – Maximize the effective use of information

5. “Boutique” – Niche expertise, varies across a broad spectrum. (Airline Chapter 11)

6. “Internal” – Trying to do the above with internal resources

Different Types of Advice

1. Defining the Problem

Helping a client to objectively understand the reality of the situation they are facing.

2. Defining the Solution

Helping the client to devise a plan or strategy that will allow them to achieve their goals.

3. Implementing the Solution

Helping the client to implement the solution that has been devised.

Choosing a firm

• Is anyone interested in working for a small company? • How about a large company?

• Is name recognition important to you?

• What kind of company culture are you looking for?

Company Culture

• The culture of any company is defined by the

people in that company today.

• You can learn a lot about a company’s culture

from the people that come recruiting – they

have been chosen for a reason!

• Go visit an office and talk to people two to

three years in.

The differences between firms

• The Work

– What you do

– How much interaction you get with the client

• The culture

– The types of people – Work life balance – Career path

Some final things to think about

• Where do you want to live?

• How many hours do you want to work? Are your weekends important to you?

• How much do you want to get paid? • How much do you want to travel?

What About the Future?

• Can a person do this for life?

– I think so, but not all firms are the same

– There are always new challenges especially in a small firm – The travel decreases

– High potential income

• What can you do afterward?

– Work in industry

– Take on a significant leadership role in a different organization

So many options…

• Because there are so many different types of

consulting jobs out there, you will have to work to narrow the field to your interests.

• Start with finding out what you will be doing each day, especially at the beginning of your career.

– Doing analysis

– Software implementation – Presenting information – Interacting with clients – Solving problems

Stroud Consulting

• We are an operations consulting firm

– Take the existing operations of a business and make it much more efficient and effective

• We work in a variety of industries:

– Food and beverage, chemicals, healthcare, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, paper, agricultural products,…

• I am biased, but I think operations consulting, and especially Stroud, is a great path for graduates like you.

What you would do with us

• Lead client teams to recover high priority and

high value opportunities

– Lots of client interaction – Lots of problem solving

– A chance to work in the operations and see how processes actually work

– The opportunity to make a big difference in a short period of time

Making Oatmeal

• Humans have been growing oats since the

Bronze Age (3000 – 1000 BCE)

• The first oat mill was built in England in 1899

• We should be pretty good at this.

Oatmeal Making Process

Growing and Harvesting Cleaning – Oat Mill

Rolling Packaging

Oat Milling

• Worlds largest oat mill

– 27,000 tons of oats a day

– 13 stories high and over 2000 different machines

• The cleaning process is not working properly –

there is mud in our finished oats

Muddy Oats

We didn’t always have mud in our oats.

It’s because we have to buy our oats from Canada where it is muddier at harvest time.

If they would only let us spend $10MM we could fix the problem.

The consequence of this is that we “extra clean” the oats and throw 3% of the oats away (810 tons)

Oat Mill - Simplified

“Logs and Frogs”

Width

Length

Weight

Solving the Problem

• You have 27,000 tons of oats per day flowing

through 2000 different machines.

• You have less than 1% mud at the end.

• What are the first steps you might take to solve

this problem?

Narrowing the problem down

Total Oat Flow

Regular Oats Double Oats Stub Oats RE

13% of Mud 80% of Mud 3% of Mud 4% of Mud 76% of flow 13% of flow 7% of flow 5% of flow

Double Oats Cleaning System

Mud of the same length and smaller

Mud of the same weight

How do you separate objects of different

weights?

Constant velocity air flow Light Objects (Oats)

Heavy Objects (Mud)

Muddy Oats

The double oats aspirators had been “upgraded”

and re-calibrated using regular oats

Results:

• Overall “muddiness” reduced by 76%

Sometimes just finding the problem is the hardest

part; figuring out the solution is easy.

What are the implications of solving this?

• For the company:

– Better quality of finished product – Reduced cost for processing oats – Less environmental impact

• For you:

– Increased confidence in what you can achieve – Significant credibility within the client’s

Other examples

• Increasing the throughput of a chocolate plant

• Eliminating contamination when bottling fresh juice • Reducing the use of oil and gas by burning bark

• Increasing the throughput of a pharmaceutical manufacturing process

• Improving the yield when extracting oil from oil sands • Reducing the in-port maintenance time for nuclear

submarines

• Reducing the water usage in a tomato plant

• Increasing the throughput of baggage handling • Improving customer service in a hospital

Why am I still at Stroud?

• I continue to be challenged and interested by the work • The opportunities I am presented with are

significantly greater than my peers

• It’s my company; I impact the decisions we make and the direction we head

Questions?