If you are thinking about consulting, or about to start preparing for case interviews, start with the job itself. The whole interview process makes far more sense once you can see the work behind it.
Consulting is helping a client tackle a business problem
A client, which can be a company, a government body or a non-profit, has a business problem it wants help with. Maybe profit is falling and nobody inside agrees why. Maybe the leadership is weighing a new market and wants an outside view before it commits.
So the client brings in a small team from outside. That team works with the client to break the problem into pieces, find the facts that matter and advise on the way forward.
What the team hands over depends on the project:
- a recommendation,
- a detailed plan,
- a new process or way of working,
- or months of help carrying a change through until it sticks.
What consultants do not do
Notice what consulting is not. Consultants do not run the client's business, and they do not make its decisions. The client decides and acts; the consultants help them get there well.
Their value is in how they break a problem down and what they find. That is also why the case interview exists: it is this exact job squeezed into about thirty minutes. (More on that in What a Case Interview Actually Is.)
Why clients bring in consultants
Why would a successful company pay an outside team to work on its problems? Clients rarely hire consultants because they are unable to make a decision. There are five common reasons, and most projects combine several of them:
- Expertise. Knowledge the client does not have in house, such as pricing, supply chains or a new technology.
- Experience. The team has seen the same kind of problem at other companies and knows what tends to work, and what does not.
- A holistic view of the market. A company sees mainly itself. Consultants see across competitors, industries and regions.
- Additional insights. An outside team asks the questions insiders have stopped asking, and reads the facts without old assumptions.
- Capacity. A capable team that can start on Monday and work on nothing else, for a problem too big, too sensitive or too far from the day job to tackle alone.
Knowing which of these reasons apply tells you what the client expects to get for its money. In a case interview, that shapes what a useful recommendation looks like.
The day to day: a problem, a client and a small team
Take an example. Harbor Grocers, a regional grocery chain, has seen sales grow while profit fell, and the leadership cannot agree on why.
A small team arrives. One person interviews store managers to hear what changed on the ground. One pulls three years of sales and cost data and looks for where the profit went. One studies what competitors have done with prices. The manager holds it together. On a smaller project, a single consultant might do all of this, working directly with the client.
A few things define the work:
- A small team, or sometimes one consultant, working directly with the client.
- Owning a workstream. As you gain experience, you work your way up to owning a specific piece of the problem, everything from the data analysis and market research to the final recommendation for that piece.
- Stakeholder management. A big part of the job is bringing people with you: presenting findings and ideas to your own team and to the client, so they get on board with the changes you are recommending or making.
- Regular client meetings. The team tests the emerging answer with the client long before the final one. The client is brought along every week, never only at the end.
Put simply, it is structured thinking, numbers and clear communication, done with other people under time pressure.
Why people choose consulting as a career
The reasons are worth knowing, partly because an interviewer will ask you, and partly so you can check they are true for you.
- The problems. You solve complex problems for a living, and the problem changes every few months, so the job rarely goes stale.
- Breadth. You experience many companies, industries and functions early, instead of one department of one company.
- Senior exposure. You engage with senior clients much earlier than in almost any other first job, presenting to people who run large organizations.
- A steep learning curve. You work in small, high-performing teams, and the feedback from strong people is fast and direct, often daily.
- A toolkit and a network. Structured thinking, analysis and communication, plus the people you meet, carry into almost any later career.
Most of these come back to two things: pace and variety. They are also what interviewers listen for when you answer "why consulting?", so pick the one or two that are genuinely true for you and be ready to say why. (If you are about to start networking, your fit stories should come first.)
Where to go next
- How the work is organized: What Does a Consulting Project Look Like? walks through the five stages of a project, and how each one maps onto a part of a case interview.
- Where you might work: Types of Consulting Firms covers MBB, the Big Four and boutiques.
- Where the career goes: The Consulting Career Path covers the ladder from Business Analyst to Partner.
- Learn the case: Learn Level 1 is free: what a case interview is, how you are scored, and one full case walked through.
The case interview is this job in thirty minutes. See what it feels like: your first case is free at The Case Room.