Bain & Company Careers vs Working at McKinsey or BCG

Bain & Company careers are different versus competitors BCG and McKinsey. Jenny Rae explains to us, not about Bain Case Interviews like in some of our other videos, but on culture. What it’s like to work for Bain & Company. What are the things that set Bain apart from BCG and McKinsey? What would make a material difference in your experience consulting there? Watch Jenny Rae, an ex-Bain consultant, as she gives insight to the differences and things to be aware of.

Bain & Company Careers vs Working at McKinsey or BCG YouTube Transcription

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work for Bain, instead of McKinsey or BCG? Now, a lot of people will get offers at multiple firms and will go through the full sales process at multiple firms. But there aren’t a lot of people who actually know from an insider’s perspective, what it’s like to work at Bain, and McKinsey, and at BCG. So today I’m just gonna talk about what it’s like to work at Bain from my perspective and the perspective of the other Bain members of our Management Consulted team, as well as some of our readers that worked at Bain.

Bain Culture

Bain does a lot around its’ culture. Bain is the smallest of the three firms and you feel it in a couple of different ways. First of all Bain has really focused on their local staffing model. They focus on building depth into their local staffing base and making sure that you are staffed on projects with teams from a single office. So if you work in Chicago, you work with a Chicago team. If you work in New York, you work with a New York team. And what that does is it builds cohesion inside the office, but probably more importantly it enables you to travel less.

So point one, is that you have this very strong local office culture, you know the people in your office, and you know people at multiple levels in your office. So where some people in other firms feel maybe more like they’re a number, with a Bain career you really feel like you’re known, and you build a strong network inside that office.

Travel at Bain and Private Equity

But then the second benefit is that you’re not traveling as much. So whereas a lot of the standard consulting is 80 to 100% travel, Bain is more in the 40 to 60% range for travel over the lifetime of your career. One other thing that’s really interesting about working for Bain, is that they have a very strong private equity practice. That means that they do different kinds of work on balance. So generally while you’re there if you’re doing a due diligence project, you’re gonna have a different kind of work than you would if you were working on a McKinsey project. And McKinsey does due diligence and BCG does due diligence, but the volume of due diligence and private equity work that Bain does, means that you’re generally going to come up against more of those type of projects.

During my Bain career I had the opportunity to do 11 projects in only two and a half years. And some of that was that I did three due diligence projects. So doing those quick projects gave me more industry experience, more strategy oversight, and more client exposure. All of which I really liked.

Summary for Bain & Company Careers

So in summary, if you have a Bain career versus McKinsey or BCG, you can expect to have:

  • A different and stronger local office culture.
  • You can also expect to travel less.
  • And finally, you can expect to do more specific types of work that will give you a higher volume of projects, such as for private equity work.

Overall I really enjoyed my Bain career,. But I’m always interested in hearing your perspective of whether you’ve liked it, and specific projects that you’ve worked on. If you haven’t worked for Bain, but have questions about working for Bain, we’d love to hear those. So leave a comment in our comment box. Make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel, reach out to us on social, or as always you can find us at www.managementconsulted.com. Thanks for watching.

Filed Under: Consulting Firms