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Transitioning from Management Consulting to Corporate Strategy/M&A – the Interview Process

Many management consultants hardly complete two or three years in their jobs before they realize that there’s more to life than consulting. Consultants are called upon to do problem-solving on behalf of their clients, but they are forced to move on and find solutions to the next client’s difficulties before being able to see what impact their solutions had on the previous client’s business.

As a result, many consultants shift to industry and join the client’s side so that they can not only offer solutions but also take more ownership to formulate, execute, and implement a strategy from start to finish.

Some consultants leave for personal reasons, because they want to start a family or spend more time with their loved ones. As consulting is a very demanding career it often becomes hard to maintain work-life balance.

As a former consultant who decided to move from consulting to industry, I would like to share my personal journey on how I landed my opportunity in corporate strategy/M&A.

Interviews

After going through a handful of interviews through referrals, direct reach out from HR/hiring team, and LinkedIn/company website applications I would categorize my interviews into three buckets:

  1. Corporate strategy
  2. Corporate development
  3. BizOps / Strategy & Operations at tech firms

Corporate Strategy

What this team does depends on each individual company but you can get a good sense of the work by looking at whether the team comprises mostly strategy consultants vs investment bankers and whether it sits under the CEO, CFO, or COO.

What is corporate strategy? According to the Ivey Business Journal it has two parts:

  1. Improving the competitive strategies of operating units by capturing inter-divisional synergies; and
  2. Helping the organization to identify and manage strategic uncertainty.

My initial impression of corporate strategy was working on high priority projects and driving the most important decisions of the company. While this is somewhat true, a corporate strategy team are more like quarterbacks, which help other business units do their jobs better. As such, key requirements for these positions include stakeholder management skills, superior communication skills, and strong business acumen with an aptitude for strategic, critical, and analytical thinking. Strong emotional intelligence to deal with sensitivity of information and seniority of audience is also essential.

In terms of the interview process it followed the following steps:

  • HR interview (fit)
  • Multiple hiring team interviews (case + fit)
  • Group head interview (fit)

The cases were very similar to traditional consulting case interviews, and some firms also require a take-home case. This means you would be given a business problem and then asked to create a slide deck outlining your recommended solution.

Tip: research and understand what’s happening in the industry (e.g. trends, competitor landscape).

Corporate Development

While some companies would group corporate development and corporate strategy together a lot of them have it as separate teams.

The corporate development team is responsible for helping across a wide variety of strategic initiatives, including supporting the development, evaluation and execution of mergers & acquisitions (M&A), divestitures and joint ventures opportunities.

The job would entail three key activities:

  1. Play an important role in idea generation and review of potential acquisition and divestiture opportunities for strategic fit and value case
  2. Lead the preparation of financial analysis, including building of company forecast models, assessment of synergies / dis-synergies, valuation analysis, and impact of acquisition / divestiture
  3. Assist in the execution of acquisition and divestiture transactions, including day-to-day coordination of the transactions, leading due diligence efforts on deal negotiations

As you can imagine, teams are mostly comprised of ex-investment bankers and ex-transaction services professionals from the Big 4 (Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG).

In terms of the interview process, it followed the following steps:

  • Hiring team interviews (financial modeling + technical + fit)
  • Group head interview (fit)

The financial modeling involved building a 3-statement financial model to value a business (i.e., discounted cash flow (DCF)) and to check if the M&A between two companies would result in an accretive or dilutive situation. The technical interviews were just like any investment banking interviews which involved a lot of finance, accounting, valuation, DCF, and M&A model questions. Because I come from a consulting background with less exposure to these concepts (compared to investment bankers), I had to do a lot of self-education prior to the interviews. I found the 400 Investment Banking Interview Quesitons and Answers You Need to Know by Breaking into Wall Street (BIWS) really helpful, and the plethora of financial modeling courses on the Internet are a good starting point.

Tip: listen to company earning calls and do research on recent company transactions.

BizOps / Strategy & Operations at Tech firms

While similar to corporate strategy, the BizOps / Strategy & Operations positions at tech firms have a slightly different nuance, which involves needing to be extremely data-heavy and having an outstanding analytical mindset. Because tech firms revolve around data, the skill to process the data (e.g. using SQL), identify trends, and provide a solution are essential.

As a result, a lot of the interviews were structured in order to verify and test this skillset.

  • HR interview (fit)
  • Analytical test (technical)
  • Multiple hiring team interviews (case + fit)
  • Group head interview (fit)

The interview process with every tech firm involved doing some kind of analytical test, which tests your mathematical rigor. I was quite surprised to discover websites and platforms dedicated to prepare you for these analytical tests.

The case interview always involved receiving a large data set (i.e. in a CSV format), which you would need to use either Excel or SQL to analyze and come up with a recommendation to improve the business. Structuring your approach and coming up with an execution plan to implement the strategy (i.e. outlining an experiment that you would run to test your suggested product/business recommendation and then expanding it on a larger scale) and identifying operational challenges and ways to mitigate the risk was key.

Tip: learn SQL if you were never exposed to this query language.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these two articles on “transitioning from management consulting to corporate strategy/M&A” will guide you as you plan your next career move, and will help with your decision making process.

Ultimately, I have decided to join a corporate strategy/M&A team at a Fortune 500 company to get exposed to both the strategic initiatives and transaction side of things and I can’t wait to share more about my journey ahead.

Jason Oh works in the Strategy/M&A – Global Wealth & Asset Management team at Manulife. Previously, he was a Strategy Consultant at EY and Novantas with industry focus in the financial sector where he advised on corporate strategy planning, commercial due diligence, and data analytics.

Image: Pexels

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