So you've decided to leave consulting. Now what?

Part II of what I wish I'd known before leaving Deloitte for a Series B tech co.

Greetings! Welcome to Part II in a series about transitioning from consulting to start-up—if you missed Part I, I’d recommend starting there. This post offers up suggestions for how to think through your next move. This will be most helpful to those folks who are sure they want to leave consulting… but have no idea where to start.

Have you ever been to the Cheesecake Factory? Or literally any Asian restaurant located in a strip mall? Then you’ve probably had the experience of flipping through a 10-page, 200-item menu, only to be totally stumped on what to order. That’s choice paralysis right there. But here’s the thing: not only can too many choices prevent us from making any decision at all, but it also often leads to worse decisions.

You might’ve experienced something similar as you scrolled through jobs on LinkedIn on your bathroom break between the prep meeting for the prep meeting… and the prep meeting. Maybe you even got to the point where you saved a couple roles that looked interesting—hey, I could be an Ops Manager at Uber, why not—but then you had thirty customer interviews the next week and that was the end of that.

So you want to leave consulting. Great! What the hell do you do next?

Step 1: Reflect on your experiences so far.

You’re on a hamster wheel in consulting. By the time you’re nearing the end of one project, you’re already thinking about (or trying to run far, far away from) the next one. So there’s not a lot of built-in time for reflection. Ideally you’ve had at least a few projects and experiences under your belt, and you’re able to zoom out and contemplate what you’d like your next act to look like. And while your job doesn’t have to satisfy every need, you do spend much of your waking hours at work. So, even if you don’t feel like you’re fulfilling your life mission, you should feel engaged and motivated. Here are some questions to help you tease out where you want to lean in and what you should try to avoid in shopping for the next role.

• Do you have a vision for the next 3-5 years? If not, you’re fucked. Just kidding. But if you can even elucidate what role you’d like to be in two jobs from now, that’d be useful to work backwards from. When I went through this process, I had my heart set on becoming a GM someday. So, having had a ton of pure strategy experience at Deloitte, I set out to prove that I had the operational chops to actually get shit done. So I looked for roles that could provide a strong narrative around execution at companies whose growth trajectory I felt really bullish on.

• What parts of consulting would you like to keep? What about consulting do you like—the travel, the project-based nature, the caliber of people, the ability to switch gears every few months? In other words, what might you miss about consulting when you leave? The answer might be nothing, I’m over it. But it’s worth pondering.

• What are you naturally drawn to? What headlines on the NYT or WSJ catch your eye? What do you like to read or learn about in your abundant free time? What newsletters are you signed up for? What doesn’t feel like work to you? What could you talk for 30 minutes about without preparing?

• What type of work are you energized by? Which projects have you really enjoyed so far? What stands out to you in that experience? Was it the people, the type of project, the industry of the client, the well-stocked cafeteria? What would you like to do more of?

• What parts of consulting and which types of work are you repelled by? What drains you? What activities feel like a waste of time? What do you have zero interest in getting good at or learning more about?

Jot your notes down somewhere, so you can refer to it during the next exercise, which I’ll introduce without further ado…

Step 2: Create your priority stack.

Now, you’re gonna make a list (we love lists! Yes we do!) of all the things one might consider when evaluating a job offer. This is an unstructured brainstorm, so try to generate as many items as possible. I’ve shared an example below:

Spot the misaligned sticky note for some gratuitous anxiety.

Next, let’s separate these stickies into three categories:

• Must haves: This seems self-explanatory, but be sure to give each item in this category a fair shake. There’s no harm in having high standards, but know that if you have a ton of stickies in this bucket, your dream role may be a needle in a haystack—you should be prepared to invest a lot of time and energy finding it.

• Important but not deal-breakers: This is where we need some real honesty. You certainly don’t have to admit to a recruiter or hiring manager that you’d be willing to accept a lower salary for the right role—I’ll keep that little secret between you and me. But it’s important to create some white space between your non-negotiables and things that you care a lot about, but won’t dissuade you from taking an offer that otherwise checks all the boxes.

• Nice to haves: This is the category of things you’re more or less ambivalent about. These are the things that would have to be actively shitty for you to dip out of the recruitment process. Kombucha fountain? Fab! 200 vs. 3,000 employees? Sure! No 401K matching? Fine.

  

Great! We’re feeling some momentum here. Now, I need you to replace each stickie note with your best guess for the type of work, salary, industry, etc. that most appeals to you.

Now, my friends, we’ve got something to work with.

Step 3: Test your priority stack with real people.

Congratulations. You’ve just generated your priority stack, a working hypothesis of what your next role should look like. Remember, you don’t have to have 100%—or even 85%—confidence in each stickie note or tier.

But you’ve done some important legwork that allows you to:

• Talk to your peers and leverage your weak ties. Think you want to be a Strategy Manager at a high-growth company with a great boss and good work-life balance? Super, now go find folks in your network who seem to fit that very profile. I’ll cover good questions to ask in the next post, but the intent here is to get very tactical about what work looks and feels like for this individual. Recent projects. What they like about their role, what they’d change if they had the chance. Whether the company actually fosters a healthy work-life balance, and which traits about their manager they like or dislike. And then refine your priority stack! Move things up or down a tier. Tweak the descriptions. And if you’re scraping the barrel with your personal network, don’t be scared to send out some feelers to randos on LinkedIn. People are generally friendly and will be open to chatting for 20 minutes because they want that sweet, sweet referral money.

• Narrow down your job searches. Friends don’t let friends doom-scroll the Jobs page. Now that you’ve got a working definition of your next role, you can search for jobs more strategically. Don’t just gravitate towards the shiny objects; try to use this priority stack as your North Star. If you do feel a magnetic pull towards a role that doesn’t seem to fit with your stack, go back and pressure-test the stack itself.

• Cite as reasons for why you want a particular role in interviews. This priority stack also comes in handy when you’re actually in the interview funnel. I guarantee that you will get asked, Why this company? or What about this role excites you? You’ve got your answer ready-made.

Inertia is a powerful force, and getting started is tough. You’re told that you have virtually limitless exit opportunities as a consultant—but instead of feeling encouraged, I remember being incredibly overwhelmed by that. So, here’s a link to my stickie note Jamboard. Feel free to make a copy on your personal drive, add more stickies, change your answers, play around with it, go nuts.

You got this.

Before you go: leave me a comment below if you’d like for me to cover a particular topic. And feel free to throw me a heart or buy me a coffee :~) if you enjoyed this post!