3Does MBB consulting equip you for entrepreneurship?

"If my ultimate career goal is to start a business, should I go into consulting first? Will my consulting experience help?"

My answer would be only partially yes, compared to many other other career options. But the preparation is certainly not adequate. And here’s why:

First, many people think consulting prepares you for starting a company because you get to learn about the high level strategy, and get to think about problems from a management perspective as a consultant. However, providing counseling to a company is very different from actually managing it, and managing an existing business is very different from starting something from 0-1. The 0-1 stage of entrepreneurship is called the pre-PMF stage, that is when you have not found product market fit. You don’t know if there is a market for your product yet. At this stage, and if you are working on a generic software product (i.e. not a product based on a patent or innovation in the lab), fast product iteration is needed, and success is a low probability event. I think consulting really doesn’t give you the experience to deal with that kind of uncertainty.

Second, junior consultants don’t really get any sales experience at MBB. I think when partners at consulting firms want to start their own businesses, they will have a much easier time, because they have reputation in their particular sector, and they have direct enterprise sales experiences.

So most of my colleagues in my age, in my cohort, if they are interested in startup, they often join a startup or a mid-sized company, working on areas such as marketing, enterprise sales, customer success or product analytics. Personally I think it would be good to think about career from a self-centered perspective, rather than being fixated on a particular job position. A prestigious position such as management consulting or investment banking can definitely give you an advantage in future career progression, but this advantage would not last if you don’t be firmly grounded in advancing knowledge & skillsets in a particular area. The area can be either functional (e.g., B2B sales, product analytics, social media marketing) or sector-specific (e.g., healthcare, oil & gas, financial services, law).