Phase 3

Andrew Ow
Andrew Ow
Aug 31, 2018 · 6 min read

My first job out of college was as an analyst for a management consulting company. Consulting companies sell business advice to corporations. In order to provide advice, the consulting company will send a small team to a client’s office for a few months. The team will work on the project (interviewing people, analyzing data, etc.), and at the end they will have a recommendation for what the client should do.

As you can imagine, as a fresh college graduate, I didn’t have much experience — so why was I giving “advice” to big companies? But the genius of consulting companies is pairing experienced managers with green recruits. The managers might have done a similar case or worked in the industry for many years. While the green recruits (me) were in theory smart and willing to work long hours.

My first cases were not that sexy, as it were. For example, we helped a client comply with some new tax regulations. This was more like pushing papers around than high powered strategic advice. But eventually I was staffed on an interesting case involving marketing strategy.

The first phase of the case involved analyzing some data the company had sitting around. As the most junior person, I was handling all the Excel work. This was right up my alley, and the whole team did a good job. The client was impressed with our work, and we sold another phase of the project to them. The second phase of the case was similar (I don’t remember the details now), and also went really well. As a 22-year-old, it was fun for me to travel to different cities, receive praise for good work, and enjoy fancy dinners with the team.

Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

With two successful phases completed, we sold Phase 3 of the project. It was destined to be different. To understand why, you have to understand the structure of the team. The most senior person on a project is the Partner, that’s the person that sold the project, let’s call him Gabe. Then, there was a Senior Manager, who we will call Mason. The Senior Manager position was known as a meat-grinder since everyone works super hard to try to be promoted to Partner. My direct manager we’ll call Jacob. He managed both myself, and a Senior Consultant who had recently graduated from business school named Alice.

Since I had done a good job on Phase 1 & 2, before Phase 3 started it was decided that I would manage two consultants in our India office that were modeling experts. They were going to build the Excel model that was the crux of what we would recommend to our clients.

The project began. But shortly after, Gabe’s mother passed away, and he took time off the project. Jacob also had a delayed honeymoon planned, so he was away for several weeks. To top it off, at about the same time, Mason’s mother passed away. Mason insisted on coming back to the project without taking any time off. Without Jacob, Alice and I were working directly with Mason — but something had changed.

The Excel model was not going well. The consultants assured me that the model was going smoothly week after week. I had no experience with management, and I didn’t know what to believe. At some point, weeks into the project, I began to have the sinking realization that the model wasn’t at all what the client wanted. Mason began to see this part of the project as a failure, and he let me know it.

In the meanwhile, Alice was responsible for interviewing people involved in distribution to add a qualitative element to our Excel analysis. She was having a tough time of it. Mason warned us that one of our important clients hated “school bus consultants” — consultants who just graduated and didn’t know anything (of course, this description fit Alice and I perfectly).

At one point, Alice and I were joking about whether Stanford or Berkeley students were more intelligent, and Mason butted into the conversation to say “I don’t think there’s much intelligence being displayed by anyone on this project.”

That was uncomfortable.

With so many people off the project, we did add another manager who I’ll call Jenny. It was halfway through the project, and we had nothing. The interviews hadn’t turned up any insights, and the Excel model was bad. At this point, Mason had started calling us into meetings regularly where he yelled at us or made sarcastic comments. For the only time in my life thus far, I almost fainted due to a combination of the stress, lack of sleep, or long hours. When I got back from splashing water on my face, Mason was still yelling at Alice. Jenny (who was pregnant) would go into the bathroom occasionally to throw up.

Whereas just a few months ago on my tax project, I had wanted to do more interesting strategic work, I started asking Jenny for all the boring tasks that I knew I could do but didn’t take much thought. Jenny gently told me that she trusted me and I had to keep going, so I did, but I missed pushing paper around.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Jacob eventually came back. He met with everyone and quickly figured out how the project was going off the rails. I told him things were terrible and that I was doing a horrible job. He said “If I were to give grades, I’d give you and Alice a ‘B.’ But I’d give Mason and I a ‘F’” I felt slightly better, but apparently was not convinced as I remember calling my mom one evening and telling her I might get fired soon.

Because of all the lost time, we had 5 weeks to deliver a project we initially scoped for 10 weeks. Jacob wrote on the whiteboard “the darkest hour is right before the dawn,” which I took to mean we were screwed. But somehow things started to turn around. Jacob providing much needed cloud coverage for Alice and I. We also replaced the team doing the Excel model with Carla — a financial modeling expert who turned out to be great.

We worked every weekend, and through Thanksgiving. Jacob/Alice/Jenny put together interviews and got some insights, and Carla and I created a model. We ultimately presented the project to the client and they were satisfied. It wasn’t a home run, but from where it was 5 weeks ago, I would call it a miraculous recovery.


Like many memories, I struggle to draw a single lesson from the experience, but here are some that I think about now:

  • It’s striking how unrelated stress and productivity can be. The first five weeks of the project were incredibly stressful, but you could argue that the amount of productivity of the team was near zero. All those hours and uncomfortable meetings — for nothing. I always remember this, and it’s made it as one of our company philosophies.
  • I have a litany of mistakes I made on the project. I could have better managed the Excel model, I could have spoken up to Mason when I thought he was being unproductive, I could have sought help outside the project structure, etc.
  • At the same time, I realized that sometimes managers can put people in situations where they are not set up to succeed. I think about that sometimes, and would like to do more than just hire smart people and let them figure it out. After all, if you throw a child in the deep end of the pool and they happen to swim, that doesn’t make you a brilliant swim coach.
  • It’s easy to imagine being angry at the consulting company or Mason as the villain in the story, but I’ve chosen not to do that. It seemed like a multiple point of failure situation, and you certainly can’t plan around parents dying.
  • I’m thankful for Jenny and Jacob for managing what in retrospect must have been a nightmare situation for them. They were rather kind to Alice and I (though we certainly shared a lot of the blame). I’m not sure if I understood at the time, but it’s been more than 10 years, and I still remember some of their advice.

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