Consultant Spotlight: Pavan Madduri
Pavan Madduri is a Manager at Bain & Company in London. He graduated from UCLA in 2011 with a major in Neuroscience. On campus, he was involved with Dance Marathon and Outside Funds. One piece of advice Pavan has for UCLA students interested in consulting is to “ invest in case preparation by forming a study group with your friends and make an effort to learn more about the specific culture of the office and firm that you are applying to.”
Q: What led you to pursue consulting as a career?
A: Consulting felt like the perfect opportunity to continue to build on the foundation of business skills that I was establishing through my MBA program, and it also gave me exposure to a really wide variety of industries and strategic issues. I am able to work with a really talented and diverse group of colleagues in an environment that has a huge focus on employee development. There is a focus on providing feedback and training and constant improvement, so it’s a really great career to continue building different skill sets.
I was also drawn to the opportunity to work with some of the biggest companies in the world and help them navigate their most challenging and strategic questions. In general, it is a job where you are continuously learning because you are changing paces and industries, facing new types of problems, building really cool client relationships, and really understanding what it takes to drive change in a large organization.
Q: What does a typical workday look like for you?
A: This is a tough question to answer because there is no real routine. I typically wake up pretty early because I’m working on a really client-heavy case right now. There are many meetings throughout the day that it can be tough to get content work done during the day, so I wake up early to do a bit of dedicated thinking time and plan out priorities for the day, for myself, and for my team. I review content from the day before, catch up on emails, and try to get that done early in the morning. Then, we also have our team huddle in the morning — we typically have a morning huddle and an afternoon huddle. In the morning huddle, we discuss the major meetings for the day, the key end-of-day deliverables, and then everyone shares their individual priorities, any key roadblocks that they might have, any key questions that they want to raise, and things they might want to discuss. After that, everyone is off on their own depending on what their priorities are. So, like I said, my current case is really client-heavy, so I’ll have a couple of meetings with various clients.
There are different types of meetings, so one type of meeting that we have regularly with the most senior clients is to check in and to update them on the process, in terms of where we are, our work plan, what are the key pieces of content that we are working on, and what our plan of action is on those. We get feedback on pieces of content as well, ending on upcoming meetings and when we need to present that content. So, like I mentioned, there are just a couple of client engagements throughout the day.
After a few meetings, I’ll have a break where I can spend a bit of additional time synthesizing some of the insights I’ve learned from various client meetings, so my next meetings will be more focused on getting input and data for the problems that we are working on. When I have breaks in between meetings, I’ll try to get some of that stuff on the slide and start thinking about what the story line is for the answer overall. Then, another kind of anchor meeting that we have every day is a session with some of my team members who I supervise. We just check in, and the team members can show me what they’re working on and ask me any questions. I can give live feedback and we can brainstorm on things together.
Then, I might spend a bit more time refining materials that I’m working on for upcoming client meetings and respond to other emails, internally and externally with clients. We also have some check-ins with partners on the case. We discuss what is going on with the case, get them updated on various client meetings we have had, and show them the big pieces of content that will be going to major client meetings to get their input and feedback.
After that we will have our end-of-day huddle with the team where we go over progress from the day, what are the key things we want to finish, and just making sure everyone is on-track for a good finish. We want to make sure that nobody is going to have a super late night, so if anybody does have a ton on their plate, we try to figure out how we can reprioritize and only do things that have to be done that night and otherwise pick up the next day. Finally, I spend time planning for the next day, preparing for client meetings, and reviewing content the rest of the team has sent through.
Q: What is the best aspect of being a consultant?
A: You never stop learning. You’re never doing the same thing for too long. You’re constantly building up your problem solving muscles. My favorite part of the case is the ramp-up period at the beginning where you’re just a sponge and just learning as much as you can about a new topic, and you kind-of start to put some structure to the ambiguous challenge that you’ve been given. Another great aspect of being a consultant is just working with a really smart group of people and a really driven group of people who are really eager to help each other succeed. Every person on the team plays a critical role and is responsible for something that drives the answers. We try to give ownership to everybody so it’s a really good team environment.
We also have like regular fun team events to celebrate our achievements and comradery, like nice meals, and we have even gone go-karting and seen shows together. Also, a really cool aspect of being a consultant is the global training. This is like an international training where you get to meet colleagues from around the world, and you get to share experiences with each other and learn from each other. There are a lot of fun social activities built into it, so it’s a good mix of learning from each other, training, learning new parts for your consulting tool kit, while also building relationships with other people from around the world.
Q: What skills are most important for consulting careers?
A: I will boil it down to three. First, I would say adaptability. Obviously, you are changing cases all of the time. You might be thrown a new problem on any given day. So, even if you’re working on a large initiative that you’ve planned out for the next couple of weeks, something might come up of higher priority for the client and you are told that the client needs a three-day mini project. This happened to me recently where I was planning something out, but I was told that the client needed this sort of surged resource on something for three days, so you have to put everything aside, scope out this new piece of work, set up new meetings, drive to a new answer, and deliver on that within a few days. It really keeps you on your toes all the time — you need to be really adaptable and comfortable dealing with ambiguous problems and bringing some kind of a structure to it.
Second, I would highlight the analytical rigour. It’s very important to be able to conduct really thorough qualitative and quantitative research, extract insights and synthesize data from a variety of sources like interviews, secondary reports, Excel modeling, and more, and synthesize across all of those and tie it together in your overall answer.
The last one that I will highlight is communication skills. It’s really important to not only crack the answer to the case that you are working on, but also to create that story around it and communicate it in a way that allows you to mobilize the management team and ensures that the client can effectively implement your solution. Being able to tie that back to the overall story and the overall answer, and then communicating that through slides — as well as the way you present it to the client and how you build that buy-in from the client — is really important.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge as a consultant so far?
A: I think it’s the unpredictability in your work schedule. What you’re working on can vary so much and I think it can be challenging to have that sense of instability. There are a lot of pros to it — things never get too monotonous — but I think that some of the cons are something as simple as you’re not always going to know when you’ll be able to eat lunch — like a meeting might get thrown in or you might not be able to work out regularly at the same time — so you won’t be able to get into everyday routines.
I think for the most part you can try to build it in, and you can often block off time. But since you are working in a client-facing industry, sometimes some things are out of your control, and things get thrown in, so you have to build your schedule around that. Sometimes the hours and the demand from your clients can be a bit spiky, and you just have to be okay with moving around your personal schedule sometimes to accommodate that.
But, I think that consulting in general, as an industry, is trying to get better at acknowledging this and building solutions to this. At Bain, one thing that we do is really proactively trying to protect an early evening every week to make sure that you can block that off if you want a dinner with friends or whatever it is and committing to that. It is very, very rare that you would have to give it up, and I’ve never seen that happen. At the end of the day, some cases will be more demanding than others, but being able to be comfortable with that spikyness can be challenging sometimes.
Q: What surprised you about your role or the industry when you first started?
A: The thing that surprised me the most is probably the level of client exposure you get, especially if I’m really early on, that’s incredible. You really get to work with some of the top leaders in a business and get to pick their brain, share your views, have those views heard, and make a really big impact early on. I was really surprised about how early you get that exposure to high levels of seniority within the client and critical stakeholders that you are engaging with, so that is quite cool.
And then I think that I was also surprised in terms of the level of focus and investment in digital capabilities that consulting firms have made. I thought I expected them to be a little bit behind the curve on that, but I think consulting firms are really proactively investing in these capabilities, and it’s really exciting to see firms pick up these digital skills, in addition to the strategy and management core capabilities that they’ve always had. It allows us, consultants, to pick up those skills and capabilities as well and to see how the traditional strategy cases have evolved from what it used to be to really incorporate these digital capabilities, and it allows us to add an even greater amount of value to the clients.
Q: What were some resources you suggest students interested in consulting take advantage of at UCLA?
A: I don’t think I personally did a great job of utilizing the UCLA resources. I know that there are some great recruiting events where the companies come and have representatives that you can chat with. I think that the key resource is reaching out to people in your network and engaging with them. Find people who work at the firms you are looking at — it is so easy now with LinkedIn to reach out to people. When you reach out, seeing that you go to UCLA, I’m always happy to have a chat with someone who went to UCLA whenever I can. Reach out to people, even if you are not directly connected to them, and try to get a better sense of the culture of the office and firm that you’re applying for, because offices vary quite a bit with industries they work with and their strengths. So definitely see what suits you best.
Lastly, whatever kind of casing resources clubs offer, take advantage of that. Join a study group with a couple of friends and case each other regularly. When you do reach out to the consulting firm that you are applying to, they typically have some resources that firm has provided them to actually case candidates, so those are always really good ones to do a test-drive on.
Q: What is one piece of advice you’d give to students recruiting for consulting?
A: I think the biggest one is investing in case preparation by forming a study group with your friends. It’s really helpful to give cases and to do cases, so it’s good to have pairs or teams of three that you can case each other. In addition to the case preparation, I think it is important to make an effort to learn more about the specific culture of the office and firm that you are applying to, because I do believe that the culture and the strengths of a specific office and firm vary across geographies and across firms, so it is good to get more insight into how that office and firm operate. Figuring out their staffing model is also good to know, because that varies and can have a big impact on your experience.
