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Writer's pictureAilee Guo

Management Consulting as a Career

This Saturday, I had the privilege of attending Paul Okundaye’s Think Tank as a part of the

Associate National Lead program. Paul Okundaye graduated with his MBA from Harvard business school, was a senior associate consultant at Bain and Company and was a Growth Strategy Manager at Microsoft.


We first learned that there are two different areas of business which many business students choose in university. These two choices are Investment Banking and Management Consulting. As a student who is wanting to pursue business, I was very interested in the different paths that people choose. The biggest difference between the two is that management consulting firms advise companies on their toughest strategic challenges (most of the time, they present to the higher “management” level of the companies), while investment banks help companies complete large financial transactions (possible large investments).


Some characteristics of a management consulting job that I’ve noticed are:

  • Working on different business problems across multiple industries.

  • Work closely with clients.

  • Work with people from diverse educational and professional backgrounds.

  • May want to pursue graduate studies after a few years of work experience.

  • Many business travel trips and weekly travel.

Next, we learned about defining the market; market sizing is divided into 3 parts:

  • Total addressable market: all potential customers

  • Serviceable addressable market: potential customers to be served

  • Serviceable obtainable market: market share of the distributor

To calculate the market size we can generally use: (# of target users) x (# of products per user) x (expected amount of purchase) = market size (in dollars)


However, it should be noted that there are still many factors involved in the calculation of market size that need to be considered. Such factors include market share, product popularity, economic state, etc.


Overall this Think Tank contained very helpful insight for the consulting industry, and introduced me to a new possibility for a career path.


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