Consulting is an enormous industry with many types of firms, but the kind of work most consultants do day to day is similar enough to describe.

A company hires a consulting firm to answer a question it can’t answer on its own. A small team works on that one question for a few weeks or months, often from the client’s offices. They gather data, interview people inside and outside the company, build the analysis in Excel, and turn what they find into a recommendation, almost always delivered as a slide deck. McKinsey calls each of these projects a study, and an engagement manager, or EM, runs the team day to day. I worked at McKinsey and BCG, so this piece is about strategy firms like them.

The question often arrives vague. Ethan Rasiel, a former McKinsey associate, writes in The McKinsey Way:

In my first study at the Firm, our team’s mission was to help a New York investment bank “increase profitability”—the business equivalent of a patient telling the doctor “I don’t feel well.” In another case, a McKinsey team went in to evaluate expansion opportunities for a division of a manufacturing company. After a few weeks of gathering and analyzing data, the team realized that what the division needed was not expansion; it was closure or sell-off.

The surprising thing about working in consulting was how obvious some of the recommendations were to my clients. But almost no one at the client was responsible for thinking strategically about what the company should do. People are specialized by function and division, and often no one is thinking about the overlaps, including simple questions like “who is worrying about the customer?”

For junior consultants, the day is mostly Excel and slides, with meetings in between

Rasiel’s overview of a day is mostly meetings:

In the course of a typical day at McKinsey, you could start with a quick brainstorming session at 9 a.m., move on to a client interview at 10, a factory tour at 11, and then a sandwich lunch with your director. You might follow this with more client interviews, an end-of-day team meeting, and then a quick trip down to Wharton to participate in a recruiting seminar.

Here are some example things you might do as a consultant. The first-person parts are from my own days, and the rest come from consultants who have written about theirs.

Three hours grinding on the deck. Data analysis, then iterations on the slides that come out of it. Somewhere in that block, a quick message to the EM or another consultant on the team to check a storyline I’m playing with before I sink more time into it. A McKinsey business analyst about a year into the job, describing a day on Wall Street Oasis, spends an hour of heads-down time on a “skeleton doc” structured as market context, competitive landscape, business unit context, and growth opportunities. Late at night the analyst sends pages “to visual graphics in India,” and reviews what comes back the next morning before the team check-in.

A ninety-minute problem-solving session. The team in a room testing the story and the slides, with some mock role play where someone takes the client’s side. In the Wall Street Oasis day, it’s a half-hour session with the EM and partner on the skeleton doc, where the analyst also gets “an update from the Partner on senior client discussions.”

Lunch in the office, the whole office, with updates from partners and from the various project teams on what they are working on. It is one of the few times you see people outside your own study. I’d use it to ask a different partner about the retail questions he was working on, because I wanted to get staffed on one of his projects later. The analyst on Wall Street Oasis puts it more bluntly: McKinsey “is entirely sponsorship driven,” meaning it matters which partners know your work and back you.

A check-in call with my client counterpart, the junior person on the client side I was paired with. Pressure-test the ideas with someone who knows the company, and pick up whatever gossip there was about the latest restructuring. In the Wall Street Oasis day, the call goes the other direction too: at eight in the evening, the SVP running the transformation calls the analyst “out of the blue” to discuss the model, with “a few questions to pressure test some of the uplift assumptions.”

An interview with a market expert, set up through AlphaSights. Industry trends, how investors are looking at the space, whatever the workstream needs that week. AlphaSights is an expert network: it connects its clients with “thousands of specialist industry experts across the globe,” and describes the calls as “30-60 minute telephone conversations.”

An hour after dinner at home, finalizing the draft review deck for the partner, which the EM sends over in the morning. Evenings are also when comments come back on earlier drafts. In the Wall Street Oasis day, the EM returns “minor easy to implement comments” while the partner “wants to understand why we aren’t being more ambitious,” which turns into a call to walk the partner through the client context. John, who joined McKinsey’s implementation group in Sydney after more than 20 years in industry, describes a quieter evening on the firm’s careers blog, on a project where the team stayed at a hotel: “I use my evening to adjust my problem solving pages, send emails and prepare for the next day before heading to bed around 11:30pm.”

The intensity varies more than the activities do. The Wall Street Oasis analyst’s day ran from a 7am inbox check to a taxi home after midnight, and the analyst said it came from “a relatively intense engagement” and that the job “changes quite significantly every 6 months.” Another commenter, who had also worked at McKinsey, Bain, or BCG, called it “very much on the hardo-side of the spectrum,” meaning the intense end, and said they never did a study where they came in at 8:30 to prepare pages before the check-in or worked on internal projects past midnight. The analyst’s summary of the job: “the role of the BA [business analyst] is to make sure the question gets answered,” which means leaning on internal and external experts, pushing the thinking forward, and pulling in leadership when needed.

Some things happen often but not every day. You get staffed on internal knowledge projects, like building out a capability around a new service line in a specific industry or geography, or analyzing recent healthcare legislation for a practice. And there is more fun in it than the hours suggest: offsites, events while traveling, and trainings, which are intense but also enjoyable.

Most of the working day, though, happens at a laptop. One published estimate of the split comes from Jenny Rae on Management Consulted: about 10% of the time gathering information, 60% in Excel ranking it and building scenarios, 20% putting the insights into PowerPoint, and 10% in meetings. On top of that, Rae lists recruiting, travel, and sleeping and eating, and says “All those things put together definitely add up to more than eight hours a day.”

Rasiel’s estimate of the hours: “A typical McKinsey team works at the client for 10 to 14 hours a day, plus a day over the weekend at the office.” Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter reported in Harvard Business Review in 2009 that in their survey of 1,000 people in professional services, including consultants, bankers, and lawyers, 94% “said they put in 50 or more hours a week, with nearly half that group turning in more than 65 hours a week.”

The core medium is PowerPoint

PowerPoint remains the ultimate medium of business ideas. I suspect this is shifting slightly because of AI, mostly to virtual dashboards and other web artifacts, but I suspect the slide will survive and thrive in this new era.

Here is Rasiel again:

McKinsey communicates with its clients through presentations. They may be formal presentations: meetings held around boardroom tables with neatly bound blue books. They may be informal presentations between a few managers at the client and a couple of McKinsey consultants with several charts hastily stapled together into a deck. As junior members advance through the ranks at the Firm, they spend a lot of time presenting ideas to other people.

Printing them was its own job. Rasiel describes “the 4 a.m. vigil in the copier room waiting for the presentation booklets to be put together for tomorrow’s (although now it’s today’s) big progress review,” and once spending “a pleasant two hours early one morning removing one chart from 40 spiral-bound copies of a blue book and replacing it with a new version, all because of one typo.”

Ezra Gershanok, a former McKinsey business analyst, put it less kindly in a Business Insider account syndicated on Yahoo: “My work output was always a PowerPoint deck, and its biggest impact was making whoever paid for us to be there look good.”

Often before slides are created, consultants will create a ghost deck based on the problem statement and hypotheses that come out of the diagnostic or early stages of an engagement. Paul Friga, in The McKinsey Engagement, defines each page of it, the ghost slide, as:

a draft slide that is used to capture ideas at an early stage in the problem-solving process. It comprises a title (usually at the top of the slide), a data label, and the data (or a sketch of what the data will be once collected). The most important part of the ghost slide, and the only part that should reflect any substantial amount of “analytical energy,” is the title of the slide.

The title, as I teach it, is the “so what?” It is a full sentence stating the conclusion, and everything on the page exists to support it.

From The McKinsey Mind, which Rasiel wrote with Friga:

Work planning is usually the job of the engagement manager (EM) running the day-to-day operation of the team. Early on in the engagement, generally right after the team has taken a stab at an initial hypothesis, the EM will determine what analyses need to be done and who will take responsibility for them. She will discuss with each team member what that person’s tasks are, where to look for the data needed to complete them, and how the likely end product should look. Then the team members go off in their separate directions to get the job done.

The book’s name for the ghost deck is a “ghost pack.” Sometimes the EM “will sketch out a ‘ghost pack,’ showing templates for each end product, which can help guide the analytical process, especially for less-experienced consultants.”

Friga also gives a time budget for this front end: on a three-month study with about 360 hours of analysis time, the framing, meaning the key question, the issue tree, and the hypotheses, should take about 18 hours, or two days.

A large part of the analysis gets cut before the client sees it

A former McKinsey associate, quoted in Friga’s The McKinsey Engagement, describes a study where the engagement manager couldn’t meet with him for the first two weeks, so he gathered everything he could find on his own:

My pride in the 200-page slide deck was destroyed at my first progress meeting with the engagement manager. She must have said “so what” 180 times as she literally tore each irrelevant slide out of the deck and threw it to the floor. It was a long and painful meeting.

The McKinsey Mind describes the same test from the EM’s side: “At McKinsey, the shorthand for this process was for someone on the team, usually the EM, to ask, ‘What’s the so what?’ for a particular analysis. What does it tell us, and how is that useful? What recommendation does it lead to? Consultants aren’t in the business of drawing pretty pictures, and that’s not what their clients pay them lots of money to do.”

Rasiel’s version is the night his EM found him still building charts:

He picked up my draft, leafed through it, and said, “Ethan, it’s eleven o’clock. The client will love this. No one will be able to absorb more than you have here. Call it a day. Don’t boil the ocean.”

The person who did the analysis may not be the one who presents it

Rasiel, as a first-year:

I was too “green” to make the presentation. My EM got the job instead. I was disappointed, but I understood the rationale behind the decision. It then became my job, over the course of several hours, to make my EM as conversant with my analysis as I was. The next day, he delivered the presentation very convincingly.

At BCG I was the lead writer and organizer for a big report on “Transformation.” Despite doing much of the work, I didn’t even get my name on the report. Which still makes me a bit sad :-(

Analysts build pages and models, associates own a workstream, the EM owns the workplan and the client team, and partners sell the next study; I’ve laid out the roles at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain level by level.

The first-year job is changing faster than the job description

Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, said this on Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast in January 2026:

I’m now considered a dinosaur in our firm because I’m a little over 30 years with us, but the stuff that I did when I joined as an associate 32 years ago, we wouldn’t consider even doing right now. Why? Because clients do that stuff themselves and we are solving much more complicated interconnected questions with our clients.

Kate Smaje, who leads technology and AI at the firm, told Bloomberg in June 2025, in a story carried by Fortune: “Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that. Is that a bad thing? No, that’s a great thing.”

Researchers from Harvard Business School and other universities, working with BCG, ran a randomized trial with 758 of its consultants, about 7% of the firm’s individual contributors. On 18 consulting tasks that AI could handle, the paper found that consultants using AI “completed 12.2% more tasks on average, and completed tasks 25.1% more quickly,” and produced work of “more than 40% higher quality compared to a control group.” The researchers also built one task so AI would struggle, starting from the kind of business case BCG uses in job interviews. On that one, consultants using AI were “19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions compared to those without AI,” and “Professionals who had a negative performance when using AI tended to blindly adopt its output and interrogate it less.” I’ve written about how to check AI output before it goes into a deck.

If you’re deciding whether to do this job, my advice has always been that a two-year stretch at one of these firms can be game changing. Their work keeps adapting to the frontier of where the economy is, and right now that’s AI, so you get a close look at how large organizations are adapting to it. I’ve written more about whether to join in my report on the industry.