Work-Life Balance in Consulting

The Reality of Consulting Hours

Consulting is not a 35-hour-a-week job. This is especially true from Monday through Thursday when client-facing demands peak. Many things do not happen unless consultants are there pushing the ball up the hill. The work is project-based, which means clients give you a time frame to deliver, and often the statement of work contains 12 weeks of effort in half that time.

Survey respondents described the grind plainly. Monday through Thursday offers no balance unless you are lucky enough to land a less intense project in your hometown. Most teams limit weekend work, but Monday through Friday remains a grind. Hours range from 55 to 65 per week, with 10 to 15 hour days on site with the client, full Fridays, and some weekend hours. One respondent billed six years of work in a four-year period. 1

Meeting client expectations comes first, and life events are frequently sacrificed to address client needs. Work hours have ranged as high as seven days at 13 hours per day or as low as five days at 10 hours per day depending on circumstances. Not going to the office on Fridays was one way to get some home time on weekdays, but the core challenge remains.

Balance Is Really Integration

One respondent reframed the concept effectively. They do not call it balance but integration. Exercise helps a lot, whether at the gym, the park, or running as much as possible. The quality of the experience depends heavily on the project, market, and service line. Federal markets in a Big Four firm can be manageable with State Department work but hectic with Navy engagements.

Consultants are measured against their utilization, and billed hours require significant effort to attain. In tight customer environments where clients question every hour billed, consultants find themselves working three hours to bill two. Travel similarly affects work-life balance because it is hard to go to the dentist when you are on a plane. Daily meditation, exercise, water, healthy eating, and being social help maintain perspective.

The survey scored work-life balance at 4.3 out of 7.0. Eighty-six consultants responded that the balance was okay, a little better than average. Consultants with seven or more years gave it higher marks for several reasons. Those who disliked the trade-off left the business and are not in the sample. Those who stayed got more efficient through the learning curve. They became financially stable enough to pick and choose projects. Perhaps they are satisficing their choice, career, and lifestyle, which is perfectly reasonable. 2

The Travel Experience

Travel in consulting is a beast, yet about a third of comments about it are positive. These road warriors maintain a zen attitude about travel as a cost of business. Why fight it when you can find the positive sides? There are delayed flights, travel woes, and follies, but consultants rated travel at 4.5 out of 7.0.

Global travel to Asia presents tough airports. Penny-pinching firms book economy class and cheap hotels. Travel is tiring, always in economy, and time-tight. One respondent spent two months in a city without seeing anything outside the client site and hotel. It is rarely glamorous, and hours spent traveling can make people more tired than the actual work. However, you can use your Thursday flight to go anywhere, and Fridays in the office can be anywhere in the world.

As a single person, travel was enjoyable even to less glamorous cities. As a married person with a child, it becomes more difficult. Long engagements where you cannot get home every weekend are particularly painful. Forty percent travel is great because it puts you in front of clients for valuable in-person work. On the flip side, spending 21 hours away from home in a 24-hour period to attend a one-hour meeting across the country is draining.

Zoom and shared drives have been game changers, especially for working parents. However, some travel remains necessary to bond with the client. The stoic approach prevails among veterans. Consulting is a choice you make to devote more time to work than home. A bad travel experience today becomes a great story to tell in a year. Going into the industry, you need to understand the type of consulting and the varying degrees of travel required.

Control Comes With Competence

This pattern echoes the ideas of Cal Newport, who argues that career satisfaction comes from building rare and valuable skills. Do great work and prove your worth to become the person they hold the bus for. Once you are good, you gain negotiating leverage and control over your projects and hours. 3

The leverage model in consulting divides roles into finders, minders, and grinders. Finders are partners and senior managers who find the business. Minders manage the client, project scope, and team. Grinders execute the analyses, interviews, and work. Moving from grinder to minder to finder brings progressively more control over schedule and engagement choices.

Respondents confirmed this trajectory. The first five years were awful, but things improved in the last three as they became more senior and made a name in the company. You get more work-life balance if you remain at the same firm, do your time, and earn their trust. Consultants demonstrated competencies at different levels of complexity before earning the right to specialize. Once they established a track record, they picked what they wanted to work on, and managers had little reason to challenge them.

Is It Worth the Cost?

The first two questions about work-life balance and travel drew tough love and cold-brew realism. The remaining questions about work, learning, and people drew far more encouragement. The work is good, the people are fun, and the learning is substantial. This is personally how the author felt too.

Respondents affirmed that the experiences are unlikely to be found in non-consulting roles. The travel and work-life balance violations can be worth it, but they need to be limited in time. An intense project should be followed by a lower-intensity one, or burnout is guaranteed. Young people should go in with eyes wide open and have opinions about what kind of whole work-life experience they want.

Consulting is about resume building and building a skill set. It is worth it especially early in your career because the experience to see varied functions, companies, and industries is invaluable. In business school, consulting experience puts you far ahead of peers in professional development. The caveat is that the level of effort required to make partner or principal is similar to starting your own business.

Learning at Twice the Speed

Consulting is the Master of Business Administration (MBA) you get after your MBA. Working on new projects and learning makes you more valuable. It is a great place for the intellectually curious. You will leave consulting wiser, able to break down ambiguous problems, prioritize recommendations, and persuade executives to take action.

Every year of consulting experience feels like three years compared to the cohort of friends from university. Salary differences reflect this acceleration. In over 20 years as a consultant, one respondent never saw another role with the same opportunities for learning, networking, or leading-edge experience. If you are smart and easily bored by routine, consulting is addictive.

For the early part of a career, consulting is the way to go. There is so much to learn that you do not get in a classroom. Those who transitioned to corporate roles found the rate of learning diminished greatly. Industry was about three times slower, with more bureaucracy and less growth, which means less fun.

The People Make It Worthwhile

Management consulting firms are picky. They have many candidates and choose only one in 20 or fewer. The people you work with have the right education, mindset, intellectual horsepower, ambitions, and talents. These are the people you want in your network. Consulting is a diaspora because only a small percentage stay long-term. After 10 or more years, you have a network of former colleagues in every industry.

Consulting requires a certain personality that dislikes routine and enjoys working hard to reap rewards. Being around people who are smarter than you raises the bar for yourself. Travel builds networks, collects points, and gives you opinions about things far from home. Doing consulting for two or three years early in your career exposes you to so many things and teaches you to shift gears quickly between different types of work and clients.

• 1Analysis of Work-Life Balance in Consulting, Consultancy UK
• 2Work-Life Interface of Management Consultants, Wits University
• 3So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport