Typical Day
Greg McGeekerson's alarm goes off at 6:30AM. Never one to sleep longer than he must, he leaps out of his hotel bed, ready to start his day.
He's in a hotel because that's really where he lives. He has a home—a nice one, in fact. But he's almost never there. Greg splits Sunday afternoon to get on a plane (business class) to fly to a client's locale, and, after kissing his wife good-bye, reminds her that he'll be back in a quick four days. Sadly, he knows his hotel bellhop, Bob (who's a former hedge fund manager), better than he does his better half.
Greg checks his phone for messages (and checks for the time: Greg is awake, so he's on the clock and billing his time to a client), and replies to a few emails. He grabs a cab with two of his office buddies who lead similar lives—it's always go, go, go for them—and zips to the client's office.
Once settled into the conference room, the three of them begin putting the final touches on their PowerPoint presentation. In it, they demonstrate which departments should be downsized and why, and which employees within those departments are most expendable. Sounds harsh, but this ugly task is what the client hired them to do.
After that process has finished, it's time (client-billed time) to create a financial model for the optimal poundage of steel that Greg's favorite lug-nut producer should buy each month. Greg will spend an hour writing 500 lines of raw data input nodes so that he can find the asymptote. Greg loves this stuff; to him, serving clients in this manner is more like doing puzzles than work. He's a great consultant.
Before the 2:00PM meeting, Greg returns to lunch with the other members of his team (kind of like a pre-meeting meeting) to run through their rough script and shore up any problems with the presentation. The client meeting and presentation go smoothly. They win the business.
Their group will be paid $8 million for about twenty-two weeks of work for nine people: Greg will be the engagement manager; he will have two older but junior managers "managing," and then a half dozen few-years-out-of-biz-school Excel and PowerPoint jockeys doing most of the core work, which is really just plugging numbers into pre-set models that Greg's consulting firm has created and edited over decades.
In the cab back to the hotel, he calls another senior partner to inform her of the win; it's a big victory, as this was a hotly-contested deal. The firm will make $7 million in operating profits (before bonuses) and all are delighted. Greg is The Man.