McKinsey to PE (Private Equity)

Follow Lisa, a 27 year-old ex-McKinsey senior associate, as we help her make the improbable leap from consulting into a top-tier US private equity firm.

We guide her career within the firm, improve her confidence and skills, and accelerate her promotion into a principal officer of a fund within the firm. Lisa is an MBA and liberal arts undergraduate: both from highly ranked non-Ivy schools. Prior to joining the program she had taken extensive finance modelling courses, at university and online, and partially-completed a computational modelling program before abandoning the non-degree credit courses.

~ 70% of her McKinsey engagements were due-diligence. Like all our programs, every meeting, battle plan, obstacle and messy detail will be covered. This program is recorded over several years.

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In the 1st part, we help Lisa choose where to apply for residency/citizenship in the West to guarantee she never has to return home. This first part is so detailed, since we discuss the application strategy, application documents, data needed, completing the documents, interview process etc. that it is presented as a separate program called USA vs CA/AU/UK Residency/Citizenship.

This was a necessary step to ensure Lisa could have the certainty to build a career.

In the 2nd part, we help Lisa secure interviews at the top PE firms despite being outright rejected at even mid-tier PE firms during her initial independent efforts. We help her prepare for the interviews and make the transition. We also outline the counter-intuitive strategy followed. We use Lisa’s friend, Stacy, also at McKinsey, as a comparison since Stacy uses a more conventional approach and was unsuccessful.

In the 3rd part, we help Lisa stabilize her new career by finding her the right mentor within the firm. We dissect the assignment that made her career, in great detail. We teach Lisa how to use consulting skills to differentiate herself from her finance peers. In a firm where everyone has great grades, stellar work experience and formidable work ethics, simply working harder would not help Lisa.

She needed to be more productive. We build her strategy around the correct definition of productivity. We focus on teaching her how to redesign seemingly intractable deals for the PE firm versus differentiating herself on modelling skills: superior modelling skills are rarely a competitive advantage among the top-performers at the firm.

In the 4th part, we set up Lisa for promotion within an accelerated timeline. We arrive at the point where Lisa is under consideration to participate in the carried interest of the fund she is managing. We use a simple, but rarely applied approach, to move her forward.

Some of the digital and big data thinking we teach clients was developed from the concepts we conceived to help Lisa.

Lisa faces several challenges. She is unmarried but involved in an unstable relationship. This becomes a problem. She is a foreigner and naturally shy. She is soft-spoken, lacks confidence and struggles to hold attention.

While she had chosen to leave McKinsey, her performance had been uneven at the firm. Having reviewed all her performance feedback, it is unlikely she would have made partner.

She has a thorough understanding of modelling basics but lacks the ability to generate 3rd and 7th order insights. She relies too much on sourcing insights from others. This is where we focus her point of differentiation. We teach her how to see things other cannot see.

Follow Lisa’s improbable, yet inspirational, journey and learn from everything we did to change her career.

Not yet released. The content is exclusively available to Firmsconsulting Insiders.

THE PROMOTION

The Promotion is an original Firmsconsulting program which teaches you how to apply all the skills a McKinsey, BCG et al. partner would use to fast-track a career in corporate, launch a start-up from a zero base or build a profitable business.

In Season I of The Promotion, How to Sell Multi-Million Dollar Consulting Engagements, you can follow us as we help Andrew, a senior manager / associate principal at a major international professional services firm, become an equity partner in 3 years by following a highly unconventional path: by re-building the firm’s failed innovation practice. Starting with a total budget of just $150K, and signing authority of < $5,000, we take you through every meeting, dinner, coffee chat, obstacle, plan, tactic, pilot, proposal, marital problem, client push-back, strategy, success, failure etc. to achieve total revenue of >$30MM within 3 years.

Life After McKinsey is Season II of The Promotion.

Season III is split into two programs. In the first, McKinsey to Private Equity, we detail follow the tough journey Lisa took to move into private equity. The other program, USA vs CA/AU/UK Residency/Citizenship, explains the unusual strategy we used to help Lisa obtain her green card in about 1 year 4 months.

In Season IV, The Start-up: Building a Luxury Brand, we will help Tatiana, a Wharton MBA graduate and scion of a prominent Asian family, build an ultra-luxury brand from literally nothing.

In Season V, The Start-up: Building an Electric Car Start-Up, we help Richard, ex McKinsey associate, launch an electric car business in China.

In Season VI, The Start-up: Building a Cosmetics Startup, we help Amy, senior legal counsel at a major tech company, prepare to leave her full time job as she launches a major cosmetics brand.

Due to client confidentiality, as always, we have altered some of the details. 

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Image from Judy Schmidt under cc, cropped, added text.