Paramjit Anand, Executive Director, Acreaty Management Consultant

In the professional services industry, strategic consulting holds a position in the most esteemed and acclaimed section. It is generally known as strategic consultancy or boardroom consulting. Strategy consultant provides guidance, direction, leadership, impartial partnership and profound knowledge of the industry. The major subject matter of strategy consulting is to support businesses with effective policies and strategies.

1)  Strategy consulting reveals a myriad of business problems in numerous industries

In financial advisory consulting, consultants interpret and analyse the policies of a specific and particular industry. They focus on the dynamics of finance and the legal implications of a specific industry. Thus, focusing on a particular enterprise will not increase your domain. It will remain small and you will likely have less number of clients and thereby you will specialize in only one area whereas, strategy consulting allows an individual to have a broad horizon to work across industries. In a couple of months, a consultant in strategy can proceed and progress to the next level. Strategy and operations allows to extend and expand one’s sphere, it helps to experience diversity in the work.

2)  Strategy consulting offers opportunity to work for a global corporation’s CEO.

Financial advisory consultants work for the CFO whereas strategy consultant’s work for the company’s CEO. Being a financial advisory consultant, you may procure interesting tasks like mergers and acquisitions or you might find yourself restructuring and re-establishing debt, which at the initial stage will be very compelling and exciting but at a certain point of time you will find it monotonous and indefinite. Contrary to this, strategy consultants work for the company’s vital and pressing issues. They generally work for the company’s CEO. The assignments you deal with are more likely to be short (3-6 months), high-impact (one of the CEO’s top 3 issues) and relevant (time-sensitive), which meant you have a direct impact on the future of the company.

3)  Strategy consulting accents intellectual curiosity over adroitness and proficiency.

The positive impact of strategy consulting is that it offers to work with a myriad of projects and firms like BCG brag about their creative approach which is new for every company. The intellectual curiosity of ardent and zealous learner will be stretched and their hunger to accept new challenges will be satisfied as they will always be doing something new.

Being a financial advisor, your goal will be to excel in the specific area – there will be legitimate and compliance implications of all of your submissions and proposals. Thus, you need to have detailed information about the particular area and thereby you will quickly become an expert in your domain. For instance, if you are dealing with the financing of airline companies then you will be having a specific role which has a narrow and restricted range and this could quickly become wearisome and uninteresting.

4)  Strategy consulting firms render training of global businesses

Both Strategy consulting and financial advisory consulting puts you on the right path of  C-l suite, but you’ll end up getting  in different spheres – strategy consulting to CEO and financial advisory consulting to CFO.

In strategy consulting, you will be in the Pre-CEO capacity. There you will have to deal with analytical questions about profitability and challenges as well as team leadership and leadership development questions. You will be improving, refining and polishing your skills in order to bring productive results as a CEO, in this training, you will face those issues which you will be experiencing as a CEO and will be addressing the company’s broad and wide ranging issues.

5)  Strategy consulting doesn’t block exit opportunities

In strategy consulting you will be having a broader range of work as you will be working across multiple different industries and multiple firms in each industry. This will expose you to a broad set of future employers. The honour and reputation related with MBB help too; firms clamour for the small subset of “proven” and trained strategists that exit these firms each year. Because of substantial networks strategy firm offers various benefits, such as you are branded for life, if you left the firm 5 years earlier and start your own entrepreneurship, you will still relish the glory of MBB if you re-enter corporate life. Whereas in the financial advisory role, you deal with a specific and particular sphere, therefore, the growth of your career hinders. So if you are in financial advisory consulting, you should try external consulting as this will help you to broaden your sphere.