Landed a new job about 9 months ago, and by all accounts it seems to be going really well. Decent salary. Good title and role. In many ways, it seems like the perfect job for my 20+ years of professional experience. As a poster jokingly suggested in an earlier thread I created about how much I hated my previous job - I should start a company leverage my experience working on fucked up projects to advise other companies on how to un-fuck their projects. Which is ostensibly what I’m doing. I’m basically part of the core leadership team of a new consulting practice within a $1.5 billion global consulting firm advising clients in “modern management principles”. Mostly it’s just “agile coaching” and project management, but it seems to be working.
I have one client I work with as the sole representative from my firm, delivering a project for their biggest customer. They are in the UK, so by noon, I’m basically done with emails and Zoom calls. I don’t really “do” anything, other than facilitate calls and herd the cats forward. And in my spare time, I work with my colleagues at the firm to grow our business (which is growing faster than we can hire).
We even throw decent parties from time to time (when we had that pre-omicron lull over the summer)
And by all accounts, things are going well. I “exceeded expectations” in my performance review. My client extended me another 6 months (and probably will again in another 6 months) and seems super excited about our progress. So that’s good.
Although, I almost kind of feel like it’s going TOO well. A couple of thoughts:
Maybe I suffer from “battered spouse” syndrome from having worked for so many dipshits that it’s unsettling to have people actually follow my very practical and common sense advice?
Is there something I’m missing that I should be working 20 hour days on?
Is this an outlier and I better fucking stick to this client because my next one might easily have me working 20 hour days?
I’ve kind of been in this role before. Things are great now because we are busy and growing, but I’ve seen how quickly the market can turn or a bad project can make you become persona non grata.
I kind of want to do something different (having done this role before). Right before COVID, I landed a job in the professional services group at a large cloud software company. I really liked that. I mean it was the same sort of business-y consulting-y whimy bullshit I do, but it was anchored to the actual products of the company. Truth be told, even after 20 years, I don’t REALLY know how similar firms like Deloitte or Accenture actually sell and market their vague services.
Still, definitely beats being tossed into some role and then catching shit for all the stuff that got fucked up six months before I even got there.
There’s probably some of this going on. As a freelance consultant I spent extended periods of time at probably 50 different nonprofits over about 30 years. The differences in the company culture, the competence of the CEO, the respect among the staff, and just plain functionality was pretty stunning. I can think of only one company I’d give high marks to in all areas.
Are there more clients in the offing? Who is responsible for finding new business?
If you manage to convince yourself that it can’t actually be that good, and that something must go wrong… it will. Don’t convince yourself of that.
I mean, maybe, somewhere down the line, something will go wrong. That’s always a possibility. But so far, it hasn’t. Enjoy it while it lasts. And maybe, just maybe, “while it lasts” will be the entire remainder of your working years. In which case, bonus.
If you can’t relax into your life at this juncture, when will the time be right? It’s been a hell of a ride getting to where you are, no doubt. Now the challenge is to relax into it and just breathe.
It’s a consulting firm, so technically the partners are responsible. Although people at my level also have responsibility to contribute to sales. Also building the practice. That’s actually one of the cool parts of the job.
This. My first attempt at self-employment had me extremely busy with three clients. Then we hit a recession and boom, no clients and none lined up. One client went bust owing me a good chunk of money. One no longer needed me as they solved their software problem so the backup of work disappeared, and the third solved a similar problem. No one was hiring my particular skill because in recessions the first place companies cut is advertising and that was my area of work.
Not to take from the OP, but I swear I’m gonna leave my job but when I experience my real job I am in, I almost cry with how awesome my situation is. Do you remember that scene in Office Space where the protagonist admits he works only 45 minutes a day? That’s me at $90K a year working 185 days a year.
Yeah, that was kind of like the firm I worked at a few years back. was very small (less than 40 people) and mostly relied on long-term relationships from maybe half a dozen clients. It was fine for awhile, but there was zero growth. Just milking the same client relationship for years. One by one each of those relationships kind of wound down until they didn’t really have much work at all.
This is a bit different. The company is an almost 2 billion dollar firm of several thousand employees. We have dedicated salespeople whose job it is to bring in new projects. Not that is any guarantee of anything. I’ve worked at plenty of big firms that ran out of work and had no problem letting people go. And I’ve been at plenty of firms that thought some thing or another would be a big moneymaker and hired a bunch of people to grow and ended up laying off half of them a year later.
Hm. Enjoy it while it is there, and save all the money you can towards leaner times.
If you work in an industry where you are homebased and only travel to meetings or zoom your meetings, pick a nice place in the country to live, buy a nice tidy little property that you could see yourself retired in and go for it. If one owns their own home outright, generally the only expenses tend to be taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance. [if I were to rent out my western NY house, similar houses are renting for $2000 a month which is definitely more than my taxes, maintenance and insurance costs as I own it outright and do not have to service any sort of mortgage. It is just that the property taxes in my old home town are moderately high.]
<We recently bought a place in western Nevada as a retirement place. At this point, until we actually build on it annual taxes are $179 a year. As long as we don’t go nuts and put in one of those Hollywood Mansion compounds that runs in the tens of millions to build, taxes will never be as high as we pay for either property on the east coast>
Enjoy it while you can cause you never know when somebody else will screw it up for you.
You’re doing a great job, people representing your client think you’re doing a great job, then suddenly somebody above the people you deal with decides they don’t like what those people are doing and pulls the whole plug.
Never underestimate people at the top to do boneheaded things sporadically.
First: what msmith537 said above about landing the next job.
Second: because sometimes those little words in your email signature do matter.
I never considered myself someone who worried about titles… until I did. My last employer – at a consulting firm that almost certainly competes with one of msmith537’s past gigs – met my salary request but down-offered me. That is, they offered me one level down from the position for which I had been interviewing. I figured at the time that I didn’t care: salary and responsibilities are all that matters, right? So I accepted.
I ended up quitting over it. What I discovered was that I was not able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. I was building a new function, and my ability to set my own agenda was compromised, my ability to get resources diminished, and the respect afforded to me lower. Consulting is hyper-hierarchical (one of the industry’s many, many pathologies), and one’s position on that ladder is intertwined with one’s identity more than at a traditional corporate job.
So I quit a job whose compensation I thought was generous after less than two years. Sometimes I think I was being petty to let the title thing gnaw at me, but I really do think it had a material impact.
Much like you, I’m on a leadership team building a new function. But it feels a bit like pissing against the wind. I think that’s because in the economics of a consulting firm, the only thing that really matters is selling work or billing hours. Right now we have a collection of people billing hours to our function. But it doesn’t feel like a cohesive group. We don’t have our own dedicated salespeople or partners. It’s a lot of trying to build relationships with the partners to get them to sell our works and beg HR for staff to cover those sales. And this is on top of our day jobs of billing full weeks at our individual clients.
I just asked for a different title. Boss called the co-owner into his office, and said “Look, everyone in this room knows we’re not going to be giving raises this year. How about we give digs a supervisory title instead?” Owner shrugged, said “Okay with me,” and left.
I told the boss how happy I was, and he said “I’m even happier. This was cheaper than a raise!”
Indeed. Sometimes things DO work out for you, so you may as well enjoy it while it lasts. Everything does come to some kind of an end eventually, but that may take the form of retirement, if you’re lucky.
