The road out west

In her last several posts, Heidi has written about our crazy weekend trip to the west coast - to Seattle and San Francisco from March 13-19 (here, here, here, here, here, and here). And you also likely know by now that I've accepted a job at Visa to join their global corporate strategy and business development team in the San Francisco area. Now I can finally talk about why I'm leaving Oliver Wyman and how we settled on Visa.

The short answer for why I'm leaving Oliver Wyman (OW): It's a consulting firm, and like any consulting firm it's a pretty grueling environment (long and highly unpredictable hours) and there's lots of travel (I often traveled Monday-Thursday every week). I loved the type of work I was doing there but the other aspects made now a good time to chart a new path.

The longer answer brings in a bit more color and includes things more unique to Oliver Wyman (feel free to skip this paragraph if you're not interested in consulting firms). I feel comfortable mentioning these things here because I know OW leadership is well aware of a general discontent in their consulting ranks around these subjects: For one, OW is tightly organized around industry verticals which gives OW the ability to pitch our work has highly specialized to the given client's industry. The consulting pool (1-4th year consultants) are not affiliated to these industry verticals officially, but, since those verticals rule our organization, once you start working for one, it's hard to try work in another. This was a particular problem for me because one of the top reasons for which I joined consulting was to try various industries - an opportunity I quickly learned OW was not well equipped to provide, despite the fact that they serve clients in virtually all industries. My first several projects were in our Energy practice, so therefore virtually all of my projects were in our Energy practice. Secondly, I didn't feel OW gave me much incentive to stay. OW prides itself in raising its partner-pool up from the consulting staff, which is really cool if your dream is to be a partner in a consulting firm, but if that's not your dream, the incentive structure really isn't made for you. I fall in that latter bucket.

Early on in my time with OW I recognized it wasn't going to be a great long-term fit and made my 2-year mark (Spring 2014) my target for hitting the job hunt. However, after about a year and a half (early Fall 2013), I was contacted by Google's BizOps team (essentially their internal consulting group) and flew myself out to Chicago to attend one of their info sessions. I, already being a slightly obsessed Google fan-boy, was in love and quickly applied to the team. Over the next several months I progressed through the interview rounds. I loved the conversations I was having and really enjoyed the people I met throughout the process. I made it to on-site interviews with the team, and while that day on Google's campus was something of a personal Disney Land for me, I was not offered the job. I was crestfallen, but I'd known it was something of a moon shot for me from the start.

I finished that interview process with Google a week before my parental leave ended (I will forever be impressed by and grateful for OW's generous 6 week parental leave policy) and gave myself a week to re-coup and figure out what I wanted to do next. The thought of returning to a 4 day travel schedule with the new baby Miriam in the family was rather unappealing and I'd also just been exposed to the inner workings of a corporate strategy team which, while doing the same kind of fascinating work I've done for OW, are also able to have much more stable lives and careers in a more traditional corporate setting. After several good conversations with Heidi we decided to hit the job market full force. I was going to focus on tech companies first and then, if nothing came from those, move my attention to energy companies where we were confident we could land a solid job.

Coming back from parental leave, I was blessed at this point to be placed on an internal project for OW - one that didn't require travel, didn't require me to even show up to the office very often, and one that had incredibly flexible hours (the same internal project that I was on during my unexpected "summer vacation" last year). This project gave me the time to network, apply to jobs, etc.

I put in a lot of applications and had pretty good responses from the start. I interviewed with Visa, Google, Amazon, CVS, and Dropbox. Ultimately, I had offers from both Amazon and Visa and was still in process with CVS. As noted above, my interviews with Amazon and Visa were back to back (Amazon in Seattle on a Friday, Visa in SF on the following Monday); and the offers for each were delivered within about 24 hours of each other.

Choosing between the two offers was a rather heart-wrenching activity. Amazon is one of my favorite companies, it's based in Seattle (I've ALWAYS wanted to move back to Seattle), I have several friends there I'd love to work with, and the offer was quite strong. Despite what I've heard many people say about Amazon having a negative or cut-throat culture, I didn't experience that at all on campus - I genuinely likely everyone I met with and enjoyed the interviews themselves. Visa's offer was also strong, I really enjoyed the team, and felt like it'd be a great fit for me. I felt both companies pretty well met my desire to be with a tech company. Amazon is one of the industry's leaders, and Visa, if you think about it, really is one of the original tech companies, and even if you don't buy that argument, is based in Silicon Valley so I'd still be rubbing shoulders with tech players either way.

The decision came down to the job role itself. At Amazon I'd be managing a particular vendor as a "Brand Specialist", being responsible for purchasing, sourcing, and marketing for a specific product category. I'd have ultimate responsibility for that product category. At Visa I'd be part of their Corporate Strategy and Business Development team, which essentially serves as something of an internal consulting team for Visa, doing projects in strategy, market entry, competitive analysis, knowledge gathering, etc. Visa's role was also more team-oriented, would be an easier short-term transition (it's more similar to what I've done in the past), and I believed that being closer to executive decisions around strategy for a huge and successful company like Visa would provide better long-term leverage.

Heidi and I gave it a lot of the thought and took the question to the temple. We felt the answer was loud and clear: to take of the job with Visa. We feel this role with Visa will provide better career opportunities in the long-and short-term, and there is the added bonus of the undoubtedly great Bay-area weather. We were (and still are) bummed that we're missing the chance to live closer to the McQuay grandparents (my dad's parents) in Seattle though. Thankfully Amazon took the news really well and encouraged me to stay in touch in future.

I'm really excited to start - in two weeks! I'm less nervous than I think I should be, but perhaps that's a blessing from consulting - for each consulting project I've been on it's basically been a whole new job, meaning I've had about 8 new job ramp-ups over the last two years.

Looking back on these two years with Oliver Wyman, I am immensely grateful to have started my career there. I've worked with some wonderful people, I've learned valuable hard and soft skills, and I've learned a lot about myself. Have two years of consulting experience helped my resume stand out from the crowd - evidenced by the fact that I'm going to join Visa, a company in a sector I've never worked for and where I had no prior contacts or network. The travelling projects also forced Heidi and I to rely on each other even more than normal as we had to teamwork the management of our house without one another's physical presence.

I'm happy to answer any questions regarding Oliver Wyman, consulting in general, Amazon, or Visa if you'd like.