Paul Harrison talks about his work as a treasury consultant. He covers the upside of seeing different countries and companies, the grind of constant travel, and how consulting sales is really about building relationships, not pushing products.
To answer your question more broadly, why consulting, it did interest me, it had always interested me, you know, and for the reasons that a lot of people give, which is that you get a very wide exposure to a lot of things, both from a technical perspective and from an organizational perspective and actually from a geographical perspective as well. I mean, I've worked in a great many countries. I've done work in most Western European countries, haven't been to Portugal on business, I'm afraid, and, or possibly Luxembourg and I'm not sure I would know. But all the Scandis, all of the Dutch countries, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey. I've also worked in Japan, India, Canada, various parts of the US and so it gives you that exposure to a lot of other stuff in a whole range of areas. Now I get the argument with being in one place. One of the things with being in one place is that you get to specialize sometimes you also get to see something through a number of cycles, whether that's just time passing or whatever. The disadvantage is, of course, you can get stuck in a rut that rarely happens with consulting. One of the ways you try to balance it is by getting more senior. Right. So if I'm completely honest with you, quite a lot of the excess travel that people do, particularly this side of the pond, I think is done at the more junior level. I mean, a lot of the time, the travel itself overnight. So by the nature of a lot of the work I do, I'm going to Milan or Madrid or Stockholm or something like that for two days and one night or perhaps three days and one and two nights would have been clever, wouldn't it? But clearly, yeah, travel can be an issue and travel is an issue for a lot of people. And you know, and then quite honestly, even if you are traveling business class and, or staying in reasonably nice hotels, you know, the, the glamour as epitomized by sort of 1960s movies, sort of Pan Am and all the rest of it does pall quite quickly. But against that you are also getting to see some different parts of the world and some different organizations and people. If you want to work in a particular office the whole time. You can still sometimes do that with consulting, but it depends on what consulting you'd going to do. So a lot of the deal based stuff can often be in house because there's a lot of analysis and a lot of work that you're going to do there. One of the other concerns that people often have with consulting, in addition to potentially having to travel and somewhat disconcerting nature of change is this idea of selling. So when I was having a quick beverage afterwards with several people, more than one of them came up and said, well, how do you manage the selling? It's the selling that I would hate. And I think there's somewhat of a misnomer there, because the concept of selling in that context implies that you're getting on the phone and you're almost sort of inviting people to purchase double glazing from you or those family portraits and so forth. Photograph portraits when in actual fact, it's not really like that. It's primarily about relationships. So it's about putting together a compelling offering to people. So knowing what you're talking about, having the resources, having some credibility there, and then building up a relationship with somebody over time whereby you are, you obviously then build a track record, but you clearly are understanding what they are looking for.
