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Comparing post-undergrad opportunities in brand management and boutique TMT consulting

by | Oct 23, 2011 | Business, Business School, career, career path, consulting, mba | 0 comments

In the email below, a reader asks for my advice in comparing his 2 job offers coming out of undergrad: an assistant brand management role at Procter & Gamble and a position at a boutique consultancy focused on technology, media, and telecom. I was humbled but a little reluctant to respond to this email at first because the first job out of college is a huge deal. Also, the kid lives in Europe and I don’t know the job market out there too well. In the end, I just gave him my honest read on his situation and hope that he’ll augment that with advice from others. I hope he sends me an update at some point to let me know which option he chose.

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SB wrote:

Hello Marquis,


I am a 22 year old, recent graduate from University of Navarra (IESE Business School) in Spain. I have two job offers in hand, and wanted to ask your for advice.


My dream would be to be a CEO in the future of a big company. For achieving this, I think an MBA is very useful and for this reason I am considering “exit opps” of both offers for taking a good decision. The offers are:


  1. P&G (not sure if Geneva or Madrid), for assistant brand manager.
  2. Delta Partners (www.deltapartnersgroup.com) in Dubai: a boutique consultancy (160+ consultants) focused on TMT in emerging markets. They have as well a corporate finance and private equity division. They have really good partners and extremely high growth, but they are lacking name and they are specialized.


What really matters me is to achieve a top 5 MBA in three or four years time, and as well learn as much as possible during my previous years.


At this stage my mind suggests me to go to P&G (strong name and security), but my heart suggests me to go for Delta. I will travel heavily through the ME, Asia and Africa.


For doing so, my questions are:

  1. Which path you think I should take?
  2. Do you think Delta will narrow down my opportunities (not having a brand and being specialized in TMT) in the future for moving to another sector or entering an MBA?


Thanks and regards.

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My response:

SB,

I usually don’t send replies to time-sensitive emails because it’s difficult for me to develop good responses in the time period that the person needs them. Fortunately for you, I can give you a pretty quick response to this one, which I hope will be helpful to you in some way.

Before I respond, I must stipulate that I’m not trying to tell you what to do here. Instead, I’ll just tell you what I’d do if I were in your shoes and the reasons why. I would HIGHLY recommend that you talk to a few other professionals about this and then make the best decision for yourself based on the combination of perspectives that you will have gathered.

With that said, here are my very quick answers to your questions:

  1. If I were in your position, I’d choose the Delta Partners opportunity because it provides an opportunity to gain business experience in several countries; could provide exposure to Consulting, Finance, and Private Equity; and could be a place where you could have lots of impact early on in your career. Some might say that it would be a risk, but, since B-school is in your future plan, I’d see this as a risk worth taking to get a unique experience. Also, if brand management is still interesting to you in a few years, you could always target your post-MBA career search in that area. I must admit that I am biased about all of this though because I really believe that Consulting is a great way to build a broad, foundational toolkit of business skills at the front end of one’s career. This is why I recommended that you discuss the issue with other professionals before making a final decision.

  2. I don’t think Delta Partners would hurt your prospects for getting into a top-MBA program. You could learn many tremendous things (i.e. variety of industry/functional problems to solve, experiences to help build a growing company, smaller team focused on helping you to grow) during a stint at a boutique consultancy and it sounds like you’d also get a chance to gain some multi-national experience if you were to take that position. Once you’re ready to apply to business school, you should be able to flip this into a fantastic MBA story for yourself. If you wanted to move to another sector before going to business school, it could be tough to make the case for why you’d want to move into another industry after having focused on TMT for a few years though. For that reason, I would stay at Delta Partners for the entire period prior to attending business school. Plenty of people make large switches in industry and functional area after B-school, so you could do the same if you decide that TMT is not the right sector for you as you look 10-20 years into your future. The big question is whether you have enough interest in the TMT sector to be able to enjoy the work for the next 3-4 years…if the answer is “no”, then that should tell you something, right?

Overall, I would recommend that you make the choice that feel right to you in terms of what you want to do longer-term, what you want to do in the near future, and where you feel the best culture fit at this point in your career. The fact that you plan to pursue an MBA in a few years gives you a lot of flexibility here.

My comments above would change if you were coming out of an MBA program now. In that case, I would probably go for the P&G opportunity for both the brand of the company and the great training opportunities there. Coming out of a place like P&G after having earned an MBA, you exit options should be plentiful, so, if you’re really interested in pursuing brand management, I’d recommend keeping that in mind for an option after business school.

I hope this helps. Whichever route you choose, you should feel happy to have what sounds like 2 great job opportunities in such a tough global economic environment. Good luck with your decision.

Marquis