[thowawaybcg1]

What? You know a team of 5 from McK/BCG/Bain costs about $180K/w right? These 500 will run for ~$70M/month. Likely more, we never have 500 consultants available on a short notice.

Maybe you're confusing with staff augmentation, not consulting.

[KingOfCoders]

Thank you. I thought I take quite some money, but $900/h ($180.000/5days/5consultants/8hours ?) is really nice money. Especially if you think that probably many of the team are fresh from university with no experience (at least my friends at Berger/BCG/Bain worked there fresh from university) - selling people fresh from university for $900/h is quite a feat.

The most expensive I've worked with in the past was EUR 700/h for an M&A lawyer.

Large companies - like Deutsche Post - I've worked with take people from all the big consultancies at once, so I assume there are enough. Governmental departments in Germany spend around $600M a year paying external consultants, I wonder how many that are at peak time. Wikipedia says BCG has 21k employees, Mk 30k and Bain 12k, Spiegel says BCG Germany has 500 consultants.

"Maybe you're confusing with staff augmentation"

You might be right here too. Would fit in with my "most consultants from BCG/Mk are not consultants but body leasing, but call themselves consultants".

[thowawaybcg1]

Those fresh grad are supported by managers and, partners with global and deep expertise, and a small army of back-office research staff.

We generally avoid "body leasing" kind of work, even when client is OK paying for that. Attracting talent is hard, and putting them in such projects is a sure way to lose people. And we generally avoid consultants on cases for more than 6mo, too short of a time for staff augmentation.

Despite BCG having 21k employees they're spread across 90 offices globally, and usually staffed. When we do get requests for large amount of people, it's a staffing nightmare.

[KingOfCoders]

Damn, should have taken that BCG director for digital something job when it was offered to me :-( - small army of back-office staff sounds refreshing after decades of startups and lean tech companies.