May 29, 2024
After spending years in consulting, working on big company transformations and building teams, I’ve picked up quite a few stories along the way.
In this episode, we talked about my career journey, what it’s like to help companies make major changes, and something I really care about – finding the right people for the job and landing great opportunities yourself.
Podcast Episode
Listen to the podcast episode here.
Transcript
Ryan Dickerson: Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast, where we explore perspectives on work that fits. I’m Ryan Dickerson, your host. Today’s guest is Mike Smith. Mike is a manager at Ernst and Young. Ernst and Young, also known as EY, is a privately held professional services firm that generates $50 billion in annual revenue with nearly 400,000 employees. Mike focuses on technology transformation projects and M and A projects with insurers, banks, and asset managers. Mike is also a venture capitalist with Scrappy Capital, a firm that invests in companies focused on the future of work in the media, distribution and logistics sectors. Mike, thank you for being here.
Mike Smith: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Ryan Dickerson: Ryan, I’m so glad to have you on. So, Mike, to get us all started and help us build our frame of reference, would you please walk us through your work as you see it today?
Mike Smith: Usually my description is management consultant by day and venture capitalist by night. And if I think about my career arc, first third of my career was being an entrepreneur. Second third was being self employed, which I think is different from being an entrepreneur. And then the most recent third is being a management consultant and a venture capitalist. So today I’m a manager at ey, which is one of the largest consulting firms in the world, actually. And I service mostly financial services companies. So that’s banks, insurers, asset managers, and we help them mostly with what we call transformations. So that’s either a large scale software change, put simply moving from an old system to a new system, or an acquisition integration. So bank acquires a bank, a lot happens behind the scene to make sure that bank A is operating within bank B and customers don’t really see a difference. And then on the side, I’m a venture capitalist at Scrappy Capital, where we invest in media distribution and the future of work.
Ryan Dickerson: All right, Mike, that makes a lot of sense. So to bring us back to your early life, would you tell us a little bit about what you were like as a kid and what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Mike Smith: Yeah, absolutely. My grandparents called me my parents, second, third, fourth, and fifth kid. So I think rambunctious was probably the word that most people would use. And then more about my career. I wanted to be pre med, so I became an EMT in high school, emergency medical technician. Then I started taking a bio in chem and I knew that was not for me. So I went from wanting to be a doctor to wanting to be a sports agent just like Jerry Maguire. Then we segued to being an advertising executive and then finally ended up at this big bucket that is entrepreneurship, which means a million different things to different people. But to answer your question, did I ever envision being a big four management consultant? Absolutely not.
Ryan Dickerson: It’s funny how that plays out. And what was schooling like for you? I guess with all those different paths that you could have gone down, how did you figure out what you wanted to study and how did it actually play out?
Mike Smith: I was lucky that I had directional interest. I knew business was something I had always been interested in, and then communications, so advertising. So I started off in those two schools at Syracuse, and they gave me a really good general curriculum. And I think the big thing was just trying out a bunch of things, you know, having internships and coffee chats and, you know, different little tastes at things I wanted to try. And some things like medicine, I said bio and chem, totally not my thing. Realized that earlier. Much better to realize that then than being deep in medical school. But I tried to do like a buffet kind of attempt at college. Try a little bit of this, try a little bit of that, and figure out what I don’t want to do. Because I think a lot of folks focus on what you want to do. I think it’s also important to try things and realize that’s not for me or the other thing isn’t for them.
Ryan Dickerson: A lot of people go through life saying they want to be a doctor or a lawyer or one of those major knowledge work professions. How did you find out that medicine was not the right fit for you?
Mike Smith: I think it was a mix of just the science. I think when people think of doctors, or at least when I think of doctors, I think of compassionate care. Not client service, but bedside manner and caring about people. And that’s, that’s a really big part of it. But the foundation is science, biology, chemistry. You know, it’s a. You’re a scientist and then you’re a doctor. So I think I didn’t realize how much science went into it. And then two blood and guts. I was an EMT for about 10 years. I loved picking drunk people out of bushes and fun stuff like that. But I mean, the blood and guts, just not my thing.
Ryan Dickerson: Good to know early on. And I bet you had some pretty epic stories from those EMT days.
Mike Smith: College EMS is a fun story.
Ryan Dickerson: I believe it. When you graduated and you were trying to think about and figure out what that first job was really going to look like, what was going to pay the bills, what was that transition like from your master’s level education into the workforce?
Mike Smith: I’d Say a non traditional transition. So I didn’t go straight to a traditional job. After college I started a business with two colleagues of mine, did that for about three years. So I think the first thing was, hey, we have this idea, let’s try and build it. And I think looking back at my career, I now more admire and impressed by the people who do the entrepreneur thing later in life because I think at 21, 22, it’s really hard to understand the business and how the world works. So we can get into it more if you want a prod, but try to business set it for a couple of years and then to the working world. I did the whole wham, my startup thing failed, cried and was very upset about the failure and had a whole summer of being sad. And then eventually I got off my butt and I started just going to meetings, networking events, and I met someone who ended up being the first company I worked with just through networking and then testing out the relationship.
Ryan Dickerson: I would say, Mike, having known you for a long time, you are one of the best networkers that I know and it is no surprise that that first proper job, you know, came through the network. To take a little bit of a tangent here, when you’re thinking through the I’m a new graduate, I’m ready to go find a job. I don’t really have a professional network. Is there any advice you might have for folks out there who want to establish their network, are starting it for the very first time, and would like to make use of perhaps the people they know or don’t know yet?
Mike Smith: Yeah, great question. I get that question a lot. The first thing that comes to mind is leverage of the student card. Everybody loves to talk about themselves. I think at a college level, if you look at any of your professors, they are undoubtedly one of the top 1,000 people in their field. When I would guest lecture in classes, I would always ask the professor, hey, what’s your billable rate advertising? Professor goes, yeah, if I’m consulting, it’s like 300, 400 an hour and students have access to one of the thousand best people in their field. So email every professor that is remotely in your area and just chat with them. They’re paid to care about you and they’re there and they are really mostly wonderful people. And then two, thinking a little more about networking. Something I’ve gotten better at with that is realizing who’s like a best friend and who’s at arm’s length, meaning if I email Jeff Bezos or some luminary and I’M like, Jeff, hire me. That’s not getting responded. But if I email my best friend and say, hey, I’m interested in X, Y and Z, they’ll go a lot further for me. So I think I’ve realized the closer they are, the more you can ask for them and the further the person away is from you. You have to make it stupidly easy. And I think one of the mistakes I made earlier in my career was thinking that these people who are already busy are going to make time for me and people genuinely want to help. But I think it’s figuring out how it can be very bite sized and say, I want you to read this one email, recommend a book, get coffee with me. Because as I’ve gotten older, my life has gotten busier. So. Right. Sizing the ask I think is incredibly important. And then I think the last piece is giving first. I am sure shocked how many people go straight for the ask. That’s all fine to be direct, but I forget someone at my firm said that you want to make a deposit before you make a withdrawal in your networking bank. Something like that. Right. You and I have had a long relationship, 10, 15 years. We’ve both made a bunch of deposits and we’ve proven that the other person is a quality person. It’s easy for you or I to make a withdrawal, but someone was emailing me for the first time. You got to prove that you’re not going to waste my time and above all, not going to hurt my reputation. I mean, I think that’s, I’m a very helpful person. But if there’s a chance that I think you’re going to make me look bad, I can’t do business with you.
Ryan Dickerson: Oh, sure. And that, that early career person or that right out of school person saying to a stranger, hey, would you recommend me for a job that’s a pretty big ask versus what’s one thing that you learned or what’s one thing that you would do differently? Giving them something that’s an accessible bite size ask. It makes a lot of sense.
Mike Smith: And I think one more point on that is it doesn’t always have to be a meeting. Maybe I’m on a meeting soapbox lately because I work in consulting, but if I was out of college and I emailed Ryan for career advice, you’re a great person, you might want to get on the phone with me. But a lower lift thing is, hey, Ryan, I really want to be a career coach. Like what’s one book you recommend or what do you recommend? I do or here’s my website, would you give me feedback like finding a way for it to be asynchronous, meaning we don’t have to meet like this. It’s so much easier for me to give feedback because I can do that at 3am or 3pm so it doesn’t have to be a meeting is a really good early takeaway as well.
Ryan Dickerson: Yeah, great advice man. So Mike, tell us a little bit about how you landed that very first job after your entrepreneurship experience. What was the hiring process and that experience like for you?
Mike Smith: So I did. My little pity party of my startup failed and then I knew I just had to start meeting people. So went to a bunch of entrepreneur esque events in New York City and met a gentleman and just started strike up a conversation and we stayed in touch. And I was reflecting on this because a lot of my when I was self employed a lot of my friends would ask me what my funnel was for getting clients. And I hate the idea of a funnel, but my primary job in career search strategy is helping people with their stuff with no expectations of returns. So I met Chris at a networking event. I knew he had a business that was doing data enrichment, so I followed up and I said, hey, here’s some ideas. And my M.O. is always I’m going to try to provide some value for people and they can say it’s great, they can throw it in the trash. Doesn’t matter to me. I’m putting it out in the world and not with an expectation that I’m going to get a job. I just, I think if you make more deposits eventually it’s going to be valuable for you. So met Chris at a networking event, followed up with some ideas and then after a few weeks of just talking back and forth, we started with a small project and I think testing employment is something that’s really underutilized in the workforce today. It’s really hard for large companies to do this, but I think smaller companies have an advantage in the sense that they can say we’re going to timebox this project together, we’re going to work on a website or it doesn’t really matter what the project is, but it gives you a way to test how you work with someone. So first we work together for a week, then a month, then three months, then six months. So kind of similar to dating, you know, the relationship gets a little bigger each time.
Ryan Dickerson: So now that you’ve landed that first job and you’ve been in the role for a little while, I’d love to have you Share a little bit about what the experience was like going from being an entrepreneur to being an employee and learning how to do that job.
Mike Smith: Sure. Happy to talk about that. So the first job, first company I worked with out of college was a company called Touchpoints. They did and still do data enrichment, started by two great brothers working out of their apartment. My role was mostly sales, but helping with growth and company building. And this is someone I found through a networking event. We became friendly, started working together. First two days, then four days. And I remember my first sales call. And Chris, great guy who hired me, I remember being on the first sales call and I bombed. And I’m just like, buy our stuff. It’s so good. You gotta buy it. It’s so good. Trust me, it’s really good. And then I was really grateful to have the opportunity to have a review of it and see where I could have improved. And I’d say the biggest. One of the biggest things I learned from that role is how important sales is and how much it is not what you see in the movies. It’s not a boiler room. The really good salespeople are coaches, consultants, developers who ask questions and help instead of just shoving things down your throat and forcing you to buy.
Ryan Dickerson: And as you went through and tried that job out and then got into data enrichment, and I’d love for you to clarify a little bit on what data enrichment really means, but what did you learn about yourself in that first job? And how did it, you know, how did you kind of grow into yourself from that point? Point.
Mike Smith: So first, what is data enrichment? So if you are any company that has contact with consumers, you are Nike. You are the Red Cross. You are anyone who has a direct consumer relationship. You have ryan Dickerson at 123 Main Street. You have his phone number. Ryan moves. Ryan doesn’t update his mailing address. Ryan doesn’t update his phone number, but still has affinity for Nike, Syracuse University, whatever the company is, the data enrichment industry exists to update information on a customer’s profile and augment it. Maybe I want to know, Ryan is a fan of the Yankees or Ryan lives in this city. So deepening the connection between a consumer and a brand and providing more of.
Ryan Dickerson: A comprehensive profile, that makes a lot of sense. And then what’d you learn about yourself once you got into that field?
Mike Smith: I’d say the biggest thing I learned about myself was that sales was not something I wanted to pursue. Maybe it was being young and, you know, not really confident myself yet. But sales is 99% rejection and getting One person to say yes and being okay with it. That was really tough for me. I also learned a lot about sales not being a brute force effort. There’s a saying I like. There’s no yelling in a Mercedes commercial. Mercedes is not screaming about how good their car is. Mercedes is just like, we got a great car, you want it, you don’t want it, whatever. Great salespeople do not need to scream. They know that their product is valuable and they’re helping their customers understand that or not. And then what I learned about myself, I learned that I really enjoyed the being able to whisper in an executive’s ear. I think at these large companies, you’re hundreds of rungs away from the CEO at touchpoints. I was working with the CEO every day. I could say, let’s do a social media strategy and he could listen, he could ignore. But I really valued being a consigliere or chief of staff or right hand to an executive. I’ve always valued that.
Ryan Dickerson: And you’ve had a few steps since this first gig to where you are now at Ernst and Young. Can you tell us a little bit about what you carried from that first job into your work today?
Mike Smith: Something I carried a lot is the importance of having a balance of the micro picture and the macro picture. I think sales kind of teaches you that. That yes, you need to think about how you’re selling this individual prospect, but how does that fit into the overall organization? And I find the leaders that I admire and look up to are very good at understanding and explaining. This is the enterprise wide strategy and this is what’s happening on the ground. Like switching between those can be really challenging, but I find the good leaders are able to do that.
Ryan Dickerson: The same thing that you’re talking about. I’ve seen a few times where having the understanding of the players on the field, being able to not only see what’s happening from the macro level, what’s happening on the spreadsheets, but also having enough empathy and direct understanding of what’s happening for the individual consumer or the people kind of lower down in the funnel per se. I feel like that’s an amazing thing. And I bet that in your consulting work you get to rub shoulders with a whole bunch of folks who have pretty exceptional visibility of the field.
Mike Smith: Yeah, absolutely. And your need to balance what does the CIO think and then what does the entry level individual contributor need to do? And almost universally across the board, they are misaligned. Not through anyone’s fault, but just through big companies. Move slow.
Ryan Dickerson: Where were you or Was there a moment specifically when you’d figured out that you’d found the work that was a good fit for you?
Mike Smith: Honestly, the answer is no. And I’ve, in the last few years, only become comfortable with saying no, that I don’t have a defined vision of exactly what I want to do. I think if I want to prod a little deeper on good fit, I think it means going back to that balance of macro and micro. You’re not only a strategist, you’re not only an executor. And then something I think super important about a good role is not making it your entire identity and keeping appropriate distance. When I was an entrepreneur, it was. I was the business. I’m the only thing here. It’s all about Mike’s success at EY. We’re 400,000 people. No one is looking at EY and saying, that’s a Mike Smith production. And having a healthy distance and being able to say, okay, it’s 6:00, I’m turning off. I think that’s important for a good fit career, because otherwise you burn it, you burn out and you’re too deep into something. So having balance is super important.
Ryan Dickerson: So, Mike, once you’d found work that you enjoyed and that was objectively a good fit for you, was there anything that you had to learn that was particularly challenging to master or get a grasp on, to become really good at consulting and good in your field?
Mike Smith: I think the fundamental challenge of consulting is balancing two jobs. Every consultant has the client job that pays the bills. You bill out an hourly rate. You do the work for the client, they pay you. Very straightforward. But what’s not talked a lot about is your practice job. Your job to sell more work, to write articles, to develop people. It’s really unique in consulting because they’re almost unintentionally antagonistic. Every moment I’m doing client work, I’m not doing practice work. Every moment I’m doing practice work, not doing client work. And balancing those is a huge challenge. If I’m working on an integration for a bank, if that was my job full time, I could be fully focused on that. With consulting, I have to have two jobs at all times. So balancing those, I think, was a really challenging skill to learn. I’ve gotten much better at it, but it’s. It’s really tough to have both of those jobs.
Ryan Dickerson: I believe it. And the practice of mastering that and working through achieving that balance and figuring out, I don’t know, an intuition per se in that. Were there any specific Instances or moments where you started to feel like you had the feel for it beyond just the kind of technical mastery of that balance.
Mike Smith: Yeah, having what gives me comfort a lot is having some order of operations or prioritization. And when I started, I would, you know, prioritize internal stuff over external stuff. And then you realize the client always comes first. That’s what pays your bills. So understanding client, then internal was a really helpful organization of it. And then one of my mentors talked a lot to me about personal roi, which I think a lot about. I wanted to join our people advisory board, which is like getting people together. Rah rah, building community. Very important. You needed your counselor’s support. So I went to him and said, hey, I want to do this. And he goes, listen, I’ll support you, happy to develop you, but I don’t think there’s ROI here for you. It doesn’t sell. You’re not hiring, you’re not recruiting, you’re not selling more work. So I’ll support you. But this doesn’t look like it’s going to get you to the next level. And that was a really impactful moment because it made me think about everything I take on. I want there to be value for me or value for someone above me or who manages me, who supports me.
Ryan Dickerson: It makes sense. Let’s move forward to talking about your current job here and when we’re thinking through your current role. Ernst and Young is an enormous company. They do a very wide range of different things. Can you help me understand what you do and where you fit within that broader macro organization?
Mike Smith: Sure. So EY one of the big four consulting firms, we have 75,000 people in the Americas, 400,000 people globally. And consultants get brought in for a mix of things. One, there is audit and tax, which is not my area. Every company needs taxes. Many companies need to be audited. Pretty straightforward. Consulting is a little more nebulous. Where consultants tend to be brought in are areas where there’s key knowledge that the firm might not have. So for example, I’m working on a bank integration project right now. It’s not an ongoing need. The bank needs to be integrated, which will take two years, but after that’s done, there’s no more need for people. So consultants really shine on project based work. Bank needs to be acquired, needs to be integrated, end of job. And it doesn’t make sense for the bank to hire people. And we’ve done hundreds if not thousands of these projects. So we talk a lot about what are known as transformations. Anyway, A transformation can be company gets acquired, company needs to be integrated, company is being spin off, or a large scale change within the enterprise. Moving to Salesforce, moving off Salesforce, some not just changing one line of code, but a really dramatic change in the business operations. Again, the company doesn’t have that expertise in house and it’s not going to be an ongoing need.
Ryan Dickerson: If I’m understanding you correctly. The basic idea here is that a larger bank might acquire a smaller bank or two banks of equal size might merge. They have a whole bunch of different technology systems, software that they might use to do their normal business operations. And it doesn’t make sense for the business to go in and hire, build a big team to do this because it’s kind of a one off. It’s a very specific, very targeted task that requires very specific talent. And you and your team will essentially work through that process, guide them through what they need to have done and then move on to the next project. Is that about right?
Mike Smith: Exactly.
Ryan Dickerson: Tell me a little bit about how big the team is and who you would work with from the client side or from the Ernst and Young side, what the players on the field per se look like.
Mike Smith: I sit in a group that is called Technology Transformation. So we deal with large scale changes of technology, new software companies acquired. My group focuses on financial services. So that takes the 5 to 600 down to maybe 100, 150 depending on how you break up the organization. The way to think about consulting from an internal perspective is we’re often a team of free agents that get placed at different projects. So I’ve been on six engagements in three years. I have worked with the same people on two engagements. So two of four, two of six, excuse me. Every other engagement has been a new team. So I might work with Ryan in 2021 and then we go off separate ways and then maybe we come back together. And a large driver of that is just what’s available, what bank needs, who, and is Ryan on vacation? Does Ryan have expertise in this area? So my group is about 100 and 150 people and our focus is really these technology strategy engagements, changing the technology at a large bank, insurer or something like that. And we’re focused around financial services. One of our beliefs as a firm is that you’re best able to support your customer when you are focused in that industry. So if I was a health consultant and then I started doing banks, I don’t necessarily know that there’s a ton of transferable skills. But if I worked at bank of America, well, then Wells Fargo probably cares about that, and so does, you know, Chase and Signature bank and all these other banking institutions. It’s really relevant information.
Ryan Dickerson: And I would imagine that folks out there who don’t have a lot of experience in the consulting world might be kind of surprised that over the course of three years, you’ve worked on six different projects and only two of which you’ve had similar colleagues or peers or people that you worked with. Was there an adjustment period for you to get used to working with different people every few months and that. I don’t know. How did you cope with that much change in terms of personnel?
Mike Smith: It’s hard. I’ve gotten better at it. Absolutely an adjustment, because if I was starting it a company today, what’s the general rule of thumb? You’re up to speed. You know, six months in, you feel like you’re really an employee there. First few months are just, where’s the water cooler? How does this work? A consulting engagement can be six months. So you don’t have six months to understand how things work. You have weeks to understand how things are going. So it’s a balance of spending a lot of time in the early days, getting to know who the players are, what the work is, and then giving myself grace. Because every engagement, mentally, for me, goes the same way. I’ll get dropped in some new engagement, and it’ll be about, say, backup systems for banks. A week or two in, I’ll be like, mike, why don’t you know everything about a bank backup system? You’re just so dumb. You should know more. Two weeks go by, and I go, wait. There are people who spend their entire careers understanding those. It doesn’t make sense that you’d be an expert a month in. So I think it’s knowing that you have to learn a lot and you have to get to speed very fast, and then also realizing you can only know so much in two weeks. So it’s figuring out, like, what is the really important thing to focus on. So I think one of the key skills of consulting is onboarding effectively, because it’s not only is it knowing the subject matter, getting enough knowledge about bank backups, but it’s also building rapport with Ryan Dickerson, the CIO of Bank X, which arguably is more important, in my opinion.
Ryan Dickerson: Interesting. And we’ll dive more into that in a little bit here. But before we dive into your expertise specifically, can you tell us a little bit about what the journey was like at Ernst and Young from considering the opportunity through your first promotion?
Mike Smith: Like Most things in business, I knew someone in the firm, so she told me they were hiring and she was kind enough to refer me in. And I was so fascinated. Coming from a land of startups and small companies, I was so fascinated by how this big ship that makes billions upon billions of dollars runs. And working with, I mean, true name, we don’t talk about clients publicly, but truly the leading companies of our time, we work with a majority of the Fortune 500. Working with these big companies was super interesting to me. So I had an interview. And the first one is a recruiter screen, generally to make sure that you’re directionally in the right area. You know, you’re not a accountant applying for a software engineering role or something like that. So step one, right?
Ryan Dickerson: Ballpark.
Mike Smith: Yep. You seem like a good person. And then the recruiter is also making sure that you’re directionally correct and also could be a potential fit. And with consulting, it’s very hard to figure out because we’re all, or a lot of us are, real free agents. You’re not really hired because you’ve been doing bank backups for 30 years. You’re hired because you seem like you could learn how to figure that out in a month.
Ryan Dickerson: And what’s it like to get promoted within Ernst and Young and within big consulting? I just think about the big four. How both massive these organizations are, but also really how exclusive they are and how hard it is to get into them and then how hard it is to advance. Could you teach us a little bit about what that was actually like?
Mike Smith: Yeah, it is both comforting and terrifying. On the comforting side, big companies, ey and beyond, have a very defined progression. You’re in this role for X number of years. If you do a good job, you’ll go to the next role. You do a good job, it’s a ladder. Because you have such a large organization to remove bias and other issues, you can’t really say, well, Mike will get promoted in year one, and Ryan, we’re going to wait till year seven. It just an organization of size can’t work like that. So it’s comforting to know there’s a ladder to climb. And then two, it’s terrifying because getting promoted is not a straightforward thing. It’s not, you know, we all want it to be. I think everyone wants comfort that if you do A, B, C, D, you’ll get promoted or you’ll get the job or whatever the thing is. But it’s of course more opaque than that. And what we say with promotions is you generally want to be operating at the role above you for at least, you know, six months to a year to show that you can do it. So I joined in 2021, did a year as a senior consultant, and then a year later I was getting ready to go up for promotion in the summer. And I think something that’s interesting about large firms or at least consulting. I don’t have a direct boss. I have what’s known as a counselor. And the way to think of a counselor is kind of a sports agent. So funny how that kind of came back into play. Their job is not to hire and fire you. Their job is to coach you and help you find cool opportunities and say, I really want to do bank backups. Let’s find some opportunities for that, help you develop. But they’re not the higher fire person. So they’re in a really interesting coaching and mentoring role. So a year after I started, I raised my hand to my counselor and said, hey, I’m ready for this. The next step is walking around the office and seeing who supports you, who has feedback. In any large organization, generally the highest person on the totem pole decides. So getting facetime with leadership is the thing that I didn’t realize how important it was, so I went up for it. And then summer comes around and again to make sure it’s fair across the board. It can’t just be one person decides, there’s a council and, you know, box that have to be checked. So I went up for it in the summer and was getting good news. It looks like it’s going to work out. Well, I didn’t get it and I was devastated. Oh, man, I was just like, so crushed. And this is not an ey problem. I think everyone wants direct attribution, but sometimes it’s, we had three seats and you were number four. Sometimes it’s, you’re not good enough right now. Sometimes it’s insert random edge case that kind of screwed you, but wasn’t your fault. So I didn’t get it. Had my little pity party. My mom has this rule, you get a 48 hour pity party and then you get off your butt. Truth be told, it took me a little longer to get over that. And then a mentor of mine pulled me aside and he’s like, hey, you didn’t get it. That really sucked. But it’s time to get over it. And I’m really grateful that happened because I think I would have wallowed a lot longer. And you need people who are going to do that, who are going to say, listen, it’s totally right. You got screwed, but it’s time to move on. So didn’t get it and then started walking around town and asking people for feedback, what can I do? What should I do? And so on. And then a lot of it is marketing yourself. When I talk to the folks that I counsel, I say being a good employee is being a balance of a show horse and a workhorse. You don’t want to be the workhorse who works 80, 90 hours and never picks up their head and doesn’t market themselves. You also don’t want to be the show horse who at every firm I’ve ever been at, there are people who I have no idea what they do, but they’re loved by leadership and they advance. So it’s finding being a good worker and marketing yourself and not working yourself to burnout and not being a person who only markets themselves. So started thinking about marketing myself in a better fashion. And then the big takeaway is what do the deciders care about? What are the partners who are making these decisions? What’s important to them? Finding something that is important to the people above you and making it your mission. I think if I would have noticed that earlier, I would have advanced quicker.
Ryan Dickerson: And you did advance. Even though there were some setbacks, you found a way. You made it happen. Way to go man.
Mike Smith: I did. Thanks.
Ryan Dickerson: We’ll get back to the conversation shortly, but I wanted to tell you about how I can help you find your fit. I offer one on one career coaching services for experienced professionals who are preparing to find and land their next role. If you’re a director, Vice President, or C Suite executive and you’re ready to explore new opportunities, Please go to goodfitcareers.com to apply for a free consultation. I also occasionally send a newsletter which includes stories from professionals who have found their fit, strategies and insights that might be helpful in your job search and content that I found particularly useful or interesting. If you’d like to learn more, check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn. Now back to the conversation to transition over into your expertise and teaching the audience a little bit about what you’ve learned along the way. Something that we touched on earlier was getting up to speed quickly with a new client, and something that I’d love for you to spend just a little bit of time sharing your wisdom about is if you’re in a new environment, whether it’s you’re in a new company or you’ve started a new project with a new client group, how do you begin to think about what are the most important things to begin to get a grasp of as you get started up.
Mike Smith: Great question, because I’ve done that so many times. The first thing is fact finding, doing a tremendous amount of research around. And this is applicable for starting a consulting engagement or starting a job just beyond a Google search, talking with people inside the company. If you’re at Coke, maybe you want to talk to Pepsi and see how they see things. So just a tremendous amount of deeper research beyond the Wikipedia page. And that’s meeting with folks who are at the company, who might be at competitors, who are formally with the company. Because you hear something once. Okay, hear something three or four times, you start to build a picture that this company is struggling with X or this company is great with Y. So I spend a lot of time, when I start something new, talking with our team, who’s been there for a while, to understand that, you know, Ryan’s a nightmare, or Ryan is great, and Ryan is really focused on this obscure legislation or requirement we have to follow. So because once I know that about you, I can go into a meeting and say, ryan, you’re really worried about the end of your deadline, aren’t you? And once I can say that, you and I, we build rapport like that. So research from all angles is incredibly important. And then I think an underrated thing about getting up to speed is something I talk a lot about, is defining the intellectual supply chain. So if we were on the assembly line, very straightforward way to build a car. Not straightforward, but it’s kind of linear. With knowledge work, it doesn’t really work that straightforward. And I find most problems I’ve run into business or come across in business are a lack of alignment. So let’s pretend that you’re the partner, Ryan, and you need the deck. The PowerPoint review, you need it done by end of day Friday. So I think smart consultants will build a timeline of what has to happen in order to develop that. So if the partner needs to be done with it Friday, it’s got to be in their inbox Friday morning, which means the senior manager has to be done with it end of day Thursday, which means the manager should have it in the senior manager’s inbox Thursday, which means the senior consultant should do it on Monday and Tuesday and hand it over to the manager on Wednesday. And I think it sounds very simplistic, but I think it’s so easy to get misaligned because teams zoom. There’s so many communication channels. It’s very easy to have a meeting and say, yeah, I’ll work on that deck, Ryan. And you leave thinking it’s due Friday. I leave thinking it’s not due for a month. So one of the things I am incredibly laser focused at in general, but especially when you start is leaving every meeting with, all right, ryan, it’s the 22nd. I’ll have the deck to you by May 1st. Does that work? And just making sure we’re incredibly aligned, because when it’s just you and me, it’s pretty easy to figure out. But when you’re on a project with dozens, I mean, there are projects at consulting firms with hundreds of people, it is so easy for you to think it’s coming in your inbox May 1st. And then May 1st comes along and I haven’t started. And then there’s just so many ways it snowballs out of control. So I think being. I think I’m overly communicative with deadlines and expectations, partially because that’s who I am. But also fundamentally, I think consultants jobs is to move the ball forward. You need to come in and say, we did xyz, not we were thinking about that.
Ryan Dickerson: What is a good indication of a great client? Or what are some of the behaviors and tendencies of clients that help you, as the consulting group, achieve outstanding outcomes within budget and on time?
Mike Smith: One of the challenges of consulting is you don’t always know what you’re selling. So if we talk about bank integrations, yes, the bank needs to be acquired, but what’s the level two version of that? Are we worried about compliance? Are we worried about data? Are we worried about people? So great clients have a very strong understanding that I’m being hired to remediate data or satisfy some government requirement. Great clients know what they’re paying for and what that timeline looks like. It’s challenging because we’re brought in to be the experts in that arena. And then great clients also give enough leash to understand that they’re paying for expertise around this area that they may not know the best way to do it. So knowing what they want and giving enough leash to let the consultant work as they want, I’d say that’d be the two big things for great clients.
Ryan Dickerson: Beautifully said. When you’re working with clients to try to figure out what it is you’re selling or what it is you’re delivering, or whatever it is that they need actually done, do you have any favorite questions that tend to really cut to the heart of the matter and give you very strong signal on what it is indeed, that they actually need.
Mike Smith: The cliche question is, if you could wave a magic wand, what’s one thing you could solve for? And sometimes I’ll say that as a joke because it’s such a platitude, but I’ll say that and they’ll laugh, and then they’ll usually give a straightforward answer. And then sometimes I try to anchor clients on the gravity of the problem. You know, I’ll say, ryan, is this a, you know, a dollar problem, a million dollar problem, or a billion dollar problem? And often you’ll laugh and go, oh, it’s obviously not a billion dollar problem. But then you’ll anchor me on this. Probably costs us $2 million. So I think making light of the situation and realizing we’re not all robots is really helpful to anchor on what’s the problem we’re trying to solve. And then two, I ask them to paint what the next year looks like in terms of, are we done with this in a year? Are we halfway done in a year? Because that allows me to adjust expectations. So if the client says, oh, the bank will be integrated in two days, that’s wildly unrealistic. But if they give me an answer that we like to be 50% done by 2025 and then fully wrapped up by 2026, it helps me understand how they see it. So I try to get their understanding of the timeline to bring everybody along.
Ryan Dickerson: We essentially have discussed the concept of starting a new project and beginning to know in. In very short order. Get a very rich and robust understanding of with whom you’re working. And your advice tends to be seeing that from as many angles as you can realistically get. So speaking with them directly, speaking with their partners or integrators, speaking with people who used to work with them to get just a very clear sense of, you know, more broad observations. And then from there, the big challenge is to clearly define, what have we sold to you? What are we delivering? What needs to actually happen? What pain point are we alleviating? What are your expectations? What is the time frame? Right. Getting very granular and specific on all the necessary details. From there, I would love for you to walk us through what a real project actually played out as and thinking through, you know, a real example of when you delivered on something. Can you walk us through one of those?
Mike Smith: I think the best one is not my current project, but a prior project, bank was acquired and for lack of a better phrasing, wasn’t like, perfectly well managed. And that created some tense relationships. From old bank to new bank, there was a bit of a regulatory pressure that it had to be done by a certain date. So I think what we try to do is first start off with a skeleton of how this engagement will go. Not in terms of days, because that’s crazy. In terms of weeks and months that for easy purposes, if we’re starting in January, what needs to be done by June, what needs to be done by September? And then we’ll spend a fair amount of time plotting things month by month. So first we have to look at the old bank inventory, all the systems. That’ll take three months. We’ll spend three to six more months planning, like lining up the dots. Does the social media group match up to marketing or does it connect to customer communications? Like how do we connect old to new and A to B? And then we’ll set up kind of milestones to check in. And then one of the things that consultants are really good at is setting up governance functions to make sure things are going across the board correctly. Where clients and consultants tend to mess up is having too much reporting and having a overall engagement. Reporting a business group reporting a lot of business, like having too many layers can slow things down. So generally it’s identify, plan and execute are the phrases I tend to look at things in terms of. And the forcing function is how fast does this thing need to be done? Is this a sprint where we’re doing this in three months or larger? Projects, firms like EY and Big four, they tend to be longer term because this is not company with five people acquires company with four people. This is bank with billions of dollars acquires other bank with billions of dollars. And when you’re dealing with such large amounts and such large companies, things can’t move fast because a lot of times what happens, you need to both do the acquisition while maintaining your regular business. And balancing those is really challenging.
Ryan Dickerson: I think to go a little bit deeper on that. When you were thinking through managing such complex, such large dollar volume integrations, have there been any big surprises along the way or any painful lessons learned? Or if someone else is also in the integration space or in the consulting space, is there anything that you could share from your actual project work that might be useful for them as they grow in their own careers?
Mike Smith: The first thing that comes to mind is when you deal with banks especially and really any company, the main focus is minimizing customer impacts. So tactically, what does that mean? A system can’t go down Tuesday at 3pm everyone’s using it right? But on Memorial day weekend or July 4th or Christmas weekend, Am I really checking my bank on Memorial Day weekend? Maybe. So they tend to cluster planning happens 24,7. They tend to cluster the execution of activities around times that are minimizing customer use. So good because the customer is not impacted. Bad, because it means you’re doing work at odd hours. So. And with that said, you’re not deciding on May 1st that you’re doing a migration Memorial Day weekend. You’re deciding a year in advance that because if we’re going to do this thing, we’re going to move old bank to new bank. We have 72 hours to get it right. So we have to make sure that every minute is accounted for. A lot of my role in my current project is making a run of show of what happens day one minute, one hour, one who’s doing what. Because we have a very finite window to get the thing done.
Ryan Dickerson: And I imagine all that choreography and all that planning and the test runs. I bet you’ve learned a lot about the projects that you’ve been working on kind of as you’re running through the practice test.
Mike Smith: Absolutely. The fun part now is this is my second bank integration. So getting to do it a second time, there’s a lot of transfer of knowledge where, oh, on the last project we did that. And it is a lot of building the plane while you’re flying or whatever metaphor you want to use. But I think the big thing to think about here is long term planning is so important here because when you’re talking about billions of dollars, which is a ton of money, you do not have room for error in a way that you might with smaller amounts of money. So that means the planning becomes even more important.
Ryan Dickerson: Transitioning to the concept of misperceptions, misconceptions, the way that people perceive your work. And being a Big four consultant, can you tell us a little bit about how you believe the world sees your company as well as your job therein?
Mike Smith: I think consulting is one of the most misunderstood careers because consulting is so nebulous. Accounting and audit are pretty straightforward. Consulting is anything from technology people, systems, data infrastructure, like to say you’re a consultant. It means you are a person who sends email. It doesn’t mean anything. I think people tend to look at consulting, there’s a saying, you know, you steal people’s watch and tell them what time it is. And I think the thing that’s lost about that is consultants are not stealing people’s watch and telling them what time it is. The real truth is the client often has 10 different watches all going at different times and our job is to figure out 1, 2, 3, watch is important and we can ignore 4, 5, 6 and the biggest thing, I think one of the biggest things that consultants do is create alignment across the board because our job is to come in, something is messed up, fix it and then leave. So consulting is very nebulous but a lot of what we do is come in to fix a problem that the enterprise does not have the capability to solve themselves.
Ryan Dickerson: How interesting. And so then it sounds like the endless zoom meetings and conference calls and all the coordination is absolutely necessary to get all 10 watches clicking at the same second and have a single source of truth. Is, is there any way around all that?
Mike Smith: Lately I’ve been on a pretty heavy no meeting kick. But I try to be intentional about when I’m taking people’s time. I think the important thing is to, to make sure that all levels of the enterprise are aligned. Right. So if you are at a large bank, there’s not just one line of business, there’s probably 10, 20, 30 and there’s a monitoring function bank wide. So at the CEO level there’s one. At the line of business level there’s probably one for, you know, customer impacts. So it goes across the board and each one has a different lens. So making sure that they’re all aware without being overly burdened. You know, I’ve had some projects where I feel like my entire day is stats reports. But aligning it both horizontal, the enterprise and also vertical is a lot easier said than done.
Ryan Dickerson: For the people out there who see your job, the role that you currently hold today, as their kind of mid career destination, right. Let’s say they’re just about to finish school, they’re just about to enter the job market and they want to work for a big four consulting firm, they want to have been promoted, they want to be in a senior role there. How would you help set expectations for people who are interested in your work?
Mike Smith: Large firms like EY all have campus to firm pipelines. I think I’m pretty good at consulting. A lot of my friends at my age and rank very often say we could not get in as an external hire. I managed to get in mostly through referring but leveraging a ORI existing campus relationship where there’s a recruiter and a dedicated pipeline of every year we’re taking 10 new consultants from Syracuse, Harvard, wherever the school is. So first step is leveraging the campus community because there’s a process and a form and a way that things are done and then joining externally probably once A month, give or take. Someone finds out I’m an ey, they say I want to work there. And my answer is always, I’m in a group of 500 people at a firm of 400,000 people. I am very happy to look and make a referral but understand I don’t decide here but make it incredibly easy. So once a month I hand out my business card and 1 out of 10 times I’ll get back a. This is exactly the role that I want. Here’s why I’m qualified. Very often it’s yeah, like I do anything, I just want to work at the company. I want to be a consultant. And it’s like going back to what I said at the start of the conversation. The easier you can make it for me, the more likely I am to help you. If I am hiring a bank consultant and you say, I did this for bank of America, I did this for Chase, I did this for Wells Fargo, you’re my people, I want to get you in. But if I hear, yeah, like, you know, I did some social media marketing and some accounting, like I think a lot of times the mess up is not making it incredibly easy or putting work on me. If you are coming to me for a job, if you’re my best friend, I will look through all the job searches and I’ll find something for you. But if you’re a person I met at a networking event, don’t make my job finding you a job make it easy for me.
Ryan Dickerson: It sounds also like the, for the people who are still in school that taking those career fairs a little bit more seriously, taking the internships a little bit more seriously, leveraging what’s available to you early on is actually worth considering and not just moving past it.
Mike Smith: I am always amazed how underutilized the career center is. I know when I was a student I would walk in and it felt like there were cobwebs. I mean, if you think about what we’re buying with an education, it is a pipeline to a job. Career centers and career fairs exist to do that. And it’s so much easier to build a connection that way than a cold LinkedIn message. Your uncle who sort of used to work at the firm, so there are real pipelines from school to well regarded employers that I think often are ignored.
Ryan Dickerson: It’s such a fascinating path for the folks out there who are lucky enough to know what they want to do as they’re finishing up school or even know what they want to do early enough to choose a major that’s going to be relevant to their work. It is nice to hear that for, you know, big consulting firms, the most admired companies in the world, the ones that people you know broadly pursue aggressively, that there is a real path and that if you are a student that they’re, you know, using the resources available to you may be surprisingly underutilized track. It’s surprisingly reassuring.
Mike Smith: And then I do have to add on the other end of the spectrum, there are also no rules. What would comfort me a lot in the job search market was I saw a lot of parallels between dating and job searching. I would freak out getting a job at ey, oh my God, that’s so hard. But if you boil down, what you’re really looking for is one person inside of enterprise who is important enough to believe in you and can open the door. We are not winning an election. Getting 300 million people to vote for us, like getting a job is very challenging, but it is getting the important partner and getting a recruiter and maybe one or two other people. It is not convincing thousands of people that you need to be hired here, especially at the earlier stage. I mean, Ryan, you, you did executive recruiting for a while. You know, placing a CIO is not a one interview sort of deal. But at the earlier stages of your career, you’re not impressing a thousand people. It’s a handful.
Ryan Dickerson: That’s great advice. And there are no rules. I mean, people get hired in so many different ways for so many different reasons. And I think something that I often ask and that we’ll talk about here in a minute is what would convince you or compel you to take a chance on someone. But before we get there, in whatever capacity that you’re involved in hiring today for your team, not just being hired, can you tell us a little bit about the philosophy for hiring that you’ve developed thus far?
Mike Smith: Like we mentioned earlier, I think hiring has a spectrum of expertise at the entry level, little expertise needed at the executive level, deep expertise needed at the entry level and middle manager level. I think that my philosophy is generally looking for, you know, what I call tofu or white bread. Something that can work in a lot of contexts. Tofu takes the flavor on of what it’s surrounded. White bread can be turned into a million types of sandwiches. So I think what I’m looking for is some nugget of initiative or proof that shows that I’m going to parachute you into an uncomfortable situation. You will not know about this topic. What I’m testing for is can you figure it out within the bounds of your role. A staff consultant is never facing off directly with a CIO and making a bank integration plan for a $30 billion million dollar trillion dollar portfolio of loans. Right, that’s not happening. But they get one little piece of the puzzle. As a manager who oversees a number of staff consultants, I want to know that I can say, go figure out a first draft. I know that it’s not going to be perfect, but come back to me and we’ll refine it together. So I think initiative is really, really important and finding a way to demonstrate it. And then a mentor of mine always said, act like you have the job and that costs you nothing. I’m impressed by people who come to interviews with, here’s my 90 day plan of what I would start with. Or I had these five ideas for what the firm could do. And maybe they’re great, maybe they’re garbage. It just shows me that you’re not doing a spray and pray approach. When I was interviewing at ey, I made a deck of opportunities for the business. They weren’t all great, but it was very clear that I was not putting this effort across all the companies I showed. This is something I really want. So figuring out a way to act like you have the job and demonstrate it and show that you’ve done this before or at least are in the.
Ryan Dickerson: Right direction to use one of our favorite platitudes. If you had the magic wand, how would you design your ideal hiring process for people on your team, those staff consultants that you mentioned?
Mike Smith: Ideally, there would be some small test period to start and for a bunch of reasons, regulatory and beyond. It’s very hard to say, Ryan, I’m going to test you out for a week and then a month and then six months. But if I can work with you for a week, I can pretty much figure out if you’re a solid fit for it. Hiring is very weird across the board intent in the terms of most jobs. I don’t really know if you’re good before. Yeah, I can read blogs you’ve written or do reference checks. But ideally, waving magic wand, finding a small project to work together on. And it can be so simple. Redesigning a website, you know, very, very low stakes because I’ll learn more about. Oh, Ryan sends me a status update every day. That’s, that’s really good. Oh, Ryan, like came to me proactively with an issue he was facing. I didn’t have to go chase him. Oh, Ryan drafted the deck that I had to put together in advance. Like you can pull a Lot of things through working with someone, even on a small, meaningless project that is indicative of how they’ll operate. So wave magic wand, small way to test the relationship to start.
Ryan Dickerson: And I can also see how it would be so operationally complex to begin to bring someone on board, both in terms of, like, their compensation and benefits, but also in terms of the confidentiality of your clients and the things that you’re working on. I imagine that also is in part why so many people today lean on the kind of the coding test or the sample of work assessments, the, you know, presentations, the case studies. Totally, um, as painful as they may be, I guess at least hearing it from, you know, you at Ernst and Young, it sounds like that really does matter. And putting in the extra effort there is clearly noticeable.
Mike Smith: Yeah, especially in a world where something ended up my LinkedIn feed this morning and the job was posted when I saw it 15 minutes ago, and there are already 38 applicants in. That means in an hour there’s going to be 300. Right. So my job as an applicant, or your job as an applicant, is to find someone who’s going to pull you from the big pile of 200 resumes and say, mike Orion is the guy, give them a second look. Especially in a world where we’re knowledge workers, where our jobs are sending emails and doing Excel. I think sales is straightforward in the sense where you say, I was told to sell a million dollars, I sold five. Oh, great, of course I’m going to hire you. Or coding. I have this language and this competency. The more knowledge worky the job, the harder it is to evaluate along that same line.
Ryan Dickerson: So let’s just say that we don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do the week or the month of a test period to contract a hire per se. Is there anything in someone’s professional positioning, their resume, their LinkedIn profile, however they’re presenting themselves to you, that might compel you to take a chance or either move them forward in the screening process or grant them an interview.
Mike Smith: First level is, do I have some sort of connection to them? I’m assuming I don’t. But I want some proof that they understand the role and have some ideas that separate them from the pact. And then I think in our remote environment, it matters how you present yourself. I am really surprised when I see people at all levels of an organization putting no effort into their zoom background. I’m not at my home right now. Usually I have a better background, but I mean, I see people with T shirts on interviews or their kitchen table in the back and during the pandemic, totally fine. Life was crazy. But we’re in a very virtual world. And if you’re not taking time to show up your best self on camera, and that is independent of race, creed, gender, religion, body type, anything, it shows to me that I believe what’s behind me is indicative of how I’m presenting myself to the client. So making time to present yourself correctly on video and then also Online, that your LinkedIn is descriptive of what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished and that you act like you have the job is something that keeps coming into my mind. If I’m at Coke, I want to hire someone who’s done the exact job.
Ryan Dickerson: At Pepsi that makes sense. And that reassurance, that pattern of confidence. Right. Is something that I talk with clients a lot about where it’s like, oh yeah, of course you could solve this problem, of course you could help me with this painful challenge that I’m facing. Before we move on to our discussion about the future and what you’re excited about, wanted to just open the door and give you the chance to talk through a little bit about scrappy capital and your venture capital side of your life. Perhaps how you think about this, what you look for in your investments, to whatever degree you want to go into it, the floor is yours backstory.
Mike Smith: Venture capital had always been so interesting to me. Didn’t really touch on it earlier. I think the idea of investing in a company when you have slim to no data about it is fascinating. I can look at Coke or Pepsi’s market and finances and stuff, but when it’s five people on a whiteboard in a room, there’s so many intangibles that you’re evaluating that I find it to be such an interesting intellectual challenge. Everyone now knows Uber is a good idea, but 10 years ago to prove that that’s something that makes sense to invest in is fascinating. So had been interested, had interviewed at leading firms, couldn’t get across the threshold. And then a number of years ago, a mentor of mine and I sat down and said, let’s do it ourselves. So we set up a very small fund at this point. We’ve made 12 investments, one has been acquired, all are operating pretty well. The challenge of venture is we won’t know for good until minimum five, more likely ten years from now. It’s a game where you start, you’re investing on a 10 year horizon. So venture is really interesting like that, but it’s also very challenging because I can’t tell you in 2025 how I’m doing, I can’t tell you in 2026 how I’m doing. And something I really, if I think about my career, I think there’s something really exciting about doing your, you know, entrepreneur and side hustle on the side side hustle because I think it gives you a freedom to experiment. I know a lot of people who go all in on entrepreneurship and then it becomes really stressful that you got to pay rent keeping it in the sandbox of outside of work nights and weekends. I know when I was self employed and I had to pay rent with my entrepreneurship, it was really stressful. Keeping it on the side, I think makes it a little purer where I have the freedom to invest in something that’s not. That’s going to take 10 years because EY is paying my rent or I’m earning my rent through ey. And more about investing in small private companies. I think so much of it is jockey over horse. At that early stage, there’s not enough data to say, well yeah, of course Uber is going to make sense. The people who invested in early in Uber, it was a regional, a city based cab company in San Francisco that had a lot of regulatory burden. They were not investing in numbers, they’re investing in people. And that challenge intellectually is fascinating to me. And what I enjoy is at the scrappy capital level, I get to work with tiny small companies. At the EY level, I’m working with the biggest company in the world, companies in the world. So having that balance is really interesting to me.
Ryan Dickerson: What do you look for in the companies that you would like to own a part of and help along their own growth journey?
Mike Smith: Similar to what I look for in hiring, I want proof that they’ve done it before or proof that they could solve it. So for me, I tend to look at primarily where the market is going to use a terrible example. I don’t want to be selling VHS’s in 2024, 2004. I want to be selling streaming services because I know it’s going to grow. So knowing that the and for the.
Ryan Dickerson: Kids out there, VHS is a tape.
Mike Smith: Yeah, sorry, I should have given that disclosure. But primarily it is market driven market opportunity. Is this something that’s going to grow in the coming decades? And then does the founder have an ability to execute? And they don’t have to be the technical genius, but they have to be able to recruit someone who knows. There are so many people starting technology companies without technology backgrounds and I made that mistake at my career I started my first tech company and we had no technology team and that was a mistake. So big market opportunity founder, who ideally has done it before, one of the founders we invested in sold 1, 2, 3 businesses. So at that point we’re like, yeah, you know what you’re doing, of course I trust you. And then it doesn’t always have to be that straightforward. Knowing that you are building a company in the soda industry, if you work at Coke for 10 years, like, that’s super valuable experience. So playing in a sandbox that you have expertise in is really valuable. And then we talk a lot about, we try to be in the passenger seat holding a map. You know, one of my pet peeves of investors is pretending that they built the business and that they were along like the founders of Uber built the business. The investors gave them money and helped along the way. I think I understand. My role as an investor is to give you some money and say, hey, Ryan, I’m here to help you however I can, but I know this is your company, I know this is your journey. I’m happy to navigate, but I know where I sit in this organization.
Ryan Dickerson: How interesting. Thank you for sharing. So, Mike, as we bring the conversation here to a close, I’d like to spend a minute talking about the future. What are you excited about in terms of the future of consulting?
Mike Smith: I think the most interesting and exciting thing for me in consulting is the movement away from hourly billing. I could spend an entire podcast telling you why hourly billing is incredibly challenging. Ryan, if you’re hiring me, you want me to work in one hour, I want to work in a thousand hours. Our interests are not aligned. I think a really interesting thing that started to get developed in the large consulting firms is project based billing saying, I’m hiring you to build me a website. A thousand dollars? A million dollars. Like you hand me a website, it’s over, it’s done. I think those models tend to align success across clients, and then having alignment with a client on a shared win is really impactful. And then as we get into the world of AI, large language models, I mean, really disruptive technology, I think what’s going to start happening is consultants are going to be moving towards more of a advisor and strategist role, that there are everyone and their mother starting a company that has AI in it. So how do you separate the signal from the noise? It’s having expertise in a domain that you can say, this company is full of it, this company is legitimate. So I’m excited by that. And I think what is Also starting to happen is we will see a lot more joint ventures or partnerships where consulting firms are not just doing a service and leaving, they’re building spinoffs, they’re investing in companies. There’s a lot of regulatory burden and hurdles there, but I’m starting to see the seeds of that thing happening. Those are really interesting and exciting to me because when I started at EY they said big four firms are probably the only place where you have a top tier auditor, a top tier accountant, a top tier technologist, a phenomenal people consultant, all under one roof. Google phenomenal organization. They’re mostly tech driven mercenaries. Phenomenal organization, very people focused. Consulting firms are one of the very few places in this world where you have such a diverse roster of talent. Which means I say this to a lot of people who start anything that exists in the business world EY and the big four do in some shape or form. And that’s super exciting.
Ryan Dickerson: How cool. And to make things a little bit more broad and perhaps to weave in some predictions, what do you think your field is going to look like in 20, 36 years from now?
Mike Smith: I think consulting is going to move very much towards a what they are calling human loop. Technology transformations are challenging because you’re changing bank one to bank two. So there’s inherently not automatable. But let’s say you’re doing a monitoring project. I’m already starting to see the seeds of we don’t need Mike there 24, 7. We have a really good software or AI or something that is listening 24, 7 and it says hey Mike, there’s a problem, go fix it. So we call that human on the loop because the software is listening all the time and bring in the human when necessary. I think that’s going to be really, really changing the consulting landscape. And then I think the smart companies realize we are in a global workforce. I think EY has a very strong job of bringing teams from across the globe together. We’re going to see more of that is I think very reductive to think we only compete in America. So having if I’m working on an engagement in Germany, having someone who knows German business customs, plus support from Asia, plus whatever my expertise is, we’re going to see more cross country teaming for sure.
Ryan Dickerson: How interesting. The last couple of questions here are really going to be focused on advice and inspiration and recommendations. So do you have any words of inspiration or advice for the audience out there? And the folks out there who are listening tend to be very focused on being in your role or trying to find their own way or just generally curious about the work that you do.
Mike Smith: I think starting my career in sales has really made me think a lot about many things in life are pipeline problems. When I was single, I would think about this a lot that if you’re talking, if you’re swiping one person, your odds are terrible. But if you spend an hour on the apps, your odds get a lot better. And the same is true of jobs and career. If you’re only applying dy, all your eggs are in one basket and that’s stressful and it’s going to come across in interviews. But if you’re talking to EY and Deloitte and PwC and McKinsey, your odds get a lot better. So I think a lot about in any scenario where you’re trying to change your life, increasing the number of opportunities you’re chasing. And that does not mean do a large spray and pray campaign to everyone and get them to hire you. It means have a dozen different ways you’re trying to find opportunities. LinkedIn, well found networking, alumni associations, Twitter. The larger your pipeline is, I believe, the better your odds are of getting what you want. So just expanding your universe of opportunities is incredibly important.
Ryan Dickerson: That’s great. Are there any books, podcasts, or other content that you’d like to recommend for anybody who’s curious out there?
Mike Smith: A book I keep coming back to, I think it’s 10 things successful leaders Do. It’s by Kevin Cruz and he outlines like 10 hallmarks of leaderships and how they manage their time and their people. And I come back to it often and one of my big takeaways is successful people don’t have to do lists. Earlier in my career I was kind of I would have analysis paralysis over which tool to use and I realized the best tool to use is the one that you use regularly. So I think just reducing the amount of shiny object syndrome you have and looking for all the cool toys allows you to narrow your focus and get more done.
Ryan Dickerson: That’s great, Mike. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your perspective. It was really a delight to have you on.
Mike Smith: My pleasure.
Ryan Dickerson: Our next episode is with Patton Gleason, CEO of Relin. I think there’s a perception of when you hit a certain size, everything gets a little bit easier. As soon as it starts to look like it’s a little bit easier, that’s the time to raise your standards. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe for new episodes, leave a review and tell a friend. Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson and is produced and edited by Mellow Vox Productions. Marketing is by Story Angled and our theme music is by Surftronica with additional music from Andrew Esperanceda. I’d like to express my gratitude to all of our guests for sharing their time, stories and perspectives with us. And finally, thank you to all of our listeners. If you have any recommendations on future guests, questions or comments, please send us an email at hellooodfitcareers.com.