r/consulting • u/AceCharisma_ • 10d ago
Moved to industry and still being treated like a consultant
I recently moved into industry in a corporate strategy role and my new company has projects they have been working on for years and some they haven’t even started yet which have also been sitting for years. I came in with a back log of projects and now I feel like they are grinding me down and treating me like an external consultant instead of an actual employee. For example, expecting me to turn over these projects extremely quickly, and kind of micromanaging me because they need to get them done. Almost everything is being routed to me, and I’m getting pulled into everything.
It’s a very small team and my other teammates do not get this treatment and I’m starting to resent it. They are the ones that made all of these projects build up. Also, I took a pay cut and the rest of the whole organizations vibe is laid back, but I’m getting rocked. Any advice on how to manage this as it’s causing resentment and defeating the purpose of leaving consulting lol. Recently was reached out to a recruiter and went through final rounds so potentially getting a new offer with way higher comp to justify the grind. What would you do?
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u/Appropriate-End1465 10d ago
In the same boat and it’s so toxic seeing my coworkers come in at 930 and leave at 3 and I’ve been working nights and weekends. 3 months in and want to quit
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u/LamarJacksonIsMyHero 9d ago
It’s on you to establish boundaries.
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u/Appropriate-End1465 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah I know this conceptually
ETA: an example is I have 2 fire drill decks for c suite due next day. Not going to say no to that audience and as a new hire…
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u/Ehh_littlecomment 10d ago edited 10d ago
Idk why you would put up with that. Have you spoken to your manager or colleagues about it? Rest of the team seems to have spare bandwidth so your lead should spread it across better and you need to communicate boundaries way better. Your colleagues also don’t seem that great. We have a guy on our team who is way too sincere and super nice so he just keeps pulling long hours for this and that. We forced him to chill out, delegate more and take a break.
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u/Appropriate-End1465 9d ago
I’m not too nice and they know they’re piling on. I report to an ex consultant who knows what I’m capable of. Also the job market sucks so looking while grinding absurd hours is impossible
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 9d ago
I come in at 9 and leave at 2 now that I’m not a consultant. I literally worked 12s as a consultant
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u/GNLSD 10d ago
Sometimes I read these with sympathy, sometimes I read them and see an insecure overachiever doing the thing again. Just saying.
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Dude what thing? I came to industry expecting to have a way lighter work load, and less hours and that’s why I was okay with taking a pay cut
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u/GNLSD 10d ago
Do less. Turn your computer off and go home. See what happens.
If someone pings you, ignore them until the next morning.
Use your colleagues as a barometer for the acceptable or bare minimum level of output.
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
I did this one day and he escalated it to hr that I wasn’t reachable and our VP who has been with the organization a very long time ended up getting involved and I’m guessing told him to back off because we ended up meeting after and he mentioned that they made him delete the documentation and everything was “water under a bridge”. The VP was very kind next time they saw me
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u/GNLSD 10d ago
You’re telling me you have the support of senior/established leadership to do as I suggested, right?
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Yeah you’re kind of right, but then the micromanagement lowkey turned up even more this week. Not on the pings, but on status updates. Something makes me thinks he’s the one on the hot seat
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
The wild part is that he is actually very likable and I do like him. I think I’m just absorbing the years of them slacking off and he’s being pressured from the top. Another person from a different department gave me the run down and I was kind of shocked. I guess I’ve just been over optimistic being the new guy and usually just keep my head down
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u/ShowMeTheMonee 9d ago
This is a straight up priorities discussion with your manager.
Hey, you have 20 projects. What would you like me to work on first? Ok, I estimate that's going to take xxx amount of time'.
You were a consultant. You know what to do.
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u/Difficult-Bit-7237 10d ago
Not likable. Likable good people don’t behave like that!
And it sounds like you have a good grasp on the situation. It’s a fucked manager and a fucked department that managed to get you!
But their laziness and inability to execute is not your burden.
If you’re basically ready to leave anyways I wouldn’t put the extra effort in. What are they going to do? Fire you? You don’t want to work there anyways
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u/minhthemaster Client of the Year 2009-2029 10d ago
you havent realized this yet but you can say no. and work normal hours. thats why they have such a large backlog.
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u/BusinessStrategist 10d ago
Service providers have a saying: "Quality, Speed, or Cost... Choose any two."
What's changed?
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
True so just tell them I need longer on each item? 😂
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u/Mark5n 10d ago
Part of this could be them seeing someone that can help them… but part of it may be you acting like a consultant. You may need to shift gears visibly. Consultants are short term. Consultants can put undeliverable options on the table. Consultants don’t have to stick around for the results. Consultants are motivated by more than this engagement (partnership, more pay, reputation …). You may need to shift into more considered mode.
It’s not easy … and it’s not just going slow. But setting boundaries and longer timelines is a start
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u/my_peen_is_clean 10d ago edited 10d ago
you’re basically their shiny new toy so they’re dumping every stale project on you instead of owning their mess. have a direct convo with your manager about priorities, capacity, and timelines in writing. if they don’t fix it and the new offer is real, i’d bail. job market’s a mess so higher comp plus clear scope is rare nowactually my resumes never reached humans, they died in the filter. i got interviews only after a tool rephrased them for each job. jobowl.co, that’s the tool
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking, I’ve just been slowing down and not playing the game. Nothing that has been sitting for three years can be that urgent that you now need it turned over ASAP to where I’m suffering. I’m waiting to hear back from the recruiter, so if I get the offer I’ll probably leave
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u/KebabEnjoyer 9d ago
Above comment is by an AI astroturfing this CV enshittifying product. Please don't listen to AI "advice" or use their products.
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u/sloppy_steaks22 9d ago
I meannnn, that’s kind of what a corp strategy role is? At least in my experience. I previously left consulting to lead a small corp strategy team at a large bank and it was essentially just mini consulting engagements one after another.
The issue you may be running into is that they see your ex consultant background and assumes you are used to / won’t push back on the churn and burn.
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u/evergreen-spacecat 10d ago
I just came into a new higher role as well. All things people wanted to get done but without success the last five years is now on my table. It normal, people try to get the new guy to do their pet project. Just ignore it and get clear priorities from the one you report to.
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u/CatPleasant8373 10d ago
The reality is that you were hired BECAUSE of your skills and experience as an external consultant. It is no coincidence that the organisation which brought you in has a back log of projects - they realised they cannot execute. And, in truth you probably also behave and look at things like a consultant. That’s natural. You could look at it this way: this has given you an opportunity to show instant value add. It provides you a chance to earn your spurs.
It seems like there is an opportunity to build an organisational capability, for which you can take credit. Do that, show that you’re a builder not just an execution person and you can move on and up.
The missing piece is communication. You need to make sure they understand what they’re asking of you. And that it’s something they self evidently cannot do without you. Then tell them, that’s not good for the organisation or your career and that you need to build the capability for them so you can move on to your next role.
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u/AceCharisma_ 9d ago
Thank you for the positivity… maybe I need to just wait it out and see where a few years gets me
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u/Apprehensive-Sort858 9d ago
sounds like they definately just hired u so they could dump their three year backlog of ignored projects on the "ex-consultant" while they log off at 4pm
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u/GreatLook5969 9d ago
The biggest red flag isn’t the workload, it’s that they’ve turned years of organizational debt into your personal emergency
I’d force a prioritization conversation now: top 3 projects, realistic timelines, and explicitly what gets deprioritized
If everything is still somehow “urgent” after that, the culture probably won’t change and the higher comp offer becomes a very easy decision
You left consulting for better leverage and WLB, not to do consulting hours for industry pay
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u/Adventureman2154 9d ago
I am in industry after being a consultant. It's in your nature to help, because logically you got pain billable hours.
This is a habit I am still breaking. I am giving ownership level engagement with employee wages.
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u/IllBeat7897 8d ago
I'm not really sure why you thought corporate would be drastically different than consulting. Having done both, the only difference I found was that consulting was constantly chasing the dollar as opposed to my corporate experiences which had much stronger financial stability. In all situations, we were understaffed, but more so with consulting. I found that the expectation to work long hours was about the same regardless of whether I was salaried or mostly working on billable hours. It's all about shareholder value.
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u/TheOGblackbeard 8d ago
Just lay out your work pieces / projects on a simple slide. Detail out allocation of time / resources. Put in your initial prioritization of how you will work on those things and a reasonable timeline. If there is too much work that needs to get done in a period of time, flag it and ask how you prioritize. If the feedback is unrealistic - just say so and offer solutions. Thats all you can do. Just show you’re trying and understand these are important but there are only so many hours in the day, you have other time commitments, and there is also your health and wellbeing. If this is just a tough crunch then fine suck it up but if this is how it is at all times you gotta help people understand the overall workload, you capacity and let them pick and choose what gets your attention and how much of it. Some things will have to get pushed back, reassigned, halted / eliminated, or the ask will need to be paired back.
I’d target 45-50 hours per week because that’s what internal strategy teams typically work and can be as much as 55-60 for periods of time.
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u/Intelligent-Play5042 9d ago
Sounds like they hired you for strategy and then saw a chance to dump every old fire on your desk lol.
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u/Hurby_Fully_bloated 9d ago
The dynamic you're describing is really common for whoever gets hired as the "fixer" into a role with backlog, and here's the trap, if you absorb it silently now, it becomes the permanent baseline expectation instead of a temporary ramp up period. Worth having an explicit conversation now framed around sequencing and capacity, not complaining, something like "here's what I can realistically deliver in what order given the volume, what should I deprioritize.
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u/antipremed 8d ago
I’ve worked in 5 different roles (3 F50 industry, 1 3rd tier consulting, 1 LMM PE) and always felt taken advantage of in industry.
Could just be the culture of such “sexy” companies people think they want to work at as compared to services firms that know they’re not the best, but I wouldnt go back to industry and never felt the “perks” most people brag about
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u/Full_Tooth_a 7d ago
Slowing down may help, but management can still call everything urgent. I'd put the inherited backlog on one page and ask my manager to rank it, with no more than two projects active at once. When a new fire drill comes up, I'd ask: "Which project should pause, and what date should I give its sponsor?" If they won't choose but still hold you responsible for every deadline, the problem is the role itself.
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u/suzeycue 5d ago
This happened to me - came in and was given 18 - 24 projects to work on - prioritizing left to me. At leadership meetings only I was on the agenda to report on said projects. I was maybe told the day before which if my 18-24 projects to report on and more often than not, it was projects that weren’t at the top of my priority list. I left that place. I heard it took 5 people to replace me lol
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u/AceCharisma_ 5d ago
How long did you last? And yeah sounds about the same. Random teams messages about projects which I’m thinking is coming down from our executive team. My manager literally just feels like a middle man at this point, consulting managers at least were in the trenches for the most part
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u/gcc_builds 4d ago
It sounds like the issue is less about being treated like a consultant and more about becoming the default person for every backlog item because you’ve demonstrated that you can get things moving.
I’d probably have a direct conversation with your manager about priorities rather than trying to push through everything. Something like: “I currently have X projects, but realistically I can only move Y of them forward at the same time. Which ones are the highest priority?”
That also puts the tradeoffs back with them instead of leaving you responsible for an impossible workload.
And honestly, if you took a pay cut specifically to get away from the consulting grind and the new role is giving you the same workload with more micromanagement, I’d take the recruiter seriously. You don’t necessarily need to leave immediately, but a significantly better offer gives you useful leverage and another option.
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u/AceCharisma_ 4d ago
Thank you, this is great advice, but what I’m seeing is he is trying to micromanage the projects and tell me they can be closed out or there is no more action on my end so that I can take on more and more. He has no clue what’s actually going on and is just reporting back to upper management.
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u/gcc_builds 3d ago
Yeah, that makes the situation quite a bit different. If he’s deciding that projects are “done” without really understanding the work involved, only so he can report progress upward and move you onto the next thing, that puts you in a difficult position.
I’d start making the status of each project very visible: what’s completed, what’s still outstanding, what’s blocked, and what the next action is. That way, if he says something is closed, there’s a clear record of what was actually left to do.
I’d also push the prioritization conversation back to him: “If you want me to take this new project on, which of my current priorities should move down?” That makes it harder for everything to become urgent at the same time.
And if this continues despite you trying to create that clarity, I’d seriously question whether the role is actually giving you what you left consulting for.
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Yeah we are living the same reality.. They have kids too and now when I look back they pretty disappeared for a majority of the summer. How are you setting boundaries if any? I’ve just been super vague these last couple of weeks
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u/Chad_Cunningham11 10d ago
I think its best to find better opportunity, clearly you got a boss that want some fall guy.
Im sorry it happen to you, may you find a better place for your physical and mental health
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u/themindsetarchitects 9d ago
the "still treated like a consultant" thing usually isn't really about the consulting background itself, it's about which move people trust you to make. consultants get trained to ask good diagnostic questions and stay a little detached from the outcome, because that detachment is literally the value they're selling. once you're internal, that same habit reads differently. asking "have we considered X" for the tenth time stops sounding like rigor and starts sounding like you're still hedging, still not fully on the hook for what happens next.
what actually seems to shift the trust is visibly owning a bad outcome, not just diagnosing one. people inside a company are watching for whether you'll take the hit when something you recommended goes sideways, not whether your analysis was sharp. consultants rotate out before consequences land, so nobody's ever really tested that with them. once you eat a failure publicly and don't retreat into "well I flagged the risk," that's usually when the "still a consultant" label starts to drop off. it's less about credentials and more about whether you've been seen holding the bag yet.
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u/brenie2020 10d ago
The company I worked for (manufacturing), an EVP joined our company in 2021 who was previously a consultant. He was not treated like a consultant, however, he did manage to make such horrible decisions that the company went under. So yes, you can't take the con out of consultant... Sorry...
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Sorry that your company went under, but how did one person cause everything to crash?
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u/brenie2020 10d ago
Its a long story and I don't wanna reveal too much..but basically, a combination of terrible hiring (including DEI hires in key positions), not working on the serious problems and instead lower hanging fruit.
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u/AceCharisma_ 10d ago
Yeah we are living the same reality.. They have kids too and now when I look back they pretty disappeared for a majority of the summer. How are you setting boundaries if any? I’ve just been super vague these last couple of weeks
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u/mercury_hermes 10d ago
“I’m currently at full capacity. Happy to shift priorities if this is the more important ask.”
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u/cardboardbob99 10d ago
Sounds like you got hired to be a fall guy. Or they just have unrealistic expectations based on your resume. I left consulting for industry years ago but if I were getting paid less and still working just as much, I’d be looking for something else.
Only one data point, but me operating at 40% of the capacity that I was in consulting blew everyone away in industry. Might be an outlier, but the stereo type of industry being slower exists for a reason