The Consultant Is In

UVA business grad Daniel Stern works as consultant for a sales and marketing firm in suburban Washington, D.C. Here's a typical day

by Daniel Stern

Daniel Stern
Consultant, MarketBridge
BS, Class of 2004
University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce

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It seems like everyone is a "consultant" these days—including me. After graduating in 2004 with degrees in finance and management from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, I began working for MarketBridge, in Bethesda, Md. Though the firm has just under 100 employees, it works with Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Merck (MRK), and MasterCard (MA). MarketBridge helps companies design, build, and manage marketing through sales processes that leverage traditional brand marketing and field sales channels with greater online, call center, and database resources.

As a consultant, I generally complete tasks in three categories: analytical (analyzing and synthesizing data), communication (participating in conference calls, writing and presenting key findings), and people management (managing a workstream and/or other junior team members, and managing a client or team of clients).

This is a typical day:

6:30 a.m.—Up and to the gym for an early morning Spin class.

8:00 a.m.—Short walk to the Red Line Metro train at Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. (where I live). It's a 15-minute ride to Bethesda.

8:28 a.m.—I boot up my laptop at my cube to begin the day's work. While it's loading, I get water from the kitchen, say "good morning" to a few colleagues, and feed my fish, Scratch (he's a Beta).

8:43 a.m.—An instant message comes in from my manager. We have a client fire drill for our 10 a.m. conference call. He needs me to get him a few key PowerPoint slides by 9:40 a.m. (currently, I'm staffed on a sales strategy project for a Fortune 500 computer hardware/software company).

9:38 a.m.—I send the slides to my manager and check my e-mail quickly.

9:58 a.m.—I dial into the conference call. Three other MarketBridge colleagues and our client team in New York are also on the call. Today's discussion focuses on ironing out the strategic recommendations MarketBridge has developed over the last several weeks. My role on the call is to listen, take notes, and answer questions pertaining to the slides I've developed.

11:08 a.m.—Back to my cube for e-mail and voicemail catch-up.

11:26 a.m.—I complete my expenses from my last two business trips. This requires collecting receipts, printing out credit-card statements, filling out an expense form, and submitting everything to our finance team.

11:57 a.m.—I grab my lunch out of the fridge in the kitchen and head to this month's internal "brown-bag" session, where a team presents processes and findings of current projects to the firm.

1:00 p.m.—I head into a two-hour internal project team meeting to discuss the next stage of our project.

3:00 p.m.—After a long meeting, I need to get up and walk around. I go into the concourse of the building for an iced tea and a pack of gum.

3:15 p.m.—A bit of free time. I catch up on e-mail and check box scores at ESPN.com.

3:30 p.m.—I just received new data from the client directly pertaining to my workstream. I read everything, take notes, catalog data, and update our master PowerPoint deck from earlier in to include the revisions.

4:30 p.m.—It's time to completely switch gears and focus on undergraduate recruiting. Because MarketBridge is small, there are tons of opportunities to get involved with tasks outside of typical consulting-project work. Today, I'm sitting down with our director of training, development, & recruiting to discuss 2007 internship-recruiting efforts.