Engagement Manager, McKinsey and Company

>> Hi, my name is Helen Ma. I'm a senior associate at McKinsey and Company, here, based in Los Angeles. So, right now, I do management consulting; that's what McKinsey does. And essentially what we do is we help some of the largest companies in the world with their corporate strategy. And so, the thing that I love about my job is that I get to work across all different industries and I get to work on really tough business problems. A client that I'm currently working with no is a very large enterprise, enterprise BTB-type company. And unfortunately, even though they're a giant in the industry, their revenues are declining, they're losing market share very quickly. So they brought our firm in to help them diagnose why is it that they are no longer the market leader in many of the different divisions that they sell products to? And to basically help us develop and go to market near-term and long-term strategy for them to help return them to number one but also to understand, what are the market dynamics and what are the future trends that they should... understand? It's a -- you're kind of using lots of different pieces of data to triangle it to the answer. So first, you look at the market. So we -- within the industry, there is published market data across all the different competitors that you can look at to understand trends, you know, who's gaining share, who's losing share. And you can look at it from a regional, from a global standpoint. So we look at that in terms of competitor dynamics. You can do some competitive assessments interviews that kind of understand, what are they doing? You can talk to your company vendors to understand, is there a relationship thing? Is it a product thing? to try to diagnose all those things. And then you can look internally within the company as well. So, it may be both external as well as internal forces that are causing this decline to happen. So we use all of that information, both quantitative and qualitative data, to come up with our recommendation. Typical engagements are anywhere from six to 10 weeks, but that is just the typical and there's a huge variation. And it's not like this bell curve where everything is sort of between six to 10 weeks. So, we do due diligences and those are usually a week to two weeks. And we do big transformational as well as implementation-type projects as well that can go six months up to a year. So it really does vary depending on the content as well as the industry that we're working with.