Pros
Firm is growing fast right now, and most of the other reviews on here are quite brief, so wanted to share my two cents after ~3 years of experience. Overall: if you’re interested in TMT consulting, A|S is the place to be. If you’re interested in TMT finance, you might be better off at a bank; if you just want to get general consulting exposure, go to MBB or even a T2. Pros: - Level of personal development. Joining out of undergrad, I can honestly say I have built more skills and have more responsibility than any single friend in finance, consulting, or tech. These skills are varied, primarily (1) work product development (by year 2, I’m making entire decks or models myself), (2) client-facing opportunity (again by year 2, not uncommon to lead a conversation with a senior client), and (3) speed of opportunity within the firm (high performers at A|S are given ‘stretch’ roles constantly). Note: I can’t comment on level of experience/exposure for an MBA or experienced hire, but I believe much of the below should still be relevant. - TMT expertise. It’s consulting, so your staffing is still in large part determined by luck, but you’re guaranteed to gain significant familiarity if not expertise in a number of TMT sub-verticals, e.g. business models and market trends of cloud software, home internet, 5G, streaming services, etc. In general, A|S leans a little heavier on the TMT infrastructure side (fiber, towers, data centers), but that is changing rapidly in recent years, due in part to firm effort to diversify projects, and in part to market consolidation which has meant fewer of those projects anyways. To be clear, you’ll read other reviews on this site that say, “the firm only does fiber DDs!” which may have been true 5 years ago but is not true now. However, you're not going to be working for the Snapchats or Instagrams people think of when they hear ‘tech.’ - Strategy and DD only. Our projects are almost exclusively corporate strategy and investor due diligence, meaning you’re highly unlikely to get stuck on an 8-month org or cost-cutting project like you would at most big firms. Corporate work usually involves complex business planning (e.g., building a zip-code level subscriber growth model for a large company), and DDs usually involve trying to understand the growth of an obscure market (e.g. how fast is the Peruvian edge computing middle market growing). If this sounds like interesting work to you, A|S could be a great fit. If this sounds boring, see my note on project tedium below. One more note here: as the firm grows, leadership are realizing that corporate work is generally more sustainable/reliable and it seems likely we’ll start doing more operations projects. - “No red tape” culture. In general, A|S leadership adopt the attitude of, “as long as you’re working hard, we got you.” Pre-COVID, this meant lavish happy hours and events, good office snacks/perks/swag/outings. Regardless of COVID, this means very transparent and flexible HR. For example, A|S is generally open to flexible working arrangements, reduced work plans, switching offices, low travel as needed, etc. I always have felt like i’m dealing with human beings that want me to succeed, rather than a bureaucracy that wants to use me and squeeze me. This largely comes “from the top.” Rory Altman (founder/CEO) and the VP of HR are genuinely good people committed to creating a positive working environment. - Recent merger. Our firm is now global, and growing very fast. Adding the European/Mexican offices will expand the scope of projects we do (e.g. working for more multinational corporates rather than US investors), and the opportunity to change offices (post-COVID). However, given COVID limitations on intra-office gatherings, it still feels like ‘two firms’ (Americas and Europe). Given the lack of an in-person culture, I imagine it could be difficult for some new hires to feel like ‘part of the family’ without office interactions—although this would be true of joining any company right now / will only be a temporary issue. The ‘bull’ would say, merger will mean a broader opportunity for connections and collaboration at the firm; the ‘bear’ would say, this fast growth will dilute our firm’s tight knit culture. This is still TBD from my view. - Comp. Generally in line with MBB/T2 firms. Benefits used to be below benchmark, but they have recently improved. The biggest comp upside is potential for early promotion, unlike some other firms. So, for example you could be making post-MBA $s only 2-3 years out of undergrad, or partner-level $s 5-6 years out, if promoted fast. It’s never going to be more than private equity or hedge fund pay, but it rivals any consulting firm and even most tech tracks. - Review process. Tends to be relatively transparent, with frequent performance check-ins and clear goals. Who gets promoted is always going to be political/contested, but I have very rarely felt competitive with or jealous of peers. This goes both ways--the firm is also very receptive to feedback. - Exit opportunities. In general, three paths: (1) most common is strategy or finance role at a TMT firm. Recent exits this year have been to Disney, Google, Verizon, the occasional startup. You’ll get close looks from recruiters at these TMT companies, they all know the A|S name. (2) MBA. Most who apply that I know of got into at least an M7 or two, with a few to Stanford/Wharton every year as well. The firm also sponsors if you want that. (3) finance - typically tech VC, with the occasional mid-market PE. A bit less common, but 1-2 exit this way every year since we do a lot of investor work. If your goal is to use consulting as a springboard to something other than the above 3 options, might want to look elsewhere.
Cons
Since it’s consulting, certain cons are inevitable (hours, demanding clients, tedious work), so I’ll focus here on A|S-specific realities I wish I had known before accepting the offer. - Prestige. It pains me to list this as the top ‘con,’ but honestly, it can be a bit annoying when none of your classmates/friends/family, and many recruiters, have not heard of your firm. This can be a barrier in certain types of recruiting (e.g., some PE firms will only take MBB consultants; some corporate recruiters won’t want a TMT-specific consultant for more general roles). In general, A|S thinks of itself as on par with MBB in terms of comp, level of intellect/client work, and strategic focus of projects. This may be true in the sense that, we do work for top tier PE funds and F100 corporations. However, at the end of the day, other firms have the ears of C-Suite executives at the F100, and A|S just doesn’t. You’re unlikely to interact with clients higher than Sr. Manager or VP at F100 companies. When it comes to elite level consulting, we just can't compete with the MBB brand. Another metric of this would be social following. For a company with ~1/100th the revenue of an MBB, we have ~1/10,000th the social media following. Our brand is just pretty week. - Project tedium. After a few years, consulting always gets a little boring—firms ‘add value’ by doing projects they’ve done before, so this is unavoidable to some extent. However, this problem is exacerbated at a TMT-focused firm, where the likelihood of working on 5 consecutive SaaS market size analyses for 5 different PE firms is not unlikely. - “Quantitative focus.” This is one of the firm’s favorite selling points—that we do quant heavy work. In reality what this means is, we sell projects that require a nauseating amount of data processing, interpretation, and analysis, typically in conjunction with our in-house data scientists/data engineers. It also means many of our projects involve excruciatingly granular geographic analysis, e.g. predicting business spend on some technology for every census block in the United States. I have spent a lot more time than I would like to, as a consultant, trying to write a SQL query, waiting for some massive csv to open, or googling Tableau tutorials, than will ever be useful to me in my life. I know this is where the industry is headed generally (companies keep track of more data —> require more consultants to process), but I personally find it unappetizing work. Others may feel differently, e.g. if you have a data science background. - Hours. Standard for consulting, but just to give some color—hours have improved a lot over the years. In my experience, 80% of weeks are 55-65 hours (so, ~9am to ~9-11pm M-Th, maybe ~9-5 on Fridays, zero weekend hours), and 10% are more, 10% less. There are people at A|S who work 70+ hour weeks, but that’s either a personal choice (they’re grinding to get promoted early), a one-off egregiously demanding client, or personal inefficiency/wheel-spinning. I've never worked a weekend. - Diversity. Look, the firm is making extraordinary efforts to hire senior women and people of color, but are generally struggling. This is not the forum to dissect reasons for this, but if having diverse senior-level mentorship is important to you, look elsewhere. That said, the firm is quite diverse from the ~manager level downwards, at least compared to the industry generally. Also to the firm’s credit, they are pouring an extraordinary number of resources into diversity programs - speaker series, workshops, panels, etc etc. - Unnecessary leveling. With the merger, we’ve added an extra ‘level,’ so there are now 7 levels from Analyst to Partner. Compared to how MBB does leveling, this seems unnecessary, more like a way of dragging out the promotion process with smaller, less meaningful milestones along the way, but I'm hardly an expert here. - Lack of extracurricular programming. I don’t know the exact word for this, but A|S has very few options for secondments like MBB or others have, and given it’s a smaller firm, a bit less social inertia (e.g. if the firm joins a local kickball tournament, you’ll be lucky if 3 people show up).