Pros
1. People - I met a ton of new friends here. The office skews towards the recent college graduate age. The proximity to NC State, WFU, and UNC Chapel Hill means that most people come from those schools, and being recent college grads, nobody really knows what they want to do with their lives. But luckily - everyone is in that same boat and I know of many people who made a lot of very close friends working here. The other thing to note is that CRG attracts a lot of diverse backgrounds - there are a number of Fullbrights with interesting stories, a lot of international travelers, and multilinguals. 2. Access - The business model revolves around doing research for investment analysts at hedge funds and PE firms, as well as due diligence for management consultancies. Before you get too excited, Coleman Research is essentially outsourced grunt labor that the more sophisticated consultancies and investment firms don't want to deal with. I'll touch on that more in the "Cons" section. While it is easy to pass judgment on your work as essentially the same few projects over and over again, what you do get is access to what these investment analysts are thinking about. So if you have ANY interest whatsoever in financial markets, or just the way the way active investment management works, you CAN learn a lot about various industries, the value chains, and how financial professionals view them, and keep abreast of trends, M&A, etc. Notice I say "can." None of this is required to do the job of a researcher competently, which is a shame, but it's the truth. You'll be able to help do some of the background work on deals which haven't even been made public yet, which is exciting. Obviously, you can't trade on anything while at CRG, but you can learn about the strategies and companies that various analysts are looking at before anybody else knows about them, which I thought was one of the coolest aspects of the job. 3. Easy – For the most part, the job of a researcher is pretty simple and not terribly difficult. However, this really depends on the types of projects you get stuck with. If you are doing nothing but Tech/TMT or Retail, you are on easy street since these are at the confluence of being the easiest to understand with the best network of experts and fewest coverage areas. If you are doing Industrials, Energy, or Healthcare, or need to be relied upon to do Latin America or European projects, it can get tough for reasons that are not your fault, although that won’t make much of a difference to anybody else. The core tasks you need to master for the job are the same no matter what you cover, however. You need to be able to fast, accurate, communicative with your higher ups, and you need to always be recruiting new experts, even for projects that clients aren’t looking at anymore. That’s it.
Cons
1. Culture – The culture of the company is pretty toxic, and it will wear you down after a while. The analogy I used to use with my co-workers, which always got a laugh, was that working at CRG was like working in the Soviet Union – there was always a secret trial going on about you, and you never knew what the verdict was until after it had been decided. To be more explicit, your work is going to be picked apart and analyzed at every stage using business intelligence and data collection tools. And because the company’s upper management doesn’t quite know what separates good researchers from bad researchers, coupled with the fact that they refuse to make no distinction between industries that researchers focus on (whose success obviously varies with the market and the type of client), they will keep changing the metrics and goals you need to hit in order to satisfy their revenue goals. The upper management can be absolved for the most part due to their ignorance of what goes on at the lower levels, but the fact that they continue to pivot from goal to goal, getting more and more frustrated as time goes on is what feeds the company’s toxicity machine. The fallout from upper management’s decision making process flows down to middle management, who, to justify their continued existence and utility (they don’t really do much other than direct everyone else to do obvious things like – plz work on this project, ok thank you) to the company, will often try to make examples out of people they don’t like. The fact that middle management tends to make its decisions in an overtly political way, coupled with lack of appreciation for the difficulty of certain research topics, combined with the collection of performance data that often leads to disparate conclusions (and flat out doesn’t include certain things that used to be included in the past!) unfortunately erases most of the positives I listed above. [A caveat to this dire warning – a lot of these issues depend on the team you are assigned to. There are some amazing middle managers and I don’t want to make it seem like I am painting them all with the same brush. The problem is that there are more bad ones than good ones.] 2. Middle Management – This is the real weakness of the business model that CRG has created, and for those prospective employees, your biggest sources of stress. There are two types of middle managers – the research-facing ones who assign projects to team members, and the client-facing ones that are essentially the high priests of Coleman Research Group (they get to speak for the clients, which is basically a god-like role that nobody can protest or do anything about). The account directors are the ones in charge of the various teams, which are split between consulting and investment management clients. Speaking as a former investment management-focused employee, my view is a bit biased. Yes, it is cooler to be working with the hedge fund and PE guys. However, consulting is where most of the growth is. Not only is it the growth engine, it is also run by the middle managers who know what they are doing, and by my reckoning, the least political. The rest of the middle managers are, for the most part, pretty malicious - and attained their positions by building alliances and lobbying for favor by absurd things like, for instance, playing mini-golf with an executive when he came down from New York on Friday afternoons. Ironically, for a company ostensibly so focused on the bottom line and revenue generation, such an enormous percentage of your time as a researcher is devoured trying to explain why certain projects or angles are not worthwhile, or trying to get the client-facing managers to follow up with the actual client, or going back and forth with obstinate middle managers about what the project is about, fighting over when to stop working on a project, and so forth. Notice that nothing I talked about is a revenue-generating activity – and yet it easily ate up roughly 60% of my time on a daily basis. Client-facing managers are beyond reproach – like a law or an advertising firm, power belongs to those with access and ownership over the clients. Imagine Roger Sterling from Mad Men, with half the work ethic and zero charm, and you’ve got the majority of the client facing personnel. To be fair, CRG has made a push to have researchers become more client-facing, but only for certain problematic clients that middle managers don’t want to deal with. But I'm unsure if it's outright ignorance of the view on the ground that keeps things the way they are, or if it's apathy. 3. Skills – You really aren’t learning anything in this job, apart from what you pick up on certain projects. If you have a certain industry focus, you learn a great deal about it. But unfortunately, this is not a skill. Most of the tasks you are performing are writing short summaries, staying on top of your inbox, talking a lot over the phone, and attempting to get up to speed on complicated things in a short amount of time. The ONLY way the company gives back in this regard is by allowing you to listen in on their equity research webinars that are offered to investment management clients. The team that creates these webinar products is top-notch, and are usually genuine Wall-Streeters. You can learn a lot that way – I definitely did. Apart from that, the negatives outweigh the positives. I am pretty sure that given the way that most people work at CRG – skipping around between projects and never focusing for very long on any one project –damaged my attention span. I would highly, highly recommend that you work on achieving some other professional milestone if you work here. A programming course, a professional certification, a scuba license – your work experience at CRG alone may not help you as much as you think. Most people are able to move on to a wide variety of different careers afterwards, but they have to work hard to get out. 4. Zero-Sum – All this means is that, “your loss is someone else’s gain, and their loss is your gain.” To give you an idea of this in action, very often a lucrative project from a favorable client will go to someone on a purely subjective basis of a middle manager. This could be a topic that you’ve done for several other clients, or just have expressed an interest in, or is related to past work you’ve done. Regardless, the other researcher can take all your work on your past projects and get all the credit for it. This situation has happened to everyone, but it seems to happen to some people far more than it does to others, mostly because middle managers know that if you’ve done good work on a hard project before, you can turn around other hard topics too. So you may end up getting saddled with all the front-end work, while others swim in your wake and reap the rewards. This happens to at least one person on every team. That is exactly where you don’t want to be. This “Zero-Sum” phenomenon happens in a larger sense too as well. Despite the fact that it is researchers doing all the work for clients, it is often the client-facing middle managers that get the credit for “upselling” accounts. 5. Lack of Expertise – Let me tell the story of how CRG got started. In the late 90’s, an insanely successful company called GLG was exploding in profitability, prompting the entrance of competitors hoping to emulate its success and carve out a niche in what looked to be the new market of expert networks. CRG's founders copied GLG’s business model as cheaply as they could, and leveraged relationships with large money managers (gained through personal connections) to start competing for the same client base. However, unlike GLG, which was founded by two very competent PE teams - the upper management of Coleman, and consequently its middle management and lower-level grunts – despite working for a client base almost entirely comprised of nothing but investment analysts, know almost nothing about investment analysis, financial markets, or the industries they are working on. CRG is focused on providing access to the right expertise, but ironically this is what it lacks the most! I’ll illustrate this with an anecdote: During meetings in which the team was struggling to meet its prescribed revenue goal, the account director would never fail to attempt to offer the world’s most obvious advice – “try to think like the client, and determine why the analyst needs this information.” This demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the type of company CRG is – if we were able to think like the client, we would all be working for the client, not for CRG! Ultimately, the main reason for CRG’s troubles is that it doesn’t know what it is, or what it wants to be. At its best, it is a sell-side shop sitting on a GOLD MINE of useful data. At its worst, it is trying to be some sort of strange call center. The result is that is somewhat of both, which is its main liability.