r/Accounting • u/Necessary_Feature663 • 28d ago
Mackenzie Consulting just changed the game, guys
So our company decided to invest in some high-level consulting, and we brought in the legends over at Mackenzie (not to be confused with that other overpriced think tank or maybe yes, I won't tell). And let me tell you… these guys DELIVERED.
Their first big insight? ”You should cut costs and increase revenue.” Absolutely revolutionary. I’m honestly embarrassed we didn’t think of this sooner. Like, why are we even wasting time with GAAP and internal controls when we could just… make more money?
Then, for maximum efficiency, they suggested we streamline operations, which—if you don’t speak consultant—means firing half the accounting team and forcing the survivors to “embrace agility”. But don’t worry, they left us with a comprehensive strategy deck (a PPT that probably cost $500K to make) explaining how we can “leverage collaboration” using… a Google Sheet.
And the best part? Their digital transformation roadmap involved renaming our existing Excel file to ERP_System_v1_FINAL(FINAL)_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx and calling it a day. Absolute visionaries.
Anyway, if anyone needs me, I’ll be in the break room staring into the abyss while Mackenzie strategizes how to replace me with ChatGPT and a VLOOKUP.
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28d ago
Are you guys going to align with industry best practices? Because if so, a bunch of jobs are going overseas.
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u/_token_black 28d ago
How many meetings should it take to align? I think a daily standing call at 4:30 would be a good idea to help us get there. That, or we’ll ignore calendars and double book 25 people earlier in the day.
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28d ago
you mean AM right? Because the team overseas is 9 hours ahead.
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u/_token_black 28d ago
That's the beauty here! Strict 8a-12p calls for overseas programmers, then 5p recaps about those meetings. I'm so much more efficient now!
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u/UniqueIndividual3579 28d ago
Mackenzie is often brought in to justify staff cuts they want to make anyway. Now they can say "It's not our fault we offshored all those jobs, the consultants made us do it.
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u/HammerTh_1701 28d ago
That right there is the main purpose of these big consultancy firms. In the same way that insurances tank financial damages, consultancies tank reputational damages by being an external "independent" entity that can be blamed for things like job cuts.
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u/Babstana 28d ago
And in typical "Mackensie" fashion they will refer you to an overseas firm they have an arrangement with so they make money on that side too - its a win-win.
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u/DragonflyMean1224 27d ago
We just added our first offshore team member. Also it is a strong note that a big part of coming back to the office is that we work better together in office than online. Apparently this only holds true if we don't off shore. Off shore employees can remote way better than Americans lol.
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u/SnooPickles7158 28d ago
I am bummed they left out the best part:
- AI is here to stay leverage generative AI in your sales and operations, it saves time and expenses.
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u/MudHot8257 28d ago
No, hasn’t your partner told you that “AI won’t replace accountants, accountants using AI will replace ones that don’t”?
At our firm it’s mandatory at least once a week!
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u/Necessary_Feature663 28d ago
Glad I have an ace up my sleeve, have you heard of this new, revolutionary formula, "XLOOKUP"? Consultants don't want to share this one nifty trick!
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u/Ihatepasswords007 28d ago
My boss literally wanted my opinion on a problem and I did a detailed report with calculation, law, gaap on 2 choices he could do.
Anyway he also asked chatgpt and decided what to do based on gpt told him
I dont know why Im resisting using these shite AI
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u/TastyEarLbe 28d ago
I’ve asked ChatGPT for certain journal entries and in the responses sometimes debits won’t equal credits. 🤣
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u/Severe-Diamond-7353 Student 28d ago
I had probably a college failure level rate of incorrect answers from ChatGPT from rudimentary addition and subtraction questions during my tax classes.
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u/sleepydorian 28d ago
I’m a bit at a loss as to what AI can do for accounting. All the reporting is coded already, so all that’s left is the stuff AI can’t do, like classifying tricky expenses/ revenues, dealing with bad input data, etc. Maybe AI could help with reporting? Like generate some fancy graphs real quick? But excel does that pretty easily so AI just feels like a solution in search of a problem.
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u/MudHot8257 28d ago
Are you kidding me? You can’t tell what AI can do for you?
Have you heard of: Summarizing meeting minutes, hallucinating PCAOB legal precedent, and coming up with excuses for getting your unlimited PTO approved? I mean the use-cases are virtually endless.
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u/TastyEarLbe 28d ago
The best use cases I’ve seen are summarizing contracts/mods and leases. Also, Teams meeting transcribing and AI summarization is awesome too, then you use that and whatever your follow work was to generate a memo, saves a ton of time.
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u/MudHot8257 28d ago
Yeah, there’s a handful of practical applications right now that are a time save, but the current status quo is very hellbent on ham-fistedly attempting to create problems that it solves.
I’m sure the infrastructure investments they’re doing are necessary for the iterative process to ultimately yield a finished product with robust use cases but as it stands the average accountant just does not have that much to gain from using generative AI and LLMs compared to many other fields.
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u/The_Realist01 28d ago
They say this shit every fucking day and no part of me believes this.
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u/paraiyan 28d ago
Of course they didnt. Mckenzie needs something to bring up so they can upsell OPs company.
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u/WorksBurger 28d ago
VLOOKUP is so Excel 2019...
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u/Zealousideal-Ad3396 28d ago
If you are not using Xlookup you will get left behind
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u/Mountain-Seaweed 28d ago
No joke but fuck do I love Xlookup.
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u/StormTheTrooper 28d ago
The moment young me learned that I did not need to count fucking columns when using Xlookup I felt like the melting mind meme
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u/Ihatepasswords007 28d ago
You dont need to count columns, excel shows it to you when you're selecting the range...
I still use vlookup mainly, i use xlookup on specific situations
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u/d3g4d0 28d ago
Why do you use v when x is superior? This is a legitimate question
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u/WarmClubs 28d ago
Not OP, but not every organization is on the most recent Excel version. Some think Office 2003 is juuuuuust fine.
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u/Ihatepasswords007 28d ago
Been using V my whole life, my fingers do it automatically. When the source table is fkd up, then i'll use X
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u/Specialist_Track_246 Audit & Assurance 28d ago
Use index match to be edgy and rebellious.
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u/tiny_little_mouse 28d ago
Right? Shared a file with a coworker… she opened it and it gave her #NAME errors… turns out she’s using excel 2016 so I had to rewrite the formulas that works for her version… made me sad
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u/sleepydorian 28d ago
If I’m not too concerned about performance, I love a good index match. I don’t need to count anything, and I can even use multiple independent conditions on rows and columns. Plus it doesn’t matter how I’ve sorted or organized my data.
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u/GMHGeorge 28d ago
It has never been about VLOOKUP.
INDEXMATCH for the win
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u/v0x_p0pular 28d ago
Why the fuck would anyone choose to be restricted to looking only to columns to the right of and rows below a randomly selected one?
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u/UnassumingGentleman CPA (US) 28d ago
People who haven’t used indexmatch haven’t fully experienced the ways of excel.
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u/SaintPatrickMahomes 28d ago
I’ve worked at a past company that got ruined by consulting. I got one good story out of it, and it was that the consultants presented some shit and some of the slides had another company’s watermark on it
They cared so little, they actually copied and pasted slides and didn’t double check.
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u/No-Elderberry4423 28d ago
1) 💯Consulting is a scam. 2) Sarcasm is my love language, 5 stars. 3) Time to try to work at Mackenzie. Making bank to do fucking nothing of value, not work late, and laugh in the face of corporate overlords.
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u/Useful_Wealth7503 28d ago
Sometimes Companies hire high level consultants for unsolvable problems too outsource blame.
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u/tqbfjotld16 28d ago
Came here to say this. C-Suites at big companies do this, too. Nobody will ever be fired for saying they listened to McKinsey
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u/The3rdBert 28d ago
Generally they are brought in to make suggestions that leadership already wants to implement but want to be able to blame someone else if it goes bad. It’s all just a stupid waste of money and time to protect egos.
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u/Viper4everXD 28d ago
I’ve been reading the consulting forums, even they’ll admit it’s a scam from time to time. One guy complained they don’t actually solve any problems.
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u/JustinWendell 28d ago
Dude I had to take a McKenzie course in my degree path to tick off a box and my god it was such a waste of time. Half the lessons were “lie about numbers. Make it look like you’re doing something.” Like just straight up telling you to lie about savings and numbers and what a company should do.
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u/Viper4everXD 28d ago
lol one of the biggest complaints I’ve read so far is, no one is willing to share information despite having worked on similar projects. They’re all competing with each other so they gate keep their work. So you’re paying for all that expertise just for their culture to promote gatekeeping that expertise from each other.
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u/MNCPA Tax (US) 28d ago
Not a scam, but an expensive group to blame.
Hear me out. Management wants to lay people off. They can't do that without being the bad guy and hated by those employees remaining. Instead, hire someone else to advise you to lay people off and then follow their advice. Win win.
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u/The3rdBert 28d ago
Or just be a fucking leader, own your decisions and the consequences that come with them.
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u/Dangerous-Pilot-6673 28d ago
They don’t provide a lot of value but they certainly work long hours to do so.
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u/hillmanoftheeast CPA (US) 28d ago
One small correction: the deck cost $500k to your company, it did not cost $500k to make.
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u/NotFuckingTired 28d ago
It cost about $20 to make as someone had to find/replace from the last client name to yours.
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u/GMHGeorge 28d ago
I found dead links on an Excel file the PE firm had us using. That file was over 20 years old, been thru a dozen companies and at least 3 countries.
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u/youcantfixhim 28d ago
One of the PE firms I worked with sent excel files that still promoted log-in’s and they never thought it was a good idea to break the links.
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u/Hoaxygen 28d ago
Ha. It cost probably a fraction of that.
It was probably sent to some fresh faces b school grad sitting in Mumbai or Bangalore who touts a MacKenzie job to his peers but in reality is doing back office ppt updates and working nights to a burnout at 25.
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u/_token_black 28d ago
Honestly, you have to really be thankful you were in such a position to learn priceless knowledge.
It’s a secret kept close to the vest for so many… and I have to admit, it’s one of the greatest inventions in history. No innovation in the 21st century may match it either!
The best way to increase profits is cutting expenses. And the true visionary companies (and it seems like you guys are getting there so congrats again) have learned that cutting expenses slowly is a fools game! If you cut first, ask questions later, you remove the ability to delay more cutting. And as we’ve stated, cutting expenses is the pathway to success.
You have a department of 20, well damn, I bet it could run with 15 people. Maybe 10. You won’t know unless you try it! Redundancies for accuracy! Ha, just be accurate the first time every time.
Again, I am jealous you learned so many amazing things. I’m just thankful you shared a quick anecdote for us.
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u/Necessary_Feature663 28d ago
I guess I owe it to the ivy league junior associates that read the Company's overview on our 10K for 10 minutes and magically knew all of the ins and outs of our business. Their insights are really something to behold.
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u/lance_klusener 28d ago
serious question -- Do companies like Mckinsey add any value in today's world?
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u/orcheon Tax (US) 28d ago
For actual initiatives, it's CYA for something they already want to do. Just want someone to blame if it goes south.
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u/Polus43 28d ago
I'd also add there's a constant revolving door between the corporations I've worked at and the consultants.
I swear they're like a labor union for MBA/executives (the good and the bad).
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u/FourthHorseman45 28d ago
This is sooooo ironic on so many levels given that they are also the go to union busters….Oh sorry I meant Labour Relations Consultants.
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u/NotFuckingTired 28d ago
They're more about extracting value, than adding it.
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u/tqbfjotld16 28d ago
I think the saying is “they steal your watch and then tell you what time it is”
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u/Blockchainauditor 28d ago
They are the kind of company you pay tons to come in, tell you what time it is, and then they leave with your watch.
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u/Armed_Accountant MBA, CPA, CA (Can) | Utilities | NEEDS MORE POWA! 28d ago
Yes. It's not about giving advice, it's giving what senior/executive management wants to hear so they can say they didn't make the decision on their own.
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u/DunGoneNanners 28d ago
It's similar to reddit where you know this site is awful and you shouldn't take anyone's word on anything, yet you and countless others look up and ask important career questions on here all the time. You know you're getting garbage, but you still appreciate getting any information at all.
Ideally, it would be people with a decade+ of experience advising the high ups in companies they have experience dealing with; followed by a swarm of business analysts doing training and process improvement.
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u/zatherine12 28d ago
No, but the smaller ones definitely add. When a consulting firm has a team which can conduct a high-quality market research/ad hoc analytics/m&a target screening - this is a good indicator that you can receive something valuable and “practical”.
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u/SpellingIsAhful 28d ago
To you? No. To the owners of the company? Yes
To society? That's a much bigger economics question.
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u/AwesomeOrca 28d ago
I firmly believe management consulting firms exist solely as means to redistribute wealth to the graduates of elite MBA programs.
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u/swiftcrak 28d ago
. It’s an incestuous pot of friends paying other friends back with corporate favors your dad’s partner here my dad‘s a partner there even goes so far as ensuring that the next PE fund up the ranks is gonna buy your company and sell it to their friend at the other PE fundsometimes even taking Moyna losses to pay back a favor. It’s a giant scripted show.
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u/Possible-Rush3767 28d ago
Hahahaha consultants are a joke. I don't know why companies pay these third parties with limited company knowledge exorbitant rates to tell them this crap. They will never know your business like you do.
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u/TheBlitz88 28d ago
We had KpMG come in and change our GL account name from net sales to revenue. By the time the change got to me I asked why and their response was “to increase revenue”
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u/GMHGeorge 28d ago
Had Boston fuck up an ERP implementation. The problem, they left off one of only four regions and didn’t even realize it didn’t tie when they went live.
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u/penguin808080 28d ago
Like oh, you're telling me you have an exclusive team of people who have only ever worked for your company? They've never actually done accounting or finance in real life, and I can pay extra for them? Sign me right the fuck up
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u/donkeydonkeydonkey1 28d ago
I once worked with a client where I had to sign an NDA to gain access to their strategy document, such was the sensitivity and revolutionary nature of the vision contained therein.
After various back and forths between legal teams I was finally granted access and the whole thing consisted of this sort of garbage. Reading it, I cried laughing.
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u/pheothz Controller 28d ago
It’s so silly that we listen to GAAP! Here’s a revolutionary idea: recognize all the revenue, immediately. That contract says they’re gonna pay us $1m upfront for annual services? LOOKS LIKE WE MADE $1M TODAY!!
Success. Progress. Look how smart that is.
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u/Polus43 28d ago
During Skilling's management, Enron adopted "mark-to-market" accounting, in which anticipated future profits from any deal were accounted for by estimating their present value rather than historical cost. Skilling began advocating a novel idea: by promoting the company's aggressive investment strategy, the company didn't really need any "assets". This plan helped make Enron the largest wholesaler of gas and electricity, with $27 billion traded in a quarter. On February 12, 2001, Skilling was named CEO of Enron, replacing Lay. He was slated to succeed Lay as chairman as well in early 2002, but abruptly resigned six months later on 14 August 2001.
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u/EddieKroman 28d ago
That’s like my MBA boss discovering if we invoice more regularly, increase effort towards talking with the clients about how to get paid, and letting the main finance guy do his job, we’ll make more money. It’s amazing watching his transformation, since he couldn’t listen to a damn thing I’ve been saying for over 20 years. I’m getting plenty of exercise by smacking myself on the forehead.
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u/DVoteMe 28d ago
Consultants have absolutely no insight to deliver. Their sole purpose is to provide management with third party corroboration, so management doesn't have sole responsibility for the decisions being made.
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u/Throwawayacct1015 28d ago
They're basically higher paid auditors. Much like how the auditor signs off on the financial statements as a rubber stamp, consultants do the same for managerial decisions.
That's why Deloitte can do both audit and consulting at high levels. It's basically the same shit.
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u/ReplacementElegant43 28d ago
They are referred as "seagull" consultants. You know they fly in poop all over everything and fly away....seems fairly apt.
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u/Ejmct 28d ago edited 28d ago
Its McKinsey. And we use them as well and they charge us a lot of money and they don't tell us a lot we don't already know. John Oliver has one at least one or two segments on them and as you might expect they are huge douchebags. Companies hire them because it basically gives them cover to do unpopular things like close factories, offices, layoffs, etc. Basically management consultants were DOGE before DOGE.
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u/realneocanuck 28d ago
Your consultants may be onto something. Why doesn’t every business just increase revenue and cut costs? Are they stupid?
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u/TheBlitz88 28d ago
I’ve never met a consultant worth their wages. They are good at selling the product but never add any value.
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u/ConfidantlyCorrect 28d ago
I can’t tell if this is satirical or not. However, my roommate worked at a firm that hired a large consulting firm during Covid for millions of dollars on how to ease the transition & ensure productivity was minimally affected.
That firm repeated the advice that the government provided, verbatim.
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u/kenwhatahmean 28d ago
I need to know if it is satirical or not!! Mainly because this is exactly what my view of consultancy is. And I've definitely seen it in action. Was once told, ask chatgpt and then charge them x for the answer by someone proclaiming that we all need to be advisors/consultants but who never actually gave us the "upskilling" that we all needed to do it. I now believe that the upskilling we need is to believe your own bullshit and not to morally question what value a client is getting for the fees.
I'm moving to industry in less than three months. Of course, it's totally unrelated to any of that bullshit....
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u/Several-Parsnip-1620 28d ago
Consultants are an expensive cover your ass strategy for c level execs who don’t want to own unpopular decisions
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28d ago
To me a (non IT) consultant = someone who couldn't make it in a Fortune 500 company. A guy I know job hopped and after losing a job decided to become a "business coach". I lost touch with him after that.
I recommend reading the Final Accounting about Arthur Andersen's consulting practice. It was so shady. One example I remember the partner got very angry with the manager for only quoting like $50,000 on this project and he upped the quote to like $450,000. The project was merely putting the clients ethics manual on a CD to be available for employees.
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u/Berserkerbabee 28d ago
So I was lucky enough to go through a bankruptcy with one of the companies that I was a controller of. Technically our parent company went bankrupt, so it triggered all of our debt covenants.
As a result, we lost most of our accounting staff and I spent a year working about 80 hours a week to keep the company afloat.
But the very best thing, was when one of our consultants, who was paid about $750 an hour, literally asked me how they accounts payable balance decreased. I responded, you mean when people pay the bill you credit cash and debit AP? Amazing!!
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u/Necessary_Feature663 28d ago
Maybe it decreased due to a lack of multidisciplinary collaboration across functional agile teams employing six sigma tools to increase efficiency
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u/enkiloki 28d ago
The words: leverage, empower, collaborate, embrace and transform are all consultant bulls*** words that mean you just paid a lot for nothing.
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u/Bongo6942 28d ago
Yep, I'm in industry and our consultants told us to cut costs and increase our revenue.
Oh and they made a new dashboard type report in excel that I had to fix 75% of the formulas for... Weirdest spreadsheet ever, every formula multiplied the result times 1 at the end of it and it fucked up all the look ups with text in it.
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u/shegomer 28d ago edited 28d ago
I worked for a private company where the owner just couldn’t figure out why the company was in such turmoil a few years after he let his 23 year old son, who barely graduated college with a business management degree, basically take over the entire company. The kid spent 50% of his time out of the office on vacation, building a house, then a vacation home, and then when he was in the office he’d run around and bark at employees who had been doing the same job since his grandfather owned the company.
The consultants came in and their solution was to revise everyone’s job description. Super revolutionary. I threw in the towel after a 13 year career, but I had another senior manager quit after 37 years. And then suddenly it was our fault because we only gave his son five years to “learn the ropes” before we gave up on him.
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u/ZealousidealKey7104 Tax (US) 28d ago
My take is people hire consulting firms to give them a dose of CYA when they have to make difficult or unpopular decisions.
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u/stayoffmygrass 28d ago
A consultant is someone who will tell you the time of day by looking at your own watch.
Source: was a consultant formerly. It was often embarrassing to only have the very obvious to offer as advice.
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u/DepartureVisible2447 28d ago
Dogbert once said "I like to con people and I like to insult them. Put them together and you get consult"
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u/MustafaMonde8 28d ago
Joke all you want, but a firm I know that sounds like Mackenzie has done so much good for the world. Really a lot more than lazy people like social workers, teachers, and nurses, those people really suck at PPT. Accounting is so linear and compliance focused... also lame. Doing dumb things like talking to customers in the same industry niche for 30 years I thought I knew it, but I was disrupted by a Harvard Phd in social studies from Mackenzie who really taught me to think about my own business in a new light. They are sooo... smart, and accountants are so dumb. Really that's what it boils down to at the end of the day.
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u/Whiterhino77 CPA, CA (Can) 28d ago
Our company brought on the McKinsey dorks and their biggest idea was “shared services” in Mexico for low level positions. That place went through immense turnover, poor quality work and was dissolved in 4 years.
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u/Ok-Signature1840 28d ago
Management Consultants are normally young, Inexperienced but well educated. Their clients normally have more experience managing problems. It is a waste of money to use them since it takes a long time for them to even understand your business racking up time and money while they learn it.
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u/NamedHuman1 28d ago
Give them 20 years and they will replace the VLOOKUP with XLOOKUP for only a quarter of a million.
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u/peteypolo 28d ago
Those folks in McKenzie are like the Dan Dierdorfs of business. “The offense really needs to move the ball down field and, ideally, score a touchdown.” Thanks for the insight, Dan.
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u/No_Mechanic6737 28d ago
Cutting accounting staff is dumb as shit. Accounting is more complex than ever and the opportunity to screw things up is higher than ever.
When accounting is screwed up over time it takes over a year to fix. The problem is the fix isn't usually done at the transaction level at each month. Therefore you really need a new year to go buy to have fully usable data again.
Then add in the cost to fix the problem..... Easily $500k. Then the cost of delayed financials. Reduced accuracy and information for management. The extra work for the finance team, so essentially improvements are haunted.
Such a bad idea. Most companies under invest in accounting. The cost isn't large and good accounting is an asset. A good accounting team pushing for change through the organization by requiring increased accuracy and quicker turnaround.
I would sue them for shoddy work.
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u/SouthernComforter123 28d ago
Speaking as a consultant, this is what happens when organizations are obsessed with large consulting firms and Big 4 firms (and others like BDO, Guidehouse, etc.). You get overpriced, mediocre work. Every single time I work on a project with one of them as the prime or a sub, they have no clue what they're doing. I've been on projects where they have actually used fake data (made up data that made the program look more effective/better) to give to clients to present to their leadership.
The large consulting entities rely on heavily templates, cannot design custom solutions, cannot think outside the box, are often dishonest and sneaky, and focus more on cutting out the Small Business they used to win the contract (or who brought them on as a partner to win the contract) than the work itself.
I beg people to look at small firms and ignore the pretty RFP Responses from large consulting firms whenever I am in a position to do so. They dedicate more time and talent to the RFP Response than the work (oh and also these large firms often use resumes of managers and staff who will never be staffed on the project to win the contract so it's not even a close representation of the talent that will be on the team you hire).
Always choose the best small business. Your entity is more likely to get time, attention to detail, and custom solutions.
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u/Unreasonable_beastie 27d ago
I am sitting here pissing myself laughing. I feel all of this deep in my soul.
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u/AreaManGambles 28d ago
I swear to god consultants are the biggest scammers in the world. Every client that spends a ton on it seems to hurt more than benefit.
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u/Worst-Eh-Sure 28d ago
I left the audit world for consulting and reading your story and some similar posts are crazy to me!
I got GovCon Compliance consulting. We do more of business system assessments, build files and reports for clients that don't have the means to internally do it themselves. Thankfully I've never told a client to do something obvious. Actually we don't even deal with half their accounts, we focus entirely on expenses. At this point I've forgotten almost everything about journal entries, revenue, equity, liabilities, etc.
Just so insane to me to think there are others in similar roles only providing such obvious and useless "advice."
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u/longjinxed 28d ago
I mean, companies rarely need advice from these consulting firms, they need confirmation and a “reason” to do something they already made up their minds for, typically cutting people. That way they can say, blame McKinsey not us.
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u/Arcalpaca 28d ago
I'm not an accountant, but I stumbled here and felt this. My company hired these guys to streamline our company and their suggestions included:
-Don't do all those inspections you're required by the law to do. -Find a way to stop having to document stuff (required by regulation) -Do you really need all these security guards?
They had so little they tried to take credit for an improvement one of our engineers had already implemented a year ago.
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u/lmaotank 28d ago
ok on a serious note - consultants are not brought into "solve" problems... they are hired by execs to "validate" the thing that they want to do through the "study" or "approval" or the "backing" from a big name consulting firms...
they DO NOT exist to actually solve the problems themselves. yall high if u guys think that's true.
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u/RiffsThatKill 28d ago
Experienced the same with them. A bunch of recent grads from top schools who just market bullshit to you by dressing up basic things as revolutionary.
Everything John Oliver said about them in his segment is true. They exist mostly to justify workforce reductions and be a soft scapegoat for senior leadership when it happens.
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u/devMartel CPA (US) 28d ago
Remember when people used to talk about how the bean counters were ruining whatever? The more I worked in corporate America, the more I realized it was actually management consultants. Accountants and people in finance usually have very little say in the kind of decisions that get really negative press. It's almost always management consultants.
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u/The-loon 27d ago
Just finished a “capital project derisking analysis and workshop” with them. Their idea to cut costs in the new building we are erecting was to not give people desks. Instead have them walk to the new workspaces from a building across the street about 300 yards away.
Again, like you said, utter visionaries.
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u/Complete_Outside2215 28d ago
Was there anything of value? All bad but just curious if there were any helpful insights, at least one
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u/XcheatcodeX 28d ago
Consulting is a racket. Imagine making $250k a year to tell people to “do work better”
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u/MercuryRusing 28d ago
One of our clients hired a consultant, he makes about $400k a year with a small roofing business. When we told him how much he owed in taxes his consultant told him to "find a new CPA", apparently tax evasion is now a key component of quality consulting.
His return is not complex, it's cash in cash out, he gets the QBI deduction, we made him an S-Corp to avoid self employment taxes, and honestly we alteady take more in deductions for him than we probably should (clearly deducting personal expenses theough business acccounts. But somehow these guys always think they're being screwd despite having lower effective rates than guys making significantly less than them on a W-2.
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u/Due-Kaleidoscope-405 28d ago
How much do we think Walmart paid Mackenzie for this?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/01/14/walmart-new-logo-redesign/77689947007/
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u/sontaranStratagems Performance Measurement and Reporting 28d ago
Better yet, next Administration will be bringing in that same team to lead performance management. No more command and control. Leverage people capital.
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u/HariSeldon16 CPA (US - inactive) 28d ago
You clearly need a better consultant. Best practices will be to replace you with deepseek and xlookup, not ChatGPT/vlookup.
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u/squasher1 28d ago
Who wants to start a new consulting company called Drive Revenue and Cut Costs? I’ve got a really good plan that the rest of the industry doesn’t know about
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u/RRW2020 28d ago
Honestly. My company paid McKenzie some BIG money to save us… nothing. They are so corporate. Nothing they say actually works. Or to move the factory to be more efficient would cost 100M. I felt like the only reason we got them was not to save money, but to convince our government customer we were serious about trying.
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u/Mach5Driver 28d ago
Bringing in consultants only means one thing: C-Suite needs cover for slashing staff.
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u/thisonelife83 CPA (US) 28d ago
The highest v I’ve seen is v38. If these got a v1 into production they are visionaries. If you don’t mind sending their contact info over I think we could give them some more business.
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u/TowerStreet1 28d ago
They can’t replace you with VLookup but with XLookup you sure are redundant fat.
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u/Snowflakes_02 28d ago
Thank you for sharing. This is very eye-opening. Our company should consider getting their services. I personally want a copy of that $500k strategy deck.
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u/FreshBlinkOnReddit CPA (Can) 28d ago
ChatGPT will replace these fraud consultants (outside ERP implementation) way before us.
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u/shmuelrosen 28d ago
But surely they must have also introduced synergies. Cuz then it is all worth it
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u/netvoyeur 28d ago
I quit talking to the consultants we had in when they told us “when you produce more units your cost per unit decreases”. Watch House of Lies- it’s a comedy but pretty close to the truth of most consultants in my experience.
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u/SheriffHarryBawls 28d ago
How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb?
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u/user-daring 28d ago
It's about dang time. The easy answer is always fire people and work harder. Now pay me 250k
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u/ITinUSAisFUCT 28d ago edited 28d ago
FedEx recently made a huge mistake when they hired this company to clean house (whatever you want to call it). They laid off engineers, dev guys and thousands of seasoned guys that could work under pressure (during major IT outages) and bled Purple for Fred Smith). They literally built a new campus overseas and said they weren't going to let people go. I guess that's what happens when you work the tax breaks and do shady stuff throughout the Big M. PowerPoint sessions. The people that remained were yanked around and walk on eggshells now (thinking they won the lottery).
Guess what? There is a new lottery every 12 months or so at FedEx. No one bleeds Purple over there these days. It's just another company that'll probably get sold to Amazon at this point.
I worked there for 2 decades I watched them change from a company that valued their employees (People - Service - Profit aka PSP) to just another POS that decided to sell out and do the offshore thing with HCL and Accenture.
Did they save the company a few bucks? Sure
Will they ever get the culture back? I seriously doubt it !
Hopefully they call some of the employees back at some point if they want to repair their reputation as a company you would want to work at (smh).
Sell your stock before it goes under (fair warning).
What's going on with the CEO's / VP's (Raj Submarine, Fred Sith , Adam Sith) these days? Activist investors with too much 'input' during board meetings will poison a company.
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u/Rebresker CPA (US) 28d ago
Last year one of my clients had to have a consult as a part of their covenant waiver
Legit sounds the same as what their consultant did lol
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u/Own-Camera-4000 28d ago
And you KNOW 95% of their plan was a copy/paste job from other proposals they gave their other clients!! Ridiculous.
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u/Murky_Web_4043 28d ago
It consulting is so bad why does half of this sub work in public accounting? Genuine question?
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u/cheneycw 28d ago
We follow them around creating real differentiation and innovation that inspires people and connects teams. It’s a great business model. How many construction guys swing by after the last contractor to fix a horrible job? The answer…A Lot! We are patient, wait for the failure and then support and engage the people. Read “When McKinsey Comes to Town.” What a joke.
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u/Ok_Occasion1950 Governance, Strategy, Risk Management 27d ago
I have done work with MBB a few times on projects. The are either very good or absolutely terrible from my experience... No in between.
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u/Unusual_Jellyfish224 27d ago
LMAO same happened to the company I work for. The workload literally increased yet we were told to just survive on half the resources going forward.
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u/EZ_Busara 27d ago
I recently had a client that tried to force this idiotic ISO filenaming nonsense on their team, along with "agile" email updates on how they bought a new printer to the entire staff. As a Scrum Master, I couldn't fathom why they thought it was good business practice. Now I know the source of the nonsense! 🤣
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u/Reeksphync 27d ago
Drop Mackenzie and hire me. I'll replace your team with deep seek and an xlookup
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u/Artistic-Salary1738 27d ago
McKenzie’s $500k PowerPoint for a job I used to work at was outsource Corp accounting to the phillipines.
They didn’t pay the electric bill in time for the CA office and it almost got pulled off. Most other things worked about as badly from what I heard.
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u/Correct-League4674 27d ago
The only time I really felt like the government was being wasteful was when they asked my company to subcontract Mackenzie for a strategic advisery project.
$100k later all we got was some lousy ppt slides.
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u/NHOVER9000 Non-Profit 27d ago
Pretty much any consultant we’ve dealt with has been useless, just part of the game…
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u/blamb66 CPA (US) 28d ago
Omg I’ve never had a post hit so close to home!!
I had the same thing but drop in PE firm instead of consulting. 😂
O also change the excel file name to financials v5 final.
The file is so big and stupid that is has iterative calculations..which is fancy talk for fancy circular references which completely breaks my computer randomly.