651. Chad Oakley, Current State of the Consulting Market in 2026

Speaker A: Okay, it's 1m minute after the hour. That's the official start time. All right. Okay, so let's get started. Welcome, everyone. I am so thrilled to have Chad Oakley back for the fifth annual version of the current state of the consulting market. Uh, Chad Oakley, CEO of Charles Eris, which is one of the top, uh, retained search firms in the United States with a focus on. One of their focus areas is on recruiting consultants and former consultants into roles. So we're really thrilled to have Chad here giving his perspective on the market. A couple of things up front. One is if you could please plan to. When you. Before you click that leave button, whenever it might be, whether it's at the top of the hour or sometime during the session before you leave, I'd like everyone to please share one takeaway that you had from today's session. It's always helpful for speakers to know what resonated. So. So whether it's one thing that you found helpful or one thing that you found surprising, just make a note of that and put that in the chat before you. Before you leave today. Second thing is I'm going to be kind of curating, uh, the questions as they come in from the chat. Chad's going to speak for 15 or 20 minutes. He has some remarks that he prepared, and then we're going to launch into Q and A. So as he's talking and as we go through, just be putting your questions in the chat and I'll work to sort of synthesize and, and, uh, curate those and ask Chad once he gets done chatting. So with that, Chad, uh, over to you.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, thanks, Will. Really appreciate it. Uh, thanks for having me back. And it's always, uh, great to be with the Umbrix group and so hope everybody's doing, uh, well today. Wherever you happen to be in the world team, as Will mentioned, I'll spend a little bit of time just talking about what we're seeing in the, in the consulting kind of job market, if you will, for about 15 or 20 minutes maybe. And then I'll be more than happy to answer, uh, any questions that, that people might have. What I, what I want to start with is just a little bit about who I am and who Charles Ayres is, just so that everybody on this call has some context for where all of this information is coming from. So as Will mentioned, Charles Eris is an executive search firm. And like any good consultant, right. We don't try to be all things to all people. We have very specific practices where we are an Inch wide and a mile deep if you will. And one of those specific areas is strategy. And that's a practice that I started uh, 23 years ago when I joined the firm. I'm a former consultant, just like many of you. I started my career at Deloitte, uh, consulting. I uh, then went to get uh, my MBA at the Wharton School. And then I joined Bain Co. And uh, and then after a number of years of Bain, I came uh, adhere to Charles Eris and, and started our strategy recruiting practice. And that's a practice that uh, recruits uh, current and former consultants, uh, into any number of different types of roles. Over the years, our business has migrated from when I first joined. We did a lot of kind of Fortune 500 strategy placements over time. Just like a lot of things in business, you know, private equity has really taken a, a, you know, closer front seat for our client base. And now today probably 75% of the placements we make are for private equity firms and their portfolio companies. And we're placing these types of individuals, um, both at the fund level. Right. Individuals that are going to work for a private equity firm, whether that be on a deal team or in a portfolio operations team or perhaps in a strategy role within that private equity firm and then within the portfolio companies themselves. Right. The companies that these private equity firms own, um, those roles tend to take one of four different, you know, capacities. One would just be a general strategy position, one would be a chief of staff role, uh, one would be um, a transformation role and then one would be an integration role. So if a private equity firm is doing a merger and acquisition roll up or trying to roll up a bunch of companies, uh, within the same industry, they'll need an integration person on the back end. And the individuals that we place typically, uh, either currently work for a large consulting firm, um, think Bain, BCG and McKinsey. But there's a whole host of other firms that we recruit people from or they're a former consultant, uh, in that capacity as well. And since we started the practice 23 years ago, we've completed just over 1600 of those, uh, searches during that time. So we've been busy and uh, and we've done this quite a lot. So that gives you a little bit about who I am and kind of where this context is coming from. There are 30 people, we've got 120 people in our company as a whole. Because we don't just do strategy, we do a host of different things. But within our strategy team we've got about 30 individuals. All they do is kind of recruit strategy people uh, for these private equity firms. And then the 25% that I didn't really talk about are either publicly traded or privately held but non sponsor backed companies. Those would be the types of organizations that we work with. Team. What I thought I'd do today is start with uh, just kind of talking about the market and where the market is now. And then uh, I'll kind of really want to spend some time focused on where we're seeing the biggest levels of demand. And I've got kind of two industries where we're seeing a fair amount of demand and I've got two functions where we're spending a fair amount of demand. And as you're thinking about the services that you provide to the marketplace, hopefully that'll give you some context for where demand is in the market and how you can tailor your messaging to the market and tailor your skills to the market as well. But what I always like to start with, for those of you who have been on these calls before, I always kind of like to start with a market update and maybe even a little bit of some market history because I think it's always important to kind of go back a little bit in time to see where we are today. So we're going to start with a little, with a little history on the, on the consulting space. Right. So team, over the last 24 months the consulting market has gone through four very distinct phases. Uh, we were in a downturn, we then had a short lived rebound, another downturn. And now the good news is some growth, right? And a fair amount of growth. And that's really the, the good news that I'll be sharing with everyone uh, today. So but let's talk about the history just a little bit. So let's go back to early 2024. Almost just over two years ago at that particular time, consulting activity, especially amongst the, the large firms, the firms like Bain, BCG and McKinsey was meaningfully down. And the primary driver of why the market was really struggling was those higher interest rates. You guys will certainly remember the COVID era stimulus, uh, that the Biden administration put in place that elevated inflation. The Federal Reserve aggressively raised rates to slow spending and bring inflation under control. And those higher rates had a major ripple effect across the economy. Companies reduced investments and discretionary spending, capital projects slowed and demand for consulting services weakened. But the biggest negative impact for consultants at that particular time was from the downturn in, in private equity. As borrowing costs rose, leverage buyouts became much more expensive, which caused M and A activity to slow dramatically. And Team Private equity had become a really large consumer of consulting services, especially around due diligence when they were looking at new investment and value creation work for those portfolio companies that they had acquired. And they needed help from consulting firms to implement their value creation plans, their VCPs, as they like to call them. So when the private equity firms really stopped doing a fair amount of M and A activity, that hit the consulting firms really, really hard. And consulting firms, when, when, especially those larger firms when they've got a slowdown in business, they implement kind of a classic recessionary playbook. Even though we weren't technically in a recession, they do implement kind of a recessionary playbook. They slow down their hiring, there's fewer promotions, there's lower bonus distributions, and there's more aggressive performance management. Kind uh, of what I mean by that is managing people out of the business. So they're shrinking their firms, if you will. And there's an important, there's, that's an important thing here that I'll share in a m in a reason why that's important. It's also going to be important for all of you on this call as well. Okay, so that's, that's 2024. Then in early 2025, the market began to rebound, right? And that recovery was driven by a couple of factors. One was interest rates started to come back down, which is always a good thing for stimulating business. Private equity was starting to adapt, right? They, they had kind of accepted the fact that, look, these interest rates are a little higher. They're not going down as far as they used to be back in the heyday of 2021, which is the greatest year of M and A activity in the history of our country. Right. So they were starting to adapt that, look, this is the new normal. We're just going have to get accepted with that. Our borrowing costs are going to be a little bit higher. That means the valuations are coming down a little bit. But we're just going to have to live with it if we want to use all this dry powder that we have. And we also had, you know, more recently elected a more pro business president, or at least the view point that President Trump was more pro business than, than the his predecessor, President Biden. All of those things started to reignite some activity, right? You know, the companies resumed investments, private equity firms restarted deals, consultants got staffed again, which, uh, was a good thing. And momentum returned relatively quickly. And so for a brief period, it looked like consulting was Fully back. And then in April of last year, President Trump, our pro business president, introduced the largest tariffs in the history of our country. And that changed the equation completely again. So all of that momentum kind of came to a screeching halt. We went back to uncertainty. And as we talked about, you know, previously, uncertainty is kryptonite for business investment and definitely including consulting. Um, and when CEOs face that uncertainty, what do they do? They pause, they wait, they retrench. Right. And so consulting services, which looked like they were rebounding really well, suddenly lost all that really positive momentum. Suspect many of you have been on this. Oh my gosh, this back and forth. Yo, yo. That is probably fairly stress inducing. Um, so what did the large consulting firms do in the face of more uncertainty? They continued their recessionary playbook. They hired fewer consultants, they promoted fewer consultants, and they managed out more of their consultants. All of this continued to shrink the ranks of some of those larger firms. Um, again, we'll talk about why, why that's important here in just a second. All right, so that's kind of the bad news, right? But here's where things start to get better for all of us, right? In the second half of last year, consulting really did start to rebound, and it's been on a relatively solid streak ever since. The large firms have effectively been sold out since the middle of last year. And that sold out status has been driven by two factors. The first, say it with me, right? Those two letters, that is pretty much all that we read about or think about in, uh, this day and age. AI, right? Artificial intelligence in 2023 and 2024. What was AI all about? Was all about the age of individuals, right? People like you and me exploring the benefits of AI. But late 2025 and certainly into 2026, that's been the age of companies exploring the benefits of AI. And they have been using consultants to figure out how best to implement AI best practices. So reason number one, AI is, is, is, you know, hot and heavy. The second reason why the consulting firms have been largely sold out is because of all that shrinkage that took place, right? They're basically just effectively understaffed. They spent most of the previous few years implementing those recessionary playbooks that we talked about, and now they're paying the price for it. They simply don't have enough consultants on staff to handle all of the demand. It's kind of funny that, you know, they call themselves strategic, uh, consulting firms, but when it comes to staffing, uh, you know, they're actually not that strategic. I have seen this for 23 years. When times are good for consulting, they over staff, and when times are bad, they over fire, if you will. And they find themselves in these weird, uh, states, uh, of limbo. And they are definitely in that state of limbo today. Um, so when the big firms don't have enough consultants on staff to handle the demand, it doesn't mean that the demand doesn't go away. Right? You know, companies need to find those consulting talents. And I am really hoping that many of you have been finding decent consulting opportunities in the marketplace. And part of that could just be because companies are like, look, I'm not paying these crazy rates, or I, you know, I need to go to someone who's really, really good, who can get this done for us. So in general right now, I will tell you this. Like if a client calls me today and says, hey, I want to hire a current consultant or a former consultant, whatever it is, I've got a chief of staff role, a strategy role, a transformation role, an integration role, whatever that role might. I'm starting off by saying, that's great, we can help you to get that done. But you need to know it is now a candidate driven market. And that surprises a lot of clients. I think clients are thinking that, man, what about all that downsizing that took place over the years? And we say, although that time is over, right? It is now a much smaller population pool. There's fewer candidates that have those skills that you're looking for. And they got a lot of options. Uh, on top of that, the consulting firms are doing everything they can to retain these individuals. And we've actually seen something relatively unique in the marketplace. Any of you have been on LinkedIn, you might see that some of those larger firms, they got a lot of advertising going on right now for, hey, we're trying to add consultants to our ranks. On top of that, we've actually seen a lot of the consulting firms recruiting from each other, recruiting from competing firms. That is unusual in the consulting industry. It only happens a lot during times like this when demand is up and those firms are understaffed. And that really does create opportunities for independent consultants. Right? People, people just like you. Creates more, uh, more opportunity. Okay, so that's kind of where we are today. Market's pretty tight, um, quite tight actually for uh, for consultants, uh, right now. So team, what I'm now going to do is I want to transition to what I talked about previously, which is, uh, those areas of focus where we're seeing the biggest level of demand. I'M going to start with industries where we're seeing the, and I'm going to try to have some real formal takeaways of things that might be helpful for you all as you think about positioning yourself in the marketplace. And then we're going to talk, we're going to jump into, to the functional areas, uh, that are seeing a lot of demand. Spoiler alert, AI is one of them, as you might imagine. But look, let's start with those industries where we're seeing a little bit of focus. Uh, so the first team, it is private equity. Okay. You know, private equity, guys, my goodness, it has grown so much over the last few years, 15, 20 years, and it doesn't really seem to be stopping. But I will say this, there's a little bit of a reckoning going on in private equity right now. There's this concept out there that some of you might have heard about called zombie funds. Zombie funds are private equity firms that have effectively decided to not raise their next fund. So they're just, they're just going to own the portfolio companies that they own today until they sell those, and then they're kind of just going to shut it all down, if you will. Part of the reason for that is because there's a lot of private equity firms now. I mean, they seem to get started, you know, around every corner and they're all chasing the same deals. And so there's a huge amount of demand that's going into just a limited supply of viable companies that can actually be purchased. And so there's that, that concept out there called the winner's curse, right? Uh, whoever it is that wins this deal, well, they won that deal probably because they were willing to pay the most. And so just like at an auction, right? If you're the winner in an auction, well, it also means that you were willing to pay more than anybody else. And so a lot of firms are just saying we just don't think we can get good valuations and the deals are scarce and all that kind of good stuff. So actually, I think the next two or three years are going to be very interesting to see what happens in the world of private equity. But right now, private equity really is a strong consumer of consulting services. Most private equity firms, you know, they try to run relatively lean and they subscribe to kind of a best of M breed approach when it comes to assistance for them and for their portfolio companies. What I mean by that is they don't try to do it all themselves. They often engage service providers, third party service providers, People just like you to help them evaluate investment opportunities and help their portfolio companies achieved their established value creation plans. Deal volume was really strong last year in 2025, the highest that this country has seen since 2021, which was the record year. This year looks to be pretty good as well. So private equity firms are hiring consultants for all kinds of due diligence and value creation work. Due diligence projects for private equity firms typically take one of three forms. It's, it can be commercial due diligence, which is all about revenue streams and the customer relationships and the reputation of the company that they're buying. Operational due diligence, which is all about how businesses gets it work, its work done, such as supply chain or manufacturing and distribution capabilities, or if you're a service provider, how your services are deployed. And then technology due diligence, which is all about the underlying technology, the software and the systems that fuel those commercial and operational components. Really what private equity firms are looking for are risks and opportunities within each of those three areas if they are indeed going to acquire a company. You add in the advent of AI everybody, and you've got a whole new layer of risk and opportunity that didn't exist before. And before a private equity firm makes an investment, they've got to make sure that AI is not going to completely disrupt that company's business model. Or maybe AI is going to create opportunities that hadn't been there before. So there's now this whole, you know, part of that technology. Due diligence has a big AI component associated with it as well. So my, my takeaway number one, if you will, is if you have any expertise in helping a private equity firm to assess the commercial or the operational or the technology platforms of a potential investment, there is work for you in the marketplace for sure. You just have to get the word out as to what your skills and capabilities are there. The other area where private equity firms are hiring consultants for is these value creation initiatives. Those are more functionally driven. And I'm going to talk about some functional areas here in just one second. So private equity is industry number one, industry number two. Where we're seeing the most demand for consulting services is for services firms and services firms includes both white collar firms and blue collar firms. So white collar companies, you know, services firms are firms like accounting firms, investment advisors, RIAs or law firms. Right. Et cetera. Just any company that provides white collar, white collar service consulting firms. Right. For instance, blue collar companies or services firms, or any organization that has kind of a technician or a technical Expert that drive around in a truck. Right. Is probably the easiest way to define it. It could be a roofing company or an H vac repair technician company, or a landscaping company, etc. Right. Um, think about why, why it is that services companies are doing well right now. Services firms are not impacted by all those tariffs that went into place from the Trump administration. And they've been growing. So for them it's mostly been business as usual folks. It also helps that services has been a major investment focus of private equity firms right now. Okay, major focus. Private equity tends to go in themes as they make investments. So go back five to seven years. It was all about healthcare roll ups. Right? All those veterinary clinics got rolled up, all those urgent care clinics got rolled up. Then, um, they went into blue collar services firms and blue collar was all the H Vac roll ups that took place or the roofing companies that took place. Now we're more into white collar, um, roll ups as well. But blue collar hasn't, hasn't gone anywhere. Even healthcare certainly hasn't gone anywhere. But those themes create a lot of consulting opportunities because private equity does drive a lot of where the market, uh, is headed. So my takeaway number two for everybody is do you have expertise in the services world, whether that be blue collar services or white collar services? If yes, there are consulting opportunities for you in the marketplace, uh, without question. So those would be the two primary industries where we're seeing the biggest level of demand. Private equity firms in general as they're making investments and then the, the services, uh, industries, white collar and blue collar. So I, uh, now want to pivot to functional areas of focus where we spend a lot of time. So, team, I said it before, say it again. What's the number one functional area where consulting firms are, are, are, uh, being hired, uh, these days? AI. Right. Um, AI is all the rage right now. Companies of all shapes and sizes believe that they need to do a better job of harnessing the benefits of AI and they don't have the capabilities internally to do so. So they're hiring consultants to help. There are two strategic themes that we hear consistently when AI consultants walk through meaningful project work. And they come up repeatedly in our client conversations as well. The first is how do we increase productivity and output or throughput through AI enablement? Team, the really good news here, like, there's a lot of fear about AI in the marketplace about replacing employees. We actually never really hear a lot about that. Right. It's really less about replacing employees and more about enabling organizations to Accomplish more with the same headcount. Right. So that's number one, how do we increase productivity with our, through our employees, with AI enablement. The second is how do we refocus employees on high value, higher value human interactions? Right? Because there's certain things that only humans can do and they do really, really well. So the, the strongest AI use cases are often again, not about removing people from workflows entirely, but about automating repetitive tasks like repetitive analytical tasks and administrative work so employees can spend more time on those relationship driven, judgment based or more emotionally intelligent interactions. Which are, which are things that humans do really, really well. By the way, I'll mention that I could actually talk about some real life use cases where consultants have told us, hey, let me tell you about this AI initiative that I implemented that might give people some ideas on this call. If people wanted to hear about AI use cases that consultants are truly implementing, I'm happy to do that. Team. There's two types of AI consultants that we see demand for. So the first, I know I just talked about those two use cases. This is different. This is the archetype of an AI consultant. So the first is the AI strategist and the AI strategist, someone that is skilled at helping companies to think through. Those pieces that I just mentioned help a company to think through where they can increase productivity and output by using AI or where they can help, uh, a company to automate repetitive or administrative tasks using AI. So they're more of the strategist about, hey, I'm looking at your business processes and I'm identifying some repetitive tasks. Right. That are taking place. I think we can implement AI here, right? There's an AI tool that can help to automate this, that's going to free your team up to do more of those human centric things. So that's one is the AI strategist, the second is the AI implementer. This is the hands on keys individual. This is the person that has the ability to build AI technology, to build agents, AI agents and things like that that do the actual automation that the AI strategist is actually coming up with. So team, that's kind of takeaway number three. If you have skills in AI, either as an AI strategist or as an AI implementer, a hands on keys individual, there is plenty of opportunity for you in the marketplace. Team. The other thing that I just think, I just want to mention is for those of you who maybe fear AI and I think that's very normal, right? This is a big change. Um, I'm, I'm going to encourage you to get past that and start to lean in to AI a little bit. Uh, I really do believe, and I think a lot of people that I'm talking to, we don't think that this is going to be the end of human employment at all. Right? We think that this is going to be simply an enabler. And I will say this team, regardless, like, you know, strategy is just one area of focus that we have as a, as a company. We do, we do four things. We do strategy, as I talked about, which, uh, includes go to market, by the way. We also do finance and corporate development, we do engineering and operations, and we DO president and CEOs team. I'll tell you 50% of the roles we work on across all of those areas, 50%, the client's saying, I gotta have someone who's got some experience with AI or I've got to at least have someone who is AI curious, right? They, they're lean, leaning into it. They, you know, because everyone knows that eventually AI is going to be a part of what we do in pretty much every capacity, regardless what the job is. So probably my number one takeaway is here. If you haven't gotten started with it, you need to dive in. You need to start to learn more about it and start to think about how you can incorporate it into your consulting toolkit. Because it is an important toolkit. I bet I would guess some of you would, I'm sure people on this call, uh, would be able to say as well, I would guess that 75% of the consulting projects that are being sold right now have something to do with AI. So it's a, it's a big piece of what's happened in the marketplace. Okay, so AI is, uh, a big one. All right, so the second functional area. So the first functional area, all the rage AI. The second functional area where we're seeing significant consulting demand is in go to market. Last year, when I was with all you guys, supply chain optimization was a real area of focus, right? We were trying to take cost out of these businesses. That has actually now shifted. And it's all about go to market initiatives. So this is anything related to the chief commercial officer or the chief growth officer or the chief revenue officer, those types of things. This is things like CRM redesign or sales process redesign or territory optimization, pipeline governance, forecasting improvements, lead scoring systems, compensation plan redesign for your salesforce, customer lifecycle analytics. Those types of initiatives are very popular right now from a consulting standpoint. The. And I Will also say this. The majority of these go to market consulting initiatives are how best to incorporate AI into the sales channel. So things like AI powered territory optimization or AI powered pricing or AI powered account prioritization. So you know, so my takeaway number four is if you have expertise in, go to market, right, in any of those areas I just mentioned, there is consulting work available for you in the marketplace. And again, all, all of those things really are incorporating AI at a pretty quick rate. And so understanding it from an AI perspective is going to be an increasing level of importance in the marketplace, again encouraging everyone to, to uh, dive in. All right, so um, team, I probably talked a little bit longer, um, you know, uh, than, uh, than 25 minutes. So my apologies for that. As my wife says, I've never met a microphone I didn't like. Uh, but hopefully there's some insights there, uh, that are helpful for individuals and I'm happy to answer any questions about anything that I've mentioned. And then will I. There's other things I could do. Like if we, if people wanted to hear about real live AI use cases that consultants are truly implementing, I'm happy to share some of those. Or we could talk compensation. There's any number of things we could, we could dive into.

Speaker A: All right, so let's get to the AI use cases second. But first, just to show everybody so they have a visual, why don't you call up and just show one or two slides of the compensation study so people have it in mind. And Megan, if you could reshare those two links. And I just tested them, the links are working for me. One person mentioned that they had trouble with the link, but that might be because you have a pop up blocker or something. But Megan will share the links and, and Chad, if you want to just talk about the two studies you guys do.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So I just shared my screen. Did this pop up? Will everybody see this? Okay, awesome. So, uh, team, we do produce two compensation, uh, studies specifically for consultants every single year. These are all for free on our website. You can download them, uh, you have to enter a little bit of information, but you can download them totally for free. And there's one for current consultants, right? So that's people that currently work for the big consulting firms, Bain, BC, McKinsey. And then there's one for former consultants. So individuals who at one point in their life worked for uh, for one of those types of organizations. But now we're out doing something else. And um, team, I just pulled up our former strategy consulting Compensation study. And I'll kind of. First of all, some of you filled this out. And for those of you who did, thank you very much. We really appreciate that. We do give $10 to one charity for that. And then the data comes from all over the United States. The people that these are the, these are the firms that the, that people who filled out the survey used to work with. So you can see that 74% of the respondents used to work at Bain, BCG or McKinsey. But there's a host of other firms up here that we also, uh, spend, spend, uh, time with. And you know, we always have this kind of key insight slide. Things that kind of, we thought were, were relatively interesting. And there's a couple of themes that kind of, uh, come across. Right, so 50, uh, 2%. That's the difference in compensation between former consultants in the 2020 MBA class and those in the 2023 MBA class. So like, look, consult, you know, compensation goes up, right? It goes up relatively quickly in just a short period of time for people that are successful. I thought this one was really interesting. This 100%, that's the percentage of current MBA consultants who earn more in cash but less in total compensation relative to former consultants. Okay, so if you. So if what we always say, if cash is king to you, if cash matters to you, going to work for one of those Bain BCG, McKenzie's or Oliver Wyman's or EY Parthenons or Alex Partners, or, you know, Alvarez, uh, Marcel, whoever it is, that's what you need to do. You need to go. Because they pay big on cash. But former consultants actually earn more in total compensation because they have a nice equity piece. So their cash is lower, but the equity component actually puts them above their current consultant, uh, colleagues, which is somewhat interesting. Um, we also saw an increase in people that are dedicating their careers to the energy sector. So that went up by 17 percentage points. What do we think is driving that? Yeah, it's all these crazy data centers, uh, that are taking place, right, to fuel all of this. AI. What do data centers need more than anything? Energy. What is the United States really short of right now? Energy. And, um, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of energy. Companies are really hiring a lot of smart former consultants to help them navigate this particular piece. And then, uh, this was the first time we've included AI as a function. The study came in at 13% above the average in compensation. So people that are good at AI, there's, there's a Good compensation, uh, to uh, to be created there. And then I won't go through this. But you can see we have kind of two main slides. One is by MBA graduate year, right? You can kind of see what the cash compensation is. And then that lti, which could be equity, it could be any number of uh, LTI components if you will, could be a long term cash, uh, deferred cash program as well. But you can see a lot of the data and kind of how it all, all plays uh, out. And then we also have one for people that don't have an mba, so just kind of undergrad individuals if you will. And so this is kind of what the data looks like. There's, and then, and then you can go into um, compensation by industry. So you could kind of find your industry and see ooh, if you were in life sciences, on average, people that filled out the survey that are in life sciences earned 9% less than colleagues in other spaces. And then we also have one by function. Right. So if you are pricing, pricing for some reason this year was up. We saw the people that filled out the survey that do pricing has worked. Their, their compensation has gone up. That actually speaks back to that higher demand we're seeing for go to market consulting services. Pricing as a part of go to market. So it's, it's popular right now. Companies are trying to wrestle with pricing, how to do AI powered pricing and things like that. So when you see demand, we often see the compensation go up for that as well. So uh, let me uh, I'll. There's a lot of content in there that we could, that we could, I could bore you to tears with, but I'll pause. Uh, but know that it's, it's all on our website. If you want to dig in, you certainly can, uh, do that.

Speaker A: Okay. And also before we get to the AI use cases, just want to make sure we got this in. For people who are interested in searching for, in being considered for full time roles either by Charles Eris or one of the other retained search firms. I know that you probably don't have time to meet one on one with everybody and uh, that's not the normal business model. So what is the right way for people just to get on the radar screen of a search firm like Charles Harris, you know, submit the resume or what's, what's the right approach?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question, Will. Um, I am very, very fortunate to receive a lot of inbound, uh, from individuals that want to be on our Radar screen at Charles Eric. But Will, to the point you made, I do not have the. Just the availability to, to speak with everybody. Um, and so, and, and most recruiters don't. Right, Good. Uh, recruiters are busy and, and they, uh, they're filling their, their clients needs. And so don't take it personally. What I always like to say is never take it personally if a recruiter doesn't have time to speak with you live. Um, but please know this. What is the number one job of a recruiter? It's to have a great database that they can mine effectively. So if you send, I mean, I get people who send me their resume, a cover letter, that kind of stuff every day, it all goes right into our system. Right. And we're really good at mining our data. Um, and so send your materials in. I promise you it will get into their systems. I promise you it will be mined. The other thing that, that, um, you can do on our website is we have newsletters for single industry and functional area where we spend our time. Those newsletters come out once a month, some come out every other month and they list every project that we're working on. And so if you get, if you sign up for the strategy newsletter at, uh, Charles Eris, you'll get it the last Sunday of every month. And it will tell you, here's all the projects that we're working on right now. And if you ever. And it'll tell you who the recruiter is internally at Charles Eris, who's leading that search. And if you ever see anything that's interesting, hit that person up directly and say, hey, look, I saw that you're working on this role. Joe Opaleski from our team just added the link to all of our newsletters in the, uh, in this, um, uh, post. So you can click on that link and, and sign uh, up for as many of the newsletters that are applicable to you. But that's also a really good way to stay in touch. Um, so, uh, another really good, good, uh, concept. But Will, it's, It's hard just get your information in front of most people and just know that good recruiting firms do a good job of mining that data on a regular basis.

Speaker A: Okay. So I put it up twice now. We did have multiple crests, uh, to if you could share a couple of those very specific AI use cases that you referred to earlier.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. So, uh, team, we, we heard this recently from a consultant from one of the large firms, so Bain, Bain, BCG, McKenzie. They had a, a uh, a large international bank. And uh, this was specifically for that large bank's private client division. So the private private client division is that division that serves kind of high net worth individuals. So they're really wealthy individuals, they kind of get private banking if you will. And um, this particular consulting firm identified that the primary value that these private bankers delivered was relationship development and kind of trusted advisory work. Just as I talked about before, right? How do we automate some of those repetitive tasks to get the humans doing the things that humans do really well? So relationship development and trusted advisory work was where they add the most value. However, a substantial portion of the, the, the banker's time was spent manually reviewing historical client notes, analyzing their portfolio and identifying potential products to recommend before meetings. It was a huge lift for those bankers. So this particular consulting firm helped design an AI tool that reviewed and summarized all of their historical client interactions, right. All the conversations they had with them, historically analyzed that particular client's portfolio composition, their liquidity, debt exposure and what their financial goals were, cross referenced all of that against the bank's product offerings and then made a recommendation to the banker before the call to say hey, these are products that this particular wealthy client's portfolio would probably benefit from. So it just really helped to automate some of that heavy research oriented stuff. That is important. It's critical. You have to go into these conversations with your clients, you know, being thoughtful and you know, um, well averse at what is, has happened historically. Uh, but it just, it's a, it got rid of that lift. What that did is it allowed those bankers to have a lot more of these conversations where they add the most value. So that's one good example of automating um, research tasks, administrative tasks as well that allow frees humans up to do human things, which is good. It, the other, that's one, the other one that I'll mention was for a large pharmaceutical uh, organization and this was, this was one of that go to market um, territory optimization initiatives, right. So the consulting firm or the, this particular large pharmaceutical client had a bunch of field sales reps, right? What a field sales reps do in the pharmaceutical world, they go knock on the doctor's door, right? They go to the doctor's office, they say hey, I want to tell you about our, our greatest uh, you know, pharmaceutical products and tools and technologies and all that type of stuff. What they found is that the sales reps were going to knock on the doctor's offices where it was, they knew the doctor was likely to take the meeting because they had a quota for how many meetings they needed to have. So if you've got a quota for how many meetings you have, where are you going to go? Naturally you're going to go towards those doctors that are willing to say yes, they're willing to do it. They actually said they. We found that our sales reps were going to wherever the, whichever doctor's office had the best coffee and where the doctors would actually take the most meetings. Right. And so that, that's not ideal. Right. So in this particular case, this consulting firm built an AI sales planning platform that looked at data across a series of different sources. Because there's a lot of, you know, data sources you can get in the, in the doctor, in the pharmaceutical world. So they looked at patient disorder trends and treatment patterns by practice. So they looked at how, you know, what kind of patients were these doctors saying and what were the treatment plans that the doctors were implementing. They looked at which doctors were going to certain conferences and medical events and, and scientific topics that physicians were just engaging with or writing about. And so they also looked at physician activity across publications, clinical trials, social media posts and things like that. What that did was it allowed the, this particular pharmaceutical firm to actually prioritize the best doctors that these sales reps needed to get in front of because their products were highly relevant to what those doctors were doing. And with that, it kind of took away the go there just because the doctor's gonna say yes and instead really do your best to make sure you can get a meeting with this doctor. Because our products are highly relevant. It also allowed the reps to prepare really relevant contextual insights before those meetings. So they walk in being super smart to be able to say, say, hey, I know you presented at the XYZ conference on this topic. Let me show you what our research does to further that conversation. And doctors are more willing to respond to that because it's something that they care about. So those are kind of two areas where again, you know, AI is automating research and helping humans to be more prepared for their highly, um, human centric roles and needs.

Speaker A: Chad, could you talk a bit more about, uh, some of the roles, uh, for PE firms, particularly the transformation roles. Could you define those a bit and tell us what are they looking for in candidates for those transformation roles?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, we do, we do a lot of these roles. So Team Win A, um, and I'm going to use private equity in general. But listen, great companies do the same types of things, right? So these are, these are consulting needs that apply across any business on the planet. But let's do it from a consulting perspective, right? If you think about what consulting firm does they, they buy a company and they're, they want to hold that company for, I mean, they used to want to hold it for three to five years. Today, everybody, those hold periods are being elongated because of those higher interest rates and things like that. Now it's more of a five to seven year hold period. But during those three to seven years, whatever the time frame is, what needs to happen, they need to improve the value of that company so that when they exit the business, when they sell it to the next private equity firm or they take it public through an ipo, or they sell it to a strategic. Right, that the, the value has increased and they get a higher price, they can return those proceeds to their limited partners, right. Their investors. So, but when they, you know, private equity firms are really sophisticated, they don't just say, well, let's, let's buy this company and hope it goes well. Before they even buy the company, they come up with what they refer to as a value creation plan. A, uh, value creation plan are the levers that they think are going to increase the value of this particular organization. And that value creation plan can, can range from, um, three things that we want to do to 25 things and you know, things that they want to do depending on the complexity of the business and the complexity of the private equity firm, frankly. But someone has to make sure that that value creation plan gets implemented. I mean, team the easy part. Well, not the easy part, but the easier part is coming up with a strategy. The much harder part is making sure that the strategy gets implemented okay. And so private equity firms will hire a transformation individual, typically someone who has a great consulting skill set to go in and make sure that we make progress on that value creation plan so that when the three to five year time period ends, we've made all those implementations, the value has increased and we're exiting at a higher multiple than we did when we bought the company. Um, so that's kind of what the role is all about. It's almost like a PMO job in many, in many cases, right? Um, here's the skills that the private equity firms want, right? So number one, you've got to have a track record of getting stuff done, right? We hear this all the time. They don't usually use the word stuff, they use another word that starts with an S. But getting stuff done, right? Someone who has proven track Record of, hey, they take a project and they run it to ground, right? They move the needle is what we hear all the time. They want someone who can say, hey, look, I took on this project and we went from A to B, right? And it was because of my efforts. So that's, that's number one. The second thing that you really need to have for those roles is really good eq, right? Look, if you're an executive, uh, you know, in one of these portfolio companies that's just been purchased by a private equity firm, little nervous, little anxious. Private equity firms tend to tend to nudge, you know, prod a little bit, push, push you forward. And so you've got it. You're, you're trying to get people to embrace a value creation plan without direct authority, okay? So if you're that transformation person, the CFO doesn't report to you. The CFO reports to the CEO and the board of directors of that particular portfolio company. But you need to get that CFO on board to update their finance and accounting system because, you know, it's going to create efficiencies in their business. And so having the ability to influence without direct authority is also really, really important. And then the third piece that I would just say that's, that's probably an important capability and skill set is just analytical skills, right? Private equity firm, they measure everything. Uh, they, they, uh, set forth KPIs, right? And then they say our KPI is here on day one, and on day 365, we need it to be over here, right? So your ability to just work with the numbers and um, and understand the levers to pull to actually move those numbers is really, really important. So the ability to get stuff done, the ability to have strong EQ skills, influence without direct authority, and then just strong analytical competencies is really important.

Speaker A: Chad, the McKinsey State of AI 2025 report classified only 6% of organizations as AI high performers. And, um, at those organizations, they found that the leadership was much more likely to be actively involved in personally role modeling the use of AI. Uh, I'm curious, uh, what questions, if any, do you and your colleagues ask candidates about how they're personally using AI, um, on the job or at home, uh, when you're trying to evaluate their AI, uh, uh, skill set?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's a good question. You know, I don't know if we ask a lot about the, about the personal stuff. And the reason why is because, you know, I think I'm assuming maybe what that answer is. And most People probably using it like I use ChatGPT, right? Which is I've got an email I've got to write to a client. I do a quick draft, I throw into ChatGPT and I say make this sound smarter, you know, that kind of stuff right now that's what, that's what a lot of people are doing these days. Will, we are now, you know, we have net, we now have an AI practice, right? We have an individual that does Nothing, but place AI individuals into companies. And the reason for that is because that is a huge growing area of focus. So I mean, if you do want full time work, if you have AI expertise, holy cow, there is full time jobs for you galore. Okay, so it is a heavy demand space right now. Um, again, those two spaces, AI strategist and hands on keys are, uh, the are those two areas. But Will, when we're doing those AI searches, right, it's we, we really need to hear from candidates examples like I just mentioned, right? I had a client that had this issue. We knew we could get more throughput. We knew we could automate some portion of that, that administrative task or research task or analytical task, right. With an AI tool. And I was a part of implementing that AI tool. And let me show you the results, right? Let me show you the tangible results that took place. So we really, I mean, team these days. I think personal use of AI is kind of table stakes. That's what I'm saying. If you haven't embraced it yet, you got to get into it. Okay? So you need to lean into it. But it's more of the. But there's very few people in the world today that have truly implemented an AI solution at the company level. That, that truly change, moved a needle, uh, for a function within a business. But that is where all the demand is right now. That's what companies are really trying to accomplish.

Speaker A: Chad, you talked earlier about how you do a lot of work with private equity firms. What are your tips on client development with private equity firms?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and is it some, is it more? Would you lean more towards. Reach out directly to the partners at PE firms or start by serving a portfolio company and then trying to work upwards and sideways to other portfolio companies. So what approaches have you found? Uh, work the best.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's a great question. So team. I'm a big, like if you want to know where private equity firms make the decision to hire consultants, okay. It happens in two places. Okay. One is the deal partners, right? So private equity firms typically have two big groups Right. They have deal partners. These are the people that make the investments. They go out and they source the companies. They come up with the, they come up with the investment thesis. Right? Hey, I think rolling up H Vac companies is a great, is a, is a great investment, uh, thesis. Then they go figure out who all those H vac companies are, and they connect with the owners and they say, we'd like to consider buying your company. They do all the valuation work, they get all the lawyers involved, they close the deal deal. Right. And they drag it back to camp. Right? Um, so the deal partners, they then also have to make sure that that company creates value over time. And so they will have authority, uh, to hire consultants for value creation initiatives. And also that due diligence stuff that I talked about earlier. Commercial due diligence, operational due diligence, or technology due diligence. Right. The deal partners absolutely make the decisions around due diligence. The second group are portfolio operations specialists. This is a, a fast growing space in private equity. So, uh, over time, the private equity firms realize that those deal partners that are buying all those companies, they don't have time to also manage those companies and make sure that the value creation plan is being implemented. They need to go do more deals. So they've created a second division that is called, um, portfolio operations and portfolio operations, individuals, they're not as involved on the deal stuff, but once a company has been acquired, their job is to make sure that the value creation plan gets implemented. And so they hire a lot of consultants as well. Right? Because they're really close with the CEOs, CFO, COOs of those portfolio companies. And they know, oh, wow, guys, we're off on pricing right now, right? We seem to be leaving some money on the table from a pricing perspective. We need to optimize pricing. Let's go hire a pricing consultant and bring them in and have them help us. So what my recommendation is reach out directly to the portfolio operations teams, right? And also the deal teams, by the way, you do not have to reach out to the partner. In fact, in many cases, it's the, it's the people underneath the partners that. They're the ones that get saddled with that pricing initiative. The partner says, hey, pricing is off. You know, vice president or principal, go solve it. And they're like, oh, man, I gotta solve this problem or my partner's gonna jump all over me. And so they're the ones that are saying, I got to have a, I got to find a good consultant that can come in and Help me to get this done. So reach out directly to the principals, to the vice presidents. You can all certainly reach out to the partners as well, right? Don't, don't. But what you basically want to say is I would email them directly. And in my email, in that title, right, you want to put what your specialty is. And you might even identify a portfolio company that you know that partner was a part of buying. So on every single part, you know, every single private equity firm's website, they list all their people, they'll list their partners, and the partners, it'll say things like, serves on the board of these portfolio companies. They serve on the board of those portfolio companies because they bought them. They're the ones who bought them. So if you see a portfolio company, like, if, if you have a, uh, if your specialty is. Is retail, right? And you're really exceptional at pricing, and there's a retail company that that private equity firm has acquired, you want to send a note to that partner that says pricing specialist for this inter. Name of company of that portfolio company, right? And that's more likely to get that operating partner or that deal partner to open up that email and go, what is this? Now, how do they. This is, uh, they're talking about my portfolio company specifically. What's this?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: And then in that, you want to say, hey, so, and so I know you, you know, are the deal partner at xyz. I know you were part. You serve on the board of XYZ retail company. I am a pricing specialist that specializes in retail. And let me tell you three things about me. If, if your retail company currently needs pricing optimization work, I know how to get that done, and I've done that multiple times in my past. So it's basically trying to figure out, uh, you know, the portfolio company that you can support and how you can support them hit people on the deal team and in portfolio operations directly.

Speaker A: Chad, you talked about a couple areas that are at the top of your list. The AI and go to market. What are some areas that used to be in the top five or ten, but have actually declined in demand? So people who on this call who specialize in those areas might, you know, find that valuable to know and think about. Do I need to pivot somewhere?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So as I mentioned previously, Will, last year at this time, there was a lot of cost takeout work that was taking place, right? We need improve margins, right? So if you think about the last, you know, the economy, when all the, you know, when interest rates went up and also when tariffs Went up. Right. The economy slowed. We know, uh, you all know, plenty of manufacturing businesses that have really struggled and all that kind of stuff. So last year, dealing a lot with tariffs, what are we doing? It was a lot of supply chain optimization. Right? I've got to figure out which companies can I manufacture this in now because the tariff rates are different for different companies. That was a big initiative last year. Companies had to move relatively quick on that. Um, now that really has pivoted to this. More of this go to market stuff. So supply chain optimization, you know, manufacturing footprint optimization, things like that, that has declined. But team, you know what, there's very few spaces where I would just say it's no longer. Nothing's happening in that particular world. Right. If, look, no matter what your area of specialty is, there's somebody out there that needs it. It's just a matter of you connecting with them in the right way. Um, so I would say that things on the cost side, the taking cost out of the business has, has probably softened a little bit, and now we've moved more towards, we got to grow this thing. And a big reason why the now growth is the issue is because of those extended hold periods that I've referred to, right? If you're going to run a business for three to five years, probably the fastest way to add value is actually taking cost out. If you're going to hold it for seven years, you can't just take, you can't just keep taking cost out to improve the, the, the, you know, the, the margins you got. You actually have to grow this thing, right? You got to grow revenue. And so we're seeing a lot of private equity firms have longer hold periods. And because of that, they're now figuring out, I got to grow this thing. And they're focused on go to market today. But cost takeout is probably dampened, but not, it's certainly down, definitely not out. If you will.

Speaker A: Chad, I believe that your firm also does handle some, uh, board roll searches.

Speaker B: Um, actually, we don't. Well, to be honest with you, we don't do a ton of board role service. And let me tell you why. Okay? So, um, everybody wants to serve, um, on a board. It's the sexiest job out there, right? Every candidate that I talk to, they always say, they always end with, oh, hey, Chad. By the way, keep me in mind for board roles, okay? And so I always say the same thing, which is we really don't get hired a lot to do board roles. And the reason is because, you know, when a property Firm or any, any company decides that they need a board member for their organization, they can usually reach out to some pretty talented individuals and say, hey, we need a board member. And most people are going to respond to that. Most people are going to say, tell me more. Right? Because board work is fun work. It's sexy work. You know, you, you don't have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but you get to take some of the glory and you get to tell all your friends, I've got a board meeting on Friday, I can't be there. And that sounds cool, right? So, uh, we just don't see a ton of demand for it. Um, uh, because it's, it's relatively easy for companies to fill those roles.

Speaker A: All right, Megan, I guess this will be the last question. So, Megan, if you could put in the chat the uh, survey form. We have a very short, uh, like one or two question survey. If you could fill that up before we finally leave and, and channel in this with this question, which is you mentioned how the firms are, uh, many of the top firms are sold out and because they had under hired for anyone this call who's open or curious about potentially returning to a role at, uh, a global firm and leaving their independent practice. What, um, what tips would you have on how to position yourself? Having been an independent consultant, how do you position yourself to potentially, uh, transition back and who would you even reach out to? You reach out people that you knew at the firm or how would you recommend people go about that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so if you're thinking about returning to a firm, I would definitely just reach out to people that you worked with previously. Um, and uh, if not, if you're looking to join a new firm that, uh, you haven't worked at before, I would figure out who are the partners that are in the, either the industries that you have expertise and knowledge of or the functional area where you've got expertise or knowledge of and you would want to reach out to those individuals directly. Those partners definitely are, you know, feel the, the pressure and the pain of staffing, you know, projects, and they need people to do it. And in that you, you know, basically at the end of the day, um, look, what, what do consulting firms do? They, they use analytics to put together very, you know, pretty, you know, presentations and things like that that really do have a positive impact on clients. And that's what you've got to, uh, to demonstrate. So you've got to show like, hey, I've, you've got to put together some presentations that reflect the value creation work that you have done in your past and, uh, you know, kind of situation complication solution. That was Bain's. You know, whenever Bain talked about, um, case studies, it was always, what was the situation, what was the complication, and what was our solution? You need to put together case studies of the work that you've done that kind of have a similar situation complication solution. Type, um, type format.

Speaker A: Thank you, Chad. This been fantastic. We are going to give people one minute back. If you have not filled out the survey yet, please do. Chad, I know that you're at a conference and heading to some other sessions today. Thank you so much for taking time out, uh, while you're in Philadelphia.

Speaker B: Philadelphia, yeah. My pleasure.