- Only the top 5% of senior-most staff (Senior Associates and above) are eligible for annual bonuses.
- To ensuring ongoing profitability, Senior leadership (Principals and above) frequently rely on administering Lack of Work (LOW) notices to junior staff when contracts end. LOWs are 2-page letters from HR saying “[you] will be terminated in 2-3 weeks if you do not find new, billable work.” Unfortunately, even well-managed teams and top-talent are subject to these notices as just a few weeks of non-billability can unhinge a team’s financials. This creates a culture whereby “nobody is safe” at any moment in time. If you’re interviewing with Booz, ask your hiring manager or recruiter to provide the number LOWs that were administered in the prior year.
- While the firm has made strategic acquisitions in the past and claims a heavy focus on innovation, the firm has not yet branded any truly innovative products/services outside of its existing contracts. This occurs primarily because senior leadership struggles maintain proper focus between billability and investments. For example, whenever investment projects start to take off, billability becomes an issue; whenever billability gets fixed, there’s never enough resources to continue on the investments. As a result, most “innovations” at the firm never get past a 5-slide “kick-off deck” or a basic user prototype.
- Because of the relative unpredictability associated with Government contracts, the firm undergoes frequent re-orgs whereby senior staff (e.g., Principals and above) switch between technical practices areas, resulting in wide distribution of unqualified leadership across the firm. Rarely will you find a team where its Senior Associate and/or Principal understand - or even have general technical knowledge in - the inner-workings of their projects, resulting in poor judgement calls, damage to project timelines and lower-quality client deliverables. If you’re interviewing with Booz, throw a technical question at your prospective Senior Associate/Principal and carefully assess their response.
- The overall culture is extremely political. At the Associate to Senior Associate level, there seems to be unnecessary focus on how much you network and make it “appear” to your leadership as though you’re engaged (read: the loudest mouth wins). In some cases, low-billability teams are exempt from layoffs simply because their managers have been long-running buddies with their Principal or VP. In contrast, other, less-connected teams may suffer layoffs because their Senior Associate and/or Principal are not well-networked with their newly-assigned leaders. This encourages new management to terminate existing staff and re-hire what they think are more qualified staff. But, by this point, another re org will have occurred…
- Talent is eroding at lower levels because of existing attrition, aforementioned leadership challenges and lack of interesting work. According to public sources, the firm’s employee base swelled up to 27k in 2014; however, it has now retracted back down to about 21k employees. Be mindful that this is Government contracting and, despite the firm claiming a heavy focus on innovation, there are rarely opportunities to innovate within the context of a pre-established Government project. Many of the top talent is now fleeing to smaller, more innovative tech firms, Deloitte and other consulting firms that don’t rely heavily on LOWs.
- Rather than allowing all consultants the opportunity to focus on innovation, the firm recently created a new business unit (read: more unnecessary silos) around innovation, product development and modern technical capabilities (e.g., data science). Unfortunately, this “business unit only contains 5% of staff, leaving the other 90% to focus strictly on the billability of their existing contracts. This creates numerous conflicts across internal teams who have somewhat similar skill sets, i.e., the “innovation team” perpetually wants to hire the best and the brightest, leaving only the leftover 95% to focus on existing, more-mundane projects.
- Benefits have diminished since the company went public and they continue to decline every year. For the previous 401k program, the firm would add an annual lump sum to your 401k equivalent to 10% of your gross salary; now, the 401k program is a basic 6% match. Health benefits now consist of high cost, high deductible plans (for all employees below Principal level). Annual merit increases and promotions are minimal relative to those of other firms. The only way to get a significant salary-bump is to hand in your resignation and hope for the best. If you’re interviewing with Booz, ensure your hiring manager has you confirmed for billable work. To be even more specific, ask them exactly which date you will receive your first “B-number.”
- Senior leadership regularly hires junior staff with no true billability plans and they over-promise on job roles during the interviews. Many senior leaders also rely on resignations and fighting territory wars to artificially grow their areas of the business. If the interview makes the job sound “too good to be true,” please do your due diligence and get verbal agreement on exactly which projects/clients you will be starting on day-1.
- The firm has an aging account management and staffing model which puts unnecessary strain on Lead Associates and Senior Associates, effectively requiring them to work 5+ simultaneous jobs to be successful (e.g., ensuring the team is billable, hiring, fueling innovation, leading projects, writing proposals, etc.). Further, Principals and VPs typically sit in meetings all day, rarely make face time with their teams and expect mid-level management to carry all of the workload/responsibility. Through my tenure with the firm, I’ve never seen a Principal (or above) write a single word within a proposal or client presentation - they either delegate down or hire/fire to compensate.
- The firm’s resource management function is very different from other consulting firms and arguably broken. While most companies’ resource managers are dedicated to aligning non-billable staff with billable work, Booz’ resource managers merely review staff availability lists with Senior Associates and Principals - it’s not in their job role to actually understand your team’s skills or contract needs. This puts significant stain on all levels of management as they must regularly attend these “list reviews” with no actual action from the resource managers.
- The firm broke off their overhead/operations business into a sub-company. Because these staff are not client-facing (read: less profitable people are less valuable), almost all benefits for this sub-company (e.g., health, 401k) have been eliminated over the past few years.
