job description

My job title is senior consultant, and as a senior consultant I market myself as having three skill sets which coordinate and interface with each other in a way that makes me more attractive to potential clients. Those three skill sets include finance expertise, and expertise in information technology, particularly with designing financial databases and financial applications revolving around financial reports, financial analysis and financial dashboards. My third skill set is accounting, which I have a very strong background in, but I am probably not an expert. However, because of the combination of those three skill sets, I am a rare commodity.

The duration of my contracts can be as short as two to three weeks or as long as a year or more. It all depends on the client and the scope of the assignment. The length of the contracts varies greatly. The longer the contract, the less time I spend looking for the next contract. Then, more of my time is available during the day, and it's not as stressful. If, however, I'm on a short term assignment, such as two or three weeks, and I know that at the end of that period I have to get another project to work on, then its going to be stressful and time-consuming. In those cases, I'll be working between eight and 10 hours a day on that particular client, plus I'll also have to be looking for the next assignment for two to three additional hours a day. So, it really just depends. I enjoy the project-type work, even though there is uncertainty and it requires more work in marketing and selling myself to future clients. I like the variety, because it's a chance to accept new challenges, work with new people and complete projects of different natures and scopes.

For most of my career, which started in about 1971 and ended in 2004, I always worked as an employee for a specific company. That was 33 years of just working as an employee. Then, I began doing short-term contract assignments to see if that was something that would be acceptable to me. It turned out that it was, so in August of 2004, I accepted a contract for 6 months, and that later turned into 17 months. That contract was a very good assignment with a very good client, a multi-national banking giant specifically. So, once I had completed that contract, I decided to stay in the project arena and work on these short-term projects that could possibly turn into long term projects like that one did.

I tried out the independent contracting and the consulting work status because I found that I was getting older. At the time I first became a contractor in 2004, I was 58 years old. I found employers were less likely to hire people my age as employees, but they were amenable to hiring people my age as contractors. So, the contract option gave me the opportunity to work with some great clients who might not otherwise have retained my services.

education & career path

As an employee, my roles varied greatly. In the first 10 years of my career, I started out working with Fortune 500 companies, mostly with accounting and predominantly financial positions. At the end of that 10-year period, I decided I would like to work in the investment area, rather than with corporations. I wanted to analyze investments and put together deals and financing in the investment world. I had the opportunity to do so, as I had just gotten married and my wife knew someone who knew a rising young star in the investment advisory world. One thing led to another, and I started working for an investment advisory firm in New Jersey, close to home. There, I analyzed alternative investments, principally direct investments in oil and gas, real estate, cable TV, cattle and other industries, but mostly in oil and gas and real estate. That led to a long career working in financial services that lasted over 20 years working in investments and other financial services. My roles there were anywhere from research analyst to financial analysis of private companies on Wall Street. Then, I worked for two asset-backed financing firms, where I negotiated and structured asset-backed financing for young health and science companies and entertainment companies. (Asset-backed financing firms issue loans collateralized or secured by intellectual property such as government patents in a health and science company and song copyrights in entertainment finance). To summarize, I spent the first 10 years in accounting, and then the next 20 years in investments and general financial services. After that, I became a senior consultant.

I was initially able to land the jobs with the Fortune 500 companies by virtue of my Masters of Business Administration degree from Northeastern University and Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University. The combination of an Ivy League education and my Masters degree in business gave me the qualifications and the skills to be attractive to major Fortune 500 companies.

My majors in undergraduate school were political science and mathematics, and I always loved mathematics. In high school, I had taken courses in geometry, which was a course that measured your ability to reason and provide logical reasoned solutions to what could be complex mathematical problems. Because of my skill in geometry and because of my very logical, mathematical mind, I wanted to find a career that valued the mathematical and logical attention to detail skills.

my day

My typical day is getting up at 6:00 a.m. and checking my e-mail while reading articles that I think might be good or applicable to the project I'm then working on. Then, I leave for work at the global pharmaceutical company where I am currently working, and I work basically from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day. The typical day involves meeting with clients for just a portion of the day, about a half-hour to an hour. Then, project-planning and design takes anywhere from a half-hour to an hour as well. The other eight hours are for actually working on the project with a half-hour break. I basically work a 12-hour day, from the time I leave at 8:00 in the morning to the time I get home at 8:00 at night.

It's pretty consistent. I've worked two weekend days in the three months that I've worked on my most recent long-term project at the global pharmaceutical company. Most of the time, I've been commuting into the client's office, although there may be days where I'll work from home here and there, and just log in to the company's network from home rather than going into the office.

I'm working with a global pharmaceutical company, and then I have completed assignments for a couple of clients that give me a continuous workflow of short term projects. Those projects could be anywhere from one to eight hours of work. Those projects I generally do on the weekends, when I can devote my full attention. Sometimes, they may need something at night, like they may need an enhancement to their project after work, and then I'll do that anywhere from 8:30 to 11:00 p.m., if it takes that long. Generally, I have one major client, and then I'll do odd jobs for one or two other clients as a supplement to that.

Basically, I rely upon the Internet and various business industry websites that I subscribe to in order to identify potential new projects each day. There are maybe 5 or 6 job boards that identify opportunities to me via e-mail. I'm also a member of a financial executives' networking group, and that is an industry organization of 27,000 financial professionals. These professionals are a great source of advice about the companies that they either work for currently or have worked for in the past. The financial executives' networking group also identifies employment opportunities. There are also some websites where consultants such as myself can subscribe to as contractors and bid for certain projects. By bid, I mean to offer to complete a certain project for an agreed-upon price within an agreed-upon time period. So that is a competitive marketplace. I've been quite active in one of those websites, which is called elance.com, over the last 6 months. It's interesting, because you're competing against contractors all over the world.

salary & lifestyle

The compensation can vary greatly. The compensation for the position a lot of the time depends on the location of the client. For instance, on a general basis, if the client is located in a metropolitan area like New York City, the client will pay more because they know the contractor has to endure a certain cost to commute into the city. So the client has to offer a greater reward to the consultant to induce them to accept the project. For me, the compensation can run anywhere from $45 an hour in a more suburban area like New Jersey, up to my highest paying job which was $90 an hour in New York. Just as the compensation for the job can vary on the location, it can also vary based on the duration of the contract. For the most part, long term projects pay a little less than short term projects, just because they know that the consultant or the contractor will have some sense of security knowing that the contract is for a longer period of time. This means the consultants don't have to be actively looking for their next assignment until the last two months of that assignment that they have with that client. The project that I had for $90 an hour was basically a very intense project for a person in New York City. He was hired by a bank to evaluate the financial viability and the potential cash flows from a company that had 10 or 11 operating companies. So, my job was to go in and analyze the profit and loss projections, the cash flows and the balance sheet all to see what those 10 or 11 companies would be generating in profits and cash flows over the next five years, but with particular emphasis on the next 90 days and the next 6 months. I had to evaluate not only monthly profits and cash flows, but also to evaluate on a weekly basis for the 90 to 180 days. So, in that project, I was working an average of 60 hours a week for a little over two weeks.

It depends on the project. For instance, with the global pharmaceutical company I am working for now, where I leave at 8 in the morning and get home at 8 at night it really doesn't leave too much time for personal activities, other than on the weekend. Basically, I've structured my schedule so that I'm able to do things I enjoy, like play tennis every Friday night, which is good, and then sometimes I play tennis and golf on the weekends. On my current project, most of my entertainment and personal time is left to the weekends.

I would say I have enough time for myself. I probably would like a position where I didn't have to commute as much. It's tough having a 10-hour day and commuting an hour each way; that's a lot of time. It's something that I'm used to, however. If I'm working in New York, I leave at 7:00 a.m. and get home at 7:00 or 7:30 p.m., so the hours I have now are a similar workday to the alternative. I did have one client for 14 months where I primarily worked out of the house, and I could work from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., which was ideal. That was a good workday because I was able to just concentrate and get everything I had to get done while working at home. With my current assignment, I started out commuting every day for the first three months, but I will now be working 2 or 3 days out of my home office over the next 3 months simply because there is not enough work space at the client's location. Ideally, I have the type of position where I can do most of my work at home, but of course there is a necessity for personal interaction to go over project scope, design and responsibilities, and to resolve key issues or questions. That is always required in any project, which subsequently requires me to be at the project site a certain amount of time. That's probably only required 20% of the total work time.

pros, cons & trends

At the global pharmaceutical company, the biggest challenge is dealing with the different systems that the client uses to track data. For instance, at the company I support now, they have one database that is maintained by a third party, and it has a lot of key data about the suppliers and about the products that they buy from the suppliers and the prices paid. But, that database is maintained by a third party. I think that my current client, the global pharmaceutical company, has retained my services for another 3 months so that we can develop an alternative system in-house over which they have more control, as opposed to the system maintained and controlled by the third-party independent firm.

Typically, the biggest challenge is that companies retain my services because they have all sorts of key data residing in many different locations and with many different record services. They need my skills to organize and format that data in a way that's readily accessible to them. This also allows them to use that data to automate a series of reports and a set of analytics that enables them to analyze the data and make informed business decisions based on the data. So typically, their data is unstructured - it's in many different places, it's not organized properly, and they can't develop their reports to make more informed business decisions, all because the data is in many different forms that cannot be aggregated and combined. So my job is to coordinate and assimilate that data, put it into an interface that's friendly and easy to use and produce the reports they need to conduct business more effectively.

The most rewarding aspect is designing the databases, reports or programs that the clients can use to make better decisions and to improve their profitability and the way they do business. The greatest satisfaction to me is designing programs and applications that the clients like and that they know are valuable to them.

I guess technology is the biggest change. As a financial expert and guru for most of my professional life, branching out into information technology allowed me a way to complement my financial skills for a new era.The biggest change in more recent time, in the past 5 or 6 years, has been the proliferation of job boards and job sites where consultants like myself can readily identify opportunities for future projects. It's a great resource. Having the Internet as a resource to find job opportunities has made working as a consultant a viable and attractive profession.

advice

I don't think that there's anything that I really would have done differently at the beginning of my career. Advice I would give to someone else would be to follow and trust your instincts. What you want to do is make your avocation your vocation. By that I mean if you have a personal interest in something, then you should try and do something similar in your line of work. To put it another way, if you had $10 million and didn't have to work for the rest of your life, you would have lots of free time. During that free time, you would have a big chunk of time that you would have to fill, so the activities you would choose to do during that free time would give you a great indication of the type of work that you might want to make as your vocation. That's the best way to think of it. Highlight the skills you would use in pursuing those leisurely activities, and try to choose a profession that utilizes those skills.

I have a very logical mind, and I'm a very good troubleshooter. If I see a problem, I can identify a logical, reasonable solution. There are several skills that I have that have helped me: I am very logical, very analytical, very goal-oriented and I'm excellent at identifying the source of the problem and developing the solution in the financial, accounting and information technology areas.

I would recommend that if they want to get into the type of consulting I'm doing (this is only a very small segment of the school-age population), I would recommend developing skills in financial accounting and information technology. I would recommend they take finance and accounting courses, and complement that with technology courses. In addition, take online classes that would supplement their onsite curriculums. I've learned a lot over the years by getting information online, which is a great source of additional information for young professionals.

For business schools, there are many different schools from which you can obtain an M.B.A. I think basically that in some cases, business schools are viewed as just a commodity, with the exception of the top business schools. There are maybe 15 or 20 top business schools that are not viewed as a commodity, and then there are the top schools such as Stanford, Harvard or Wharton. Having a masters in business from those schools will give you a powerful leg up on your competition, and the people that graduate from those schools are actively recruited by employers, as opposed to having to interview for a number of jobs. Those people can then command six figure salaries upon graduation.