-There's been an exodus because they over hired and furloughed tons of people. There goes expertise, connections, and any ability to join the two
-Young people leave to progress, old timers started their career elsewhere
-That exodus took with them tons of competent staff who are now taking that work away from ERM. They lost 75% of one of their largest client's business segments and what seems like 50% of another part of that portfolio.
-You need to sell yourself internally to get put on projects, but after a literal 1000+ emails and over 100+ networking calls, no one has any work to give, its the same with all the PMs & other consultants I talked to
-The company got into bed with private equity that required something crazy like a 20% return, EACH YEAR, which is insane. How did they do it? They increased billing rates to a point where they're no longer cost competitive. The company can't sell projects, so who pays? Staff. There goes your raise, bonus, any path of legitimate progression, there goes your job if you're not billable enough, thats why people are furloughed. If you promote, you're more expensive to bill, so you'll have to 'donate' hours or work hours you can't bill, which means you can't hit your billable goal
-How would you hit your billable goal? What they call 'Secondants' where you report to a client site and live there for months on end, and it's never anywhere nice (e.g. Fargo), otherwise they could staff it. But it's still not enough to hit your goal, so you don't get a raise or promotion
-'Half Step' promotions make it near impossible to progress, people have to quit and come back in is the old joke
-You need to be billable, but they didn't have work, so they furloughed staff or they left
-Favoritism is everywhere, if you're new, you'll have a really hard time breaking in to the projects that would make you billable. During a 'Grow the firm' meeting, I asked about the 'Billions of dollars' of dollars of work available, "How can I get involved?", "Well, it's already staffed..." "How can I train to get involved in the next one?" "You kinda just have to...do it", so you cant get the experience to get onto projects that would yield you that experience. Any young person would be wise to stay out and long timer would be smart to leave
