Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 19

Charlie Mercer was a Blue Devil from before he could remember:

I grew up in Raleigh, and it was a lifelong dream to go to Duke.

A natural athlete in high school, tall and broad-shouldered, Charlie played first baseman on the baseball team and forward on the basketball squad while getting good grades, being in band, and participating in student government – the picture of the well-rounded student.

“It's unbelievable what young people accomplish these days,” Charlie says from his office in the Research Triangle. “They invent something or distinguish themselves in some big way before they even get to college. That wasn't me. I was good at a lot of things but not exceptional at any one thing.”

At Duke, he served as vice president of his fraternity and played in a band called “The Facebook All Stars” while majoring in public policy.

“There's a common theme here,” he says. “Public policy covered everything from economics and leadership to classes on nonprofits and political science. It was the ability to study all sorts of things that drew me into that major.”

In other words, Charlie was ripe to be picked up by a consulting firm after graduation, where the ability to walk into any setting, see patterns, and make a connection with clients is highly prized, and where the ability to lead a team is an important rung on the career ladder.

His first job was with The Advisory Board, after which he joined Stockamp & Associates, a consulting firm that concentrated on healthcare consulting and, specifically, revenue cycle process improvements. Later, the firm was acquired by Huron Consulting.

His strong work at Stockamp earned him a place at North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler School of Business where he got his MBA, joining Deloitte after graduation.

Commenting on his move to Deloitte, Charlie explains,

At Stockamp, we often did the same thing over and over again. After my first year at business school, I interned at a private equity firm. I loved how every day was different. So, it's no surprise I ended up back in consulting, but at a firm where I could explore different industries and work on different projects. When I was at Deloitte, I joined the Strategy and Operations group where I worked on strategy, M&A, and process improvement projects. I was exposed to different types of business problems and saw how those problems compared across industries.

Like a duck in water, Charlie thrived at Deloitte:

Right out of undergraduate, they call you an analyst, but I was hired out of business school. If you do that, they call you a senior consultant. You aren't yet a project manager because you haven't proven yourself. We thought of it as a two-year apprenticeship, but maybe it was a two-year trial! Every project you work on is different. You might be doing analyst work on one project. On another, you might be managing an analyst and responsible for a workstream.