Big 4 Sourcing

No wonder the Big 4 are so hard to penetrate - they have a serious vested interest in keeping their people shuttered away from the rest of the world. Keep this in mind when you're sourcing out of the Big 4 next time...

I had an interesting experience one late winter weekend last year. The daughter of a dear friend of mine was getting married last May. She came home here to Cincinnati for several events given over Valentine's weekend in her honor. I attended two of them, and had an opportunity to sit next to her at one of the luncheons. Her first job out of a two year MBA program in upper NY that placed her immediately in loan debt to the tune of about $140,000 is with Deloitte in New York City as a financial analyst.

She and her fiance are living in CT so they (they met in graduate school in the same business program - he works for UBS Warburg - something in investment banking - it sounded pretty fancy) each have a two hour commute each way every day. That's forty hours a week in traveling to and from work between them.

I asked her how many hours did she work? As this was outside the talk of the day regarding honeymoons and wedding dresses, she looked at me sideways before turning to face me with a serious expression and, putting down her fork, she asked, "On a good week or on a bad week?"

I thought to myself, "This’ll be interesting - I wonder what she considers the difference to be." "Either," I replied.

"On a good week, sixty. On a bad week, a hundred. If you have a client going public, and we seem to have a lot of them right now, you're working a hundred hours a week. Yes, it's exhausting," she added, as if reading my mind as she shook her head and picked up her fork.

"Does that include your commute?" I asked.

"No!" she laughed, then added that brutal number to the mix.

I then asked about her fiancé, and she told me that he worked similar hours and it's not uncommon for them not to see each other for days at a time.

All this for about $90,000 (her end). I don't know what he's making. They had to choose that grueling commute because they could "not afford" to live in New York City. She probably pays $30,000 or so in taxes and then she has that $400 a month payment for her school loan. Right out of the box she's making, let's do the math, about $55,000 in exchange for 4,160 hours (80 hr/week averages)of work a year. That's $13.22 an hour. And I'm not including the commute, when we add that to the ugly fray, she's making $10.57 an hour.

I didn't have the heart to point any of this out. I'm sure she's realized it. I did say, with a sigh, "Well, it's a wonderful spring board for other opportunities. One of those clients will see what a gem you are and offer you another opportunity."

She looked at me sideways, smiled, and took a bite of her cake.

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Maureen Sharib is a seasoned telephone names sourcer, names sourcing since 1997. She and her husband Bob own the names sourcing firm TechTrak.com and Maureen telephone-names sources daily as well as teaches telephone-names sourcing in her online telephone names sourcing course "The Magic In The Method." She can be reached by email at Maureen at techtrak.com or by phone at (513) 899-9628. Maureen will come on-site to your company to teach telephone names sourcing to your sourcers.