Nova's New Strategy & Operations Vertical — What to Expect
Teresa joins the episode not just as a guest but as the anchor of a new Nova community vertical dedicated to strategy, operations and consulting. It's a natural fit: consulting alumni are one of the largest professional clusters within Nova, and the career questions that come up constantly in private WhatsApp groups of ex-consultants are exactly the kind of conversations the vertical is designed to host more openly.
Teresa describes three pillars for the community. The first is applied knowledge — not generic content, but first-hand accounts from people who have actually run a post-merger integration, launched a go-to-market strategy under time pressure, or used AI tools to accelerate a client deliverable. The second is peer support: a space where a member can ask "I've never worked in pharma and I start a project next week — give me three grounding frameworks" without the awkwardness of asking inside their own firm. The third is talent exchange: real-time sharing of senior roles and career opportunities among people who already trust each other.
Events will be part of the mix too — speakers who have made the jump from consulting to founding or to PE-backed operating roles, giving members a concrete picture of what the road ahead can look like.
The Three Acts of a Consulting Career
Teresa maps the consulting career arc with unusual clarity. She frames it as three fundamentally different jobs, each requiring a different kind of excellence.
The first act — analyst or junior consultant — is about doing. You gather data, run quantitative and qualitative analysis, conduct client interviews, build the slides, and produce the output. From day one, your voice matters in client meetings. The pace is high and the feedback loop is fast.
The second act — manager or project leader — is the hardest transition, and Teresa says this clearly. You stop being the person who produces work and become the person who organises, prioritises, and shapes the narrative. You manage upward (to partners and clients) and downward (to your team) simultaneously. Every problem in the project flows through you. The upside, she notes, is that you reclaim your agenda: you can structure your own days, protect evenings for things that matter, and start genuinely owning how you spend your time.
The third act — principal or partner — is entrepreneurial. You are building a client portfolio, developing long-term relationships, and selling engagements worth millions of euros. The content doesn't disappear — you remain intellectually involved — but the commercial dimension now dominates. Teresa is transparent that she is actively developing these skills now, watching different partners' styles and distilling her own approach.
"The manager role is a sandwich: all the problems come to you from above and below. But you finally own your time — and that's what makes it the most rewarding step."
How to Actually Learn to Manage People
Ramón asks a question that resonates across many career transitions: how do you go from being excellent at individual delivery to being excellent at leading others? Teresa's answer rejects the idea that good management is either innate or teachable through a training course alone.
Her approach has been observational and adaptive. Over years as an analyst and consultant, she noticed different management styles — some partners gave blunt, direct feedback; others built confidence through strengths-based coaching. She didn't copy any single model. Instead she developed a philosophy of radical adaptation: the style you use with one person may be exactly wrong for someone else, and the manager's job is to read which approach each individual needs.
Beyond style, she emphasises the importance of psychological safety. Teams perform better when people feel comfortable raising problems early, admitting gaps, and asking questions. Creating that environment — being the "rock" that gives people a stable base — is a skill that consulting firms increasingly recognise as critical, even if it isn't always easy to measure.
Learning to Sell: The Skill Nobody Teaches You
Ramón is candid about his own experience: leaving BCG to found Nova meant learning to sell from scratch. Consulting, he argues, teaches you how to deliver value but not how to create the commercial opportunity in the first place.
Teresa agrees, and describes how she is navigating the transition. Coaching from senior partners has been important — and BCG, like most MBB firms, provides executive coaching as consultants approach the principal level. But the deeper insight she offers is structural: consulting is not transactional. Your client pool is small, your ticket size is large, and no relationship can be sacrificed. That means the entire selling posture has to be relational rather than transactional.
The formula she describes is a 70/30 listen-to-talk ratio, a genuine interest in the other person's career not just their current project, and patience measured in years: the person you're building a relationship with today may not become a decision-maker for five or ten years. None of this is compatible with a short-term sales mindset.
"In consulting, you're not the vendor — you're the confidant, the friend, the partner. The sale follows from the relationship, not the other way around."
— Teresa Ko
The Hours: What a Real Week Looks Like
Teresa gives an unplugged account of what analysts and consultants should expect when joining a tier-1 firm in Spain. The honest answer is demanding — but with some nuances that often go unsaid.
A typical analyst week at a Spanish MBB firm
Mon–Thu:~10–12 hours/day, typically 9am–9pm. Often at client sites, which may involve travel. Analysis, slide-building, client meetings.
Friday:Light day — finish mid-afternoon. Time for team catch-ups, internal meetings, networking with colleagues you haven't seen during the week.
Weekend:Largely protected. Teresa reports fewer than five full weekends worked across nearly ten years. Occasional evening emails during intense project phases, but the weekend is treated as sacred.
As manager: Hours stay similar, but you control the schedule. You can protect mornings, leave for a medical appointment and return later, structure your own week. The autonomy is the meaningful change.
She is also clear that this is the base case. During intense project phases — especially around major client presentations — weeks can extend significantly. The key variable is the project type and client, not just the firm.
Exit Paths: What Happens After Consulting?
One of the most practical parts of the conversation is the discussion of what consulting alumni actually do next — and what happens to their compensation when they leave.
The honest picture Ramón and Teresa paint: if you leave consulting for a corporate strategy team at a large company, you will almost certainly take a pay cut. The quality of life typically improves — more predictable hours, no travel — but the total comp rarely matches what a strong tier-1 consultant earns at manager level.
The exception is PE-backed companies. If you join a private-equity-owned business in a role close to the CEO — Chief of Staff, Chief Transformation Officer, or N-1/N-2 to the CEO — the combination of a competitive salary and equity participation can match or exceed consulting compensation. The role is demanding, but the upside from equity is real if the company performs.
Consulting exit paths: a quick comparison
- Corporate strategy (large multinational): Salary dip, better work-life balance, clear scope. Good for people who want depth in one industry and a more predictable lifestyle.
- PE-backed company (Chief of Staff / CTO): Can match or beat consulting compensation, especially with equity. Intense pace, high ambiguity. Best financial outcome outside of making partner.
- Startup / own venture: Founders typically work as much or more than consultants, at least initially. The consulting toolkit (structuring, communication, problem-solving) is highly transferable. Upside is equity, but the path is longer.
- Stay and make partner: The financially most lucrative path for those who have the commercial instinct. Requires shifting identity from "expert who delivers" to "relationship-builder who sells."
- Subject-matter expert track: Increasingly common — consultants who specialise deeply in AI, healthcare, or a specific function and operate as senior advisors or independent practitioners. Less linear, more personally designed.
The Access Gap: How to Break Into Consulting From Any University
Teresa's own story is a gentle rebuke to the idea that tier-1 consulting is only accessible from a handful of Madrid and Barcelona private universities. She studied law and business at the Universidad de Valencia — a respected public institution, but not the typical feeder for MBB — and built her path through curiosity, an Erasmus exchange that expanded her view of what was possible, and a strategic master's degree at ESCP in Madrid.
Ramón frames the systemic problem directly: students at public universities outside the main cities are often equally talented but simply don't know the opportunity exists. The career offices at many public universities don't have strong consulting recruitment relationships. Professors may not think to mention it. By the time students discover consulting, they may already be in their penultimate year — late enough that preparation time is compressed.
Teresa's observations suggest the gap is narrowing. Consulting firms are running more case competitions at public universities, partly because the talent pool at the traditional targets is saturating. More online resources exist for case preparation than ever before. But Teresa and Ramón agree that the most powerful intervention would be university careers teams actively curating and sharing that knowledge — and professors acting as career guides, not just knowledge transmitters.
"Every student has a brilliant story to tell. The ones who struggle in consulting interviews aren't the ones who lack the story — they're the ones who haven't sat down to prepare it."
— Teresa Ko
Interview Preparation: What Actually Works
Teresa's advice on case interview preparation is pragmatic and specific. Practice volume matters, but it is not the only variable.
The single most impactful change she recommends is practising with people who have already been through the process — not just peers who are preparing at the same time. Ramón corroborates this from his own experience: an hour with someone who had recently received an MBB offer was worth more than several hours with someone at the same stage. The quality of feedback is categorically different.
On the personal or "fit" portion of the interview, Teresa is emphatic: most candidates over-invest in case preparation and under-invest here, even though the split is roughly 50/50 in how firms evaluate candidates. Her recommendation is to spend half a day writing out your own narrative — key career milestones, values you can demonstrate through concrete examples, moments of leadership, resilience, or creative problem-solving. The goal is to have two or three strong examples ready for each consulting value, so you are never improvising in the room.
Case interview preparation: Teresa's checklist
- Start early: Six to eight weeks of structured preparation gives you enough time to build fluency without burning out. Starting the week before is almost always too late.
- Practice with people who have been through it: Even one session with a recent hire at your target firm will compress your learning curve significantly. Nova's Strategy & Operations vertical is designed partly for exactly this kind of mentoring exchange.
- Vary your practice partners: Solving problems in front of different people teaches you to adapt your communication style — a core consulting skill that the interview is also testing.
- Write your personal narrative before you need it: Spend half a day mapping your own story. Identify two or three concrete examples for each of the core consulting values. Don't improvise in the room.
- Treat the fit interview as seriously as the case: The case has a more defined methodology; the fit portion is 50% of the decision and harder to rescue if you've neglected it.
- Use STAR for behavioural questions: Situation, Task, Action, Result — a simple structure that keeps answers focused and demonstrates the structured thinking firms are looking for.
Why Taiwan Became the World's Chip Factory — A Story of Constraints and Vision
One of the episode's most unexpected detours is a conversation about Taiwan's semiconductor dominance — prompted by Teresa's Taiwanese heritage. Her parents emigrated from Taiwan to Valencia in the 1980s; her father joined Evergreen, the Taiwanese shipping conglomerate, as a young expat. Teresa grew up between Valencia and Livorno, Italian and Taiwanese by culture, Spanish by passport.
Ramón asks a question that many people wonder but rarely articulate: why Taiwan? The island has limited natural resources, a small population, and sits in permanent geopolitical tension with mainland China. How did it come to produce around 92% of the world's most advanced logic chips — with TSMC alone holding roughly 60–66% of global foundry revenue?
Teresa's answer points to the interplay of constraint, vision and culture. Lacking exportable natural resources, Taiwan's postwar leadership made a deliberate bet on developing human capital in high-value manufacturing. TSMC's founding in 1987 — by Morris Chang, with government backing — was a strategic choice to become indispensable in the global technology supply chain rather than compete in industries where larger economies had inherent advantages.
The cultural layer is harder to quantify but Teresa doesn't shy away from it. She describes a culture of perseverance, meritocracy, and extreme attention to detail — values she sees shared across the "Asian Tigers" (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore). She also makes the geopolitical point that Ramón raises: proximity to an assertive China has, historically, created urgency. Countries that feel existential pressure tend to innovate harder than those in comfortable positions.
The data in 2025 underscores just how concentrated the stakes have become. Taiwan's semiconductor industry generated over $165 billion in revenue in 2024, representing a significant share of the country's GDP, and TSMC's global market share in contract chipmaking continued to expand. A disruption to Taiwan's chip output would reverberate through every sector of the global economy — a fragility that governments from Washington to Brussels are scrambling to address.
Key Takeaways
- The three consulting roles are three different jobs. Analyst/consultant (doing), manager (organising and enabling), partner (selling and relationship-building) each require a distinct skill set. The transition between them — especially the first-to-second — is where most consulting careers succeed or stall.
- The manager role is the toughest and the most freeing. You absorb pressure from all directions, but you also regain ownership of your agenda. Netting the two, Teresa describes it as strongly positive — especially for people who want a rich life outside of work.
- Tier-1 consulting in Spain pays €45–70K for analysts, rising to €90–120K+ for managers and uncapped for partners. The bonus proportion accelerates sharply at manager level, making performance increasingly determinative of real earnings.
- Weekends are largely protected. The Monday-to-Thursday intensity is real (10–12 hour days), but most MBB consultants in Spain work very few weekend days across their careers. This is often a surprise to people from outside the industry.
- PE-backed company roles are the best-paying exit from consulting. Corporate strategy roles usually come with a pay cut; PE-owned companies in CXO-adjacent roles can match or beat consulting comp, especially when equity is included.
- Access to consulting is a solvable information problem. The talent gap between students at target and non-target universities is often smaller than the awareness gap. The fix is earlier, better-curated career information — exactly what the Nova Strategy & Operations vertical is designed to provide.
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