Moving from Consulting to Transaction Services

You can spot the ex-consultant across the table within about ninety seconds. They frame the problem beautifully, they steer the conversation, they never fumble a question — and then the interviewer asks how a deferred tax asset behaves in a net debt calculation and the polish evaporates. That gap, between a superb communicator and a confident number, is the whole story of moving from consulting into Transaction Services. It is a move worth making: the deal world is faster, more concrete, and closer to the money than most strategy work. But it is not a free transfer, and the people interviewing you know exactly where consultants tend to be thin. This guide is the honest ledger — what you bring, what you are missing, and how to close the distance before you sit down.

Why Consulting Is Genuinely Good Preparation

Recruiters do not take chances on consultants out of charity. The habits you have built over two or three years map onto Financial Due Diligence far more cleanly than the sceptics admit, and you should lead with them without apology.

Start with structured problem-solving. FDD is, at bottom, the art of taking a chaotic commercial reality and cutting it into testable questions. The issue tree, the hypothesis-driven workplan, the discipline of being MECE — these are precisely how a good diligence workstream gets scoped and staffed. When a partner says "we have three weeks, what are the five things that could kill this deal," a trained consultant already knows how to answer that.

Then there is client comfort. You have sat in rooms with sceptical management teams, fielded hostile questions, and presented while your own numbers were still warm. In TS you are in front of acquirers and vendor CFOs far earlier than a former auditor would be. That composure is genuinely rare and the people hiring you know it costs years to build.

The consultant's edge is not that they know more. It is that they are comfortable being wrong out loud, in a room, in front of a client — and correcting course without losing the room. In diligence, where findings shift daily, that temperament is worth a great deal.

Add to that communication and synthesis — the consultant's ability to land a finding in one clean sentence with a supporting exhibit is exactly what an FDD report lives on — and pace and ownership, because if you have survived consulting deadlines the rhythm of a four-week diligence will not frighten you. These strengths are real. None of them, however, is the thing TS is actually built on.

The Gaps That Will Show Up in the Room

Here is the uncomfortable part. Transaction Services is an accounting-led discipline, and most consultants are not accounting-fluent. Slides are not the deliverable; a reconciled, evidenced view of a company's financial reality is. The interview is designed to find the seam, so you want to close it first.

Three areas matter most, and they are the three the interview probes hardest.

Accounting fluency. You need to be comfortable with revenue recognition, accruals, provisions, and how a single transaction ripples through all three statements. This is not optional polish; it is the substance of the job. Start with the building blocks of a Quality of Earnings analysis and the logic of EBITDA adjustments, then push into how those adjustments are actually argued and defended.

Excel depth. Consulting Excel is often thin — a few charts, a scenario tab. TS Excel is heavy: pivoting a trial balance with fifty thousand lines, building a bridge that ties, slicing revenue by customer and product and month, chasing a variance until it reconciles. Build genuine speed here, because slowness on the keyboard reads as weakness on the numbers.

Net debt and working capital. These are the two mechanisms that move the price a buyer actually pays. You must be able to explain net debt and debt-like items and normalised working capital cold, and show how both feed the enterprise-to-equity bridge. If you can do this fluently, you have already answered the interviewer's real question. For a fuller map of the technical ground, work through the hard skills for TS.

Strategy Work Versus TS, Day to Day

The deeper thing an interviewer is testing is whether you understand what you are walking into. The two jobs feel different in the hand.

In strategy or management consulting, you are usually answering a forward-looking question: should we enter this market, how do we take out cost, what is the three-year growth plan? The output is a recommendation. The evidence is frequently qualitative — interviews, benchmarks, market sizing — and judgement, framing and storytelling are rewarded. A degree of constructive imagination is part of the value.

In Transaction Services, you are answering a backward-and-present-looking question: is this business actually worth what the buyer thinks, and what is hiding in the numbers? The output is a finding. The evidence is the company's own ledgers, reconciled and stress-tested. Precision beats narrative, and imagination is a liability where it outruns the data. You are not there to advise on strategy; you are there to confirm or challenge the financial reality underneath a price.

That shift — from what should they do to what is actually true — is the mental adjustment you have to signal you have made. Candidates who keep answering technical questions with strategic hand-waving fail, not because the hand-waving is bad, but because it is the wrong instrument for the job.

Repositioning Your Story

Your CV and your answers should translate consulting experience into TS-relevant language. Do not bury the consulting background — frame it so the numbers spine shows.

• Choose projects with a numbers spine: a cost-reduction study where you rebuilt the cost base from the ledger, a commercial due diligence where you sized a market from actual financials, a pricing project where you modelled margin by SKU. These are your closest analogues to FDD work.
• Quantify everything. "Identified £4m of addressable cost across three functions" beats "advised on cost optimisation" every time. Numbers signal that you lived in the detail.
• Show you can reconcile. Any example where your figures had to tie back to audited accounts is gold — it is the single most TS-relevant thing on a consulting CV.
• Re-rank the CV so analytical, quantitative work leads and pure facilitation or change-management pieces sit lower. The CV-for-TS guide shows how to structure this without lying about what you did.

Worked through, a repositioned answer stops sounding like consulting and starts sounding like diligence.

Routes In

There are a handful of realistic paths from consulting into TS, and the best one depends on where you are starting.

• Big Four internal moves. If you already sit in a Big Four strategy or consulting practice, an internal transfer to the TS team is usually the lowest-friction route. Network across the aisle and get to know the deals partners before you ever apply externally.
• Direct lateral hires. Both Big Four TS practices and independents hire consultants directly, typically pegging you a grade below your consulting level to absorb the accounting learning curve. That is normal and fair — take it, and out-perform.
• Boutiques. Smaller, analytically intense shops can build deep technical reps fast if you can tolerate a steeper early climb and less structure. Weigh the trade-offs with Big Four versus boutique TS.

It also helps to place TS against neighbouring careers so your motivation reads as informed. Read TS versus audit to understand why TS is not audit-with-deals, and TS versus investment banking to position the move against the other obvious exit from consulting. For grounding on levelling and pay expectations, the salary guide is worth a read before you negotiate.

In the Interview

Expect a three-part test. First, motivation: why TS, and why now — your answer has to prove you understand the day-to-day, not merely that you like deals. Second, technical: QoE, EBITDA adjustments, net debt and working capital, walked through without hesitation. Third, fit: behavioural questions where your client and project stories should carry you comfortably.

The trap is the technical round. Interviewers assume consultants are polished talkers, so they lean on the accounting to see whether there is substance underneath the fluency. A smooth motivation answer followed by a wobble on what counts as a debt-like item is the classic ex-consultant failure. Prepare the technical core until it is automatic, then let your communication strengths carry the rest.

A strong answer to "Why move from consulting to TS?" sounds like this:

"In my last commercial due diligence I built the revenue model bottom-up from the target's billing data — by customer and by product line — and reconciled it back to the statutory accounts. That meant chasing a £2m gap that turned out to be deferred revenue being recognised early. The part of that project I found most satisfying wasn't the recommendation at the end; it was getting the numbers to actually hold up. That's what pulled me towards diligence. I know the accounting is deeper than what I've done day-to-day, so I've spent the last few months working through QoE, EBITDA adjustments and the net-debt-to-equity bridge until I can walk them without notes. I'd rather come in a grade lower and be genuinely strong on the technical core than oversell what I know."

That answer works because it does three things at once: it shows a real numbers story, it names the gap honestly, and it demonstrates the gap is already closing.

Common Mistakes

• Leading with the strategy narrative and treating accounting as a footnote. It is the main event. Front-load your technical prep, not your storytelling.
• Overselling seniority. Insisting on matching your consulting grade when you cannot yet reconcile a net debt bridge reads as arrogance. Take the grade, earn the next one fast.
• Vague, unquantified CV bullets. "Supported the workstream" tells an interviewer nothing. If there is no number, there is no evidence you touched the detail.
• Confusing a recommendation with a finding. When asked what you concluded, answer with what the numbers showed and how you evidenced it — not what you advised the client to do.
• Neglecting Excel speed. You can know the theory and still fail a modelling test because you are slow and messy. Practise on real, ugly data until it is fast.
• Skipping the behavioural prep because you assume client stories will carry you. They will — but only if you have shaped them around ownership and analytical rigour. See behavioural questions in TS interviews.

Build the whole run-up around the TS interview preparation plan, weighting the early weeks towards accounting and Excel and leaving the storytelling — the part you already own — for last.

The Closing Thought

Consultants fail the move for one reason and succeed for one reason, and they are the same reason. The failure is treating TS as consulting with a deal attached, and getting caught thin on the numbers. The success is realising that the numbers are not a hurdle in front of the interesting work — they are the interesting work, and your communication and structuring instincts become the multiplier on top. Close the technical gap and your consulting background stops being the question mark in the room and becomes the sharpest thing about you. The candidates who understand that don't just get in; they get promoted faster than the auditors sitting next to them, because they can both find the truth in the ledger and make a client believe it.

The Transaction Services Interview Programme (€119.99, one-time) includes a dedicated career-switcher module on translating a consulting CV into diligence language, plus a technical crash course covering the accounting, Excel and deal mechanics consultants most often miss. Enrol today.