Avalon Consulting (India) Reviews

Cons

Ageing partners, with no clear long-term plan
Partners are penny-wise, pound foolish: would rather delay payments to employees and lose them, rather than take short-term advances and bear interest cost for their own inefficiency
Small scale of projects - hence, small clients. Largely market research. Not enough background work is done before accepting projects, leading to immense pressure on the team
High exposure to Saudi Arabia - reflects badly on your CV if you wish to move going forward
All partners are home grown - no real additions to the client network
Lacks structure in terms of career planning and progression

Cons

Tight Deadlines, intensive travel, Little sector level development of an individual

Cons

- pathetic culture
- autocracy of the chairman
- 4 holidays only in 1 year of probation
- apart from salary no benefits
- lala company
- no appreciation of hard work
- no sector focus
- loss of pay even for marriages / sick leaves in first year
- no respect for employees

Cons

- Too much pressure on useless primaries , ultimately when the project is closed on a few good ones or knowledge of the partners
- Heavily controlled by partners due to which mid management hasn't developed capability to take independent calls and leads to lot of poor planning and ultimately few sleepless nights towards end of project which can be completely avoided
- Although HR practices are improving over last one year, its still a long way to go , for eg no leaves for a year of probation is a BIG ISSUE and there is hardly any appreciation for closing projects/extreme hard work

Cons

- Entrepreneurship sometimes translates into lack of structure; few processes can be streamlined
- Being a small boutique, there are activities to be done which are normally outsourced or at least easier in bigger firms - e.g. primary research

Cons

1. Brand name is not strong
2. Large part of the work is primary focused/ cold calls

Cons

Complete "lala" culture. The current set of so called Partners have no pedigree to be there. Whatever little the company has achieved was on account of the founders who have now hung up their boots

Cons

- Does not have a strong brand name. But any firm they have worked for, will swear by their work
- In the beginning, one needs to do there share of primary interviews with industry professionals which can be not so pleasant at times. The info gathered through these interviews is used for strategy formulation. However, this method gives a lot of depth to Avalon's work which is appreciated by clients. As a consultant, one is involved in both info gathering and strategy formulation, which keeps you closer to reality and at the same time provides a platform for a lot of learning.

Cons

Multiple projects mean some times it's too hectic to handle without any organised processes and support.

Cons

#As many previous reviews clearly state, Avalon is a market research firm. Your mental state as a consultant, senior consultant will be totally messed up and you will be totally demotivated when your cold call respondents rightly refuse to give you the required information stating they don't gain anything by providing such information. When few calls are to be made, one can pose as a customer/vendor/investor to get information from totally unknown persons. When entire projects are based on primary interviews with unknown people, Cs and SCs will not be able to get 60-70 quality interviews just by cold calling and posing as someone else. Worst of all, even when Cs and SCs have put all the effort to get inputs from unknown people by being in uncomfortable conversations where respondents shout, ridicule, ignore, insult them, Cs and SCs will be judged on the number of "quality interviews" and a low rating on the project will be given citing "not enough people contacted/not enough quality interviews done". All the effort for this!

# The more you are willing to compromise on your personal time, the more you will be appreciated. Works like writing transcripts of interviews, maintaining trackers, making proposals are expected to be done post office hours

#If the project involves calling international locations, one would come to office in the morning and will be expected to make international calls in the night. He is expected to sleep post project completion

#If a C, SC is working with two people higher up the ladder (typically AVP and VP), there will most likely be a communication gap between C/SC and VP. AVP's and VP's expectations will be different from the C/SC. As the C/SC generally works closely with the AVP, the inputs collected are as per AVP's visions. When VP screws up AVP's review, AVP screws up C's/SC's
AVPs do not even try to minimize such instances by keeping C/SC on calls with VP while discussing project milestones as in those 30 minutes of call, C/SC can make 7-10 more cold calls

#Because AVPs do not prefer to keep Cs/SCs on calls with VPs, Partners, C's/SC's learning is not much as with each project they only refine their skill of approaching and talking to random unknown people, they learn nothing in terms of story lines, how to structure a deck, etc.

#There is high churn each year(for obvious reasons) and most of the middle management that remains is spineless. They say "Yes Sir Yes Sir" to VPs and Partners and expects Cs/SCs to say the same to them. Some of these managers intentionally create harsh internal deadlines even when the actual deadline is not that near/soon

#Project managers' appraisals are not at all affected by their juniors' feedback about them. Even though Avalon has an "Upward Appraisal" form, it is more to show Avalon cares about what juniors think. The inputs from upward appraisals are not included in any way in the appraisal of the manager. If it was, a few managers would have been fired long back
So basically, a manager can give you false internal deadlines, ask you to compromise on your personal time, become the reason of miscommunication between you and VP/Partner and screw your appraisal by saying "not enough quality interviews" but there is not a single way in which you can also affect his rating and appraise him on how he performed as a manager

#The biggest problem: the management knows all of this,each of the point mentioned. The senior management just wants any project at any cost to keep the business running, whatever be the nature of project (consulting or non-consulting) and they want to finish the project to raise the bill anyhow. If that means doing random projects, living with inefficient middle management who can get the work done by stressing juniors, so be it