Careers

Q&A with Thomas

Thomas came to McKinsey from Notre Dame in 1999, where he had a liberal arts focus–philosophy, history, theology, literature. He considered three options after graduation: get a PhD and become a professor of political theory, work at the think tank where he had done a summer internship, or head to the Peace Corps. Once he discovered McKinsey, he found himself going on to business school, and today he is a McKinsey partner in Lima.

Interviewer: Your three choices upon graduating from Notre Dame are all a long way from McKinsey.

Thomas: I had never heard of McKinsey, to be honest. I applied only because I happened to pass through the Notre Dame career center and saw huge quantities of résumés sitting in a box for McKinsey. It piqued my curiosity, so I asked my friends in the business school. I put together a résumé, applied, and amazingly I got an offer.

Interviewer: How did that happen?

Thomas: I got lucky in my first-round interview. An amazing woman interviewed me; she saw that I had some ability in spite of my ignorance on how to do a case interview.

Interviewer: Were your early years as an analyst inspiring to you?

Thomas: Definitely. I worked across a pretty amazing range of industries, geographies, and business problems. Can you think of something as different as lean manufacturing at a toilet-paper plant and developing strategy for an Internet bank startup? Or optimizing promotions for a big retailer in Detroit, and process improvement for the health and human services agency in Chicago?

Interviewer: Were you ever at a disadvantage, given your liberal arts background? Philosophy tends to be not all that helpful with spreadsheets.

Thomas: I did find that the ramp-up as an analyst was difficult for me. As an example, I didn’t have the slightest idea about Excel. Fortunately, McKinsey offered me lots of support to figure things out–both help from other members of my teams and training you could sign up for.

Interviewer: Let's go back to your fascinating trajectory. What happened after 2 years as a business analyst?

Thomas: I never expected to stay more than a few years. But McKinsey offered to send me to graduate school, and also gave me the option to take a year or 2 to try something different first.

Interviewer: What exactly did “different” mean to you?

Thomas: I still felt a strong pull toward service. So I spent a year as a COO at a start-up nonprofit in Chicago that was working to lower high school drop-out rates. I then became a volunteer consultant in Nicaragua for TechnoServe. My job was to help a number of small coffee farms form a cooperative, build their own processing plant, and then market and sell to gourmet roasters in the US, Europe, and Japan. My McKinsey contacts helped me to find it.

Interviewer: And then...from Nicaragua to Hanover, New Hampshire?

Thomas: Yes, quite the culture–and wardrobe–shock. I spent two really good years at Tuck Business School, and came back to McKinsey in Chicago as an associate. As an associate and a new engagement manager, I did a lot of insurance work. About two years in, however, I had a chance to do a strategy project for a big retailer. I loved the work, was truly energized by it.

Interviewer: What was it about the retail engagement that was compelling to you?

Thomas: I loved how tangible it was. We’d make decisions that would literally appear on the shelf in thousands of stores and that would show immediate results on the retailer’s P&L. It was a long way, but I found my calling.

Interviewer: And based on your calling, you were called in an unexpected way.

Thomas: One of our clients was struggling to find an answer for declining performance in a group that made up almost 40 percent of their profits. After cycling through a number of different managers, they asked McKinsey to install a temporary head of the division and try to turn it around. I was lucky that the timing worked out and I was able to step in and serve as the merchandising vice president, reporting directly to the CEO for 8 months.

Interviewer: What was it like to step into an operational role and all its complexities?

Thomas: It was a fantastic experience. I got to manage a big team and feel the day-to-day pressures of managing a division within a public company. It was also confidence-building. Over the course of the eight months we went from negative 5 percent year-over-year sales performance to 5 percent and created more than $100 million of value for the business.

Interviewer: Now you’re in Peru which is a long way from Chicago. How did that happen?

Thomas: About a year ago, I was elected partner while still in the Chicago office. This was a big deal for me and a day that I will not forget. It is fantastic to receive hundreds of calls and emails of congratulations from your family, all of your colleagues, and many clients that you have worked with over the years.

As a new partner, you have quite a bit of flexibility to define your path forward and I took it as an opportunity to think about transferring to another office. McKinsey has been growing quickly and there has been a real push for folks to consider transferring to emerging-market offices. For me, Latin America made the most sense because I had functional Spanish and because my wife is fluent.

It was also nice to be closer to family in the U.S. than we would have been in Asia or Africa. We did not want to move our kids, Edith and Thomas, too far from grandparents and cousins. So we set out to explore options in Latin America and ended up falling in love with Lima. From a work perspective, there are a large number of opportunities here, the people are exceptionally welcoming, and the food–especially the ceviche and pisco sours–is off the charts. So I have now been here in Lima with my family for three months, starting off on the next chapter of my McKinsey adventure!

Education

• Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth MBA
• Notre Dame University BA