PFM Reviews

Training--extremely wasteful. After researching hotel rates, I calculated over $5,000 spent per person for the 6-week training and 1-month relocation benefit. Why couldn't this money be put towards my noncompetitive salary? Pay--industry (public finance) is known for low pay, but the amount of talent I saw in my peers (and myself) is much too valuable for this amount of pay (sub-$50K base salary, $53-55K after COLA). It obviously increases with seniority, but still remains noncompetitive. Relationship with managers--almost nonexistent if you do not engage yourself. While I accept that managers are busy, they make very little effort to get to know analysts unless you directly report to or engage in conversation with them. Day-to-day job responsibilities: work distribution is very unbalanced--for days, I would have nothing to do while my colleague would have to stay past 6 to finish. Models that we learn to use in training, although great to learn for the building blocks, went virtually unused in daily work. Models that we use day-to-day are almost completely automated and require mostly grunt work to copy-paste. Managers--generally quite nice, but those in charge of new hires all seem to be ex-bankers who not-so-gently enforce expectations that, arguably, do not fit within the context of public finance advisory.

The quality of the consulting product is questionable. Certain consultants produce a predetermined narrative for clients regardless of what the actual data shows. There is a specific project manager who creates an extremely hostile work environment for all the women in MBC, people of color, and gay men. He takes credit for others' work and got promoted meanwhile half a dozen people who have done work for him have been fired or left the firm in the last 3 years. There are numerous managers who focus only on bringing in business and then harass analysts and less tenured consultants to do all the work and blame them if the slightest thing goes wrong. There have not been substantial or robust quality controls process put in place after a recent Washington Post article identified a major mistake that PFM made for a county government client. The managing directors play favorites with certain project managers and analysts and allow certain employees to leave early while requiring everybody else to stay from 9AM to 6PM (or sometimes later!). MBC demands long hours and there are stretches of weeks where you will work multiple hours during late nights and weekends. The compensation is well below peer consulting groups. The Human Resources at PFM is a joke -- they don't know what's going on with any of the managing directors or directors and they can barely handle compensation, benefits, and recruiting. MBC pretends to be a group of professionals who treat everyone fairly and kindly, but the reality is that they are nice to your face and then denigrate you behind closed doors. The open office layout does not foster collaboration--you can go an entire business day and speak to no one. You have no privacy and for someone as experienced as I was, it was embarrassing to have a desk and computer screen that faces senior management. PFM as a whole is very top heavy, but MBC is ridiculous because there are more than 2 managers for every 1 analyst. The result is consultants and project managers end up doing analyst level work.