A former BCG partner says leaving consulting taught him how to build

As told to

Lakshmi Varanasi

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This is an as-told-to conversation with Daniel Dantus, a former BCG partner who's now a senior vice president at Skan AI, a startup that analyzes how work happens across a company. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I came into consulting as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan's business school. I joined a student consulting club and landed at Boston Consulting Group in Chicago, first as an intern, and then full time.

What was special about BCG was that you were given a lot of rope from day one. My first week was training. By the second, I was on a manufacturing floor working with a large food-and-beverage company. We flew to Dallas and Mexico and visited plants. I was 20 years old. I was learning to enter new environments, build relationships, and have an impact.

I was at BCG for a total of eight years. For the first six, every project involved a different client, city, and team. Firms recommend continuity, but I loved diving into new things. I did operations work in manufacturing and supply chain, as well as in financial services. Later, after I moved to San Francisco, I worked in tech, focusing on sales and product strategy.

When I was promoted to project leader, my work shifted from delivering work to figuring out where I was going to build a business. I realized I wanted to keep learning and building products, which consulting projects generally do not allow over the long term.

So I took some transition time from the firm, which is paid time to take a breather and find the next thing. I made a list of companies I thought might be interesting and people I knew who might be worth talking to. I had about 100 conversations. Job searches are a numbers game, like sales. If you want to sell to 10 customers, you'd better start talking to 200.

That process led me to Harbor Freight Tools, a tool and equipment retailer, as the Director of Marketing, right after BCG. The mandate was to build out the company's digital marketing capability. It was my first "real job" after consulting, and I wasn't sure how learning to build PowerPoints would translate into delivering results. Still, by launching and scaling HFT's digital marketing channels across search, social, and display, I learned it did.

Two years later, I ended up at Juul. I had worked with the head of corporate strategy on a BCG project when he worked at Constellation Brands. He later went to Juul to build a new capability. I reached out to catch up, and it happened to be good timing. I started working on its corporate strategy team, then later ran global travel retail and product.

It was a turbulent time for the company. We went from about 1,000 employees to about 4,000 and then back to 1,000. It was also the first time I got to run a business over a longer term. Travel retail was my first sales job. You learn what it is like to be told no, to negotiate hard, to develop relationships, and to stand your ground.

In my final two years, I ran product and e-liquid development, my first technical role alongside a business role. I learned how to take a product to market.

I later returned to BCG as a partner. My work consisted of serving private equity clients in strategic due diligence.

My advice to people leaving consulting is that no single job is that important. Take time to pause and reflect, and do outreach in addition to considering inbound opportunities. If a job does not work out the way you thought, you can always get another one.

I joined Skan last year after reconnecting with its founders. It's a surprising turn of events. Five years earlier, I thought the problem the company was trying to solve was impossible: How do you use passive observation to understand a complex workflow, such as an insurance claim that takes two months to resolve?

Generative AI has made it easier to automate work where existing data — documents, databases, calls, and chats — is available. There's still a gap between clicks and tacit knowledge that explains how to execute a business process, and it's one of the biggest opportunities in enterprise AI.

After over a year at Skan, I know one thing: AI is just accelerating the same hard work that has always needed to be done.

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Lakshmi Varanasi

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• career advice
• as told to