By Coleman Cox

July 9, 2025

I spent the first ~6.5 years of my career in professional services at Ernst & Young. I did ~2.5 years in the Audit practice, and another 4 years in the M&A Advisory group. As alums of a Big 4 accounting firm would say, I had a pretty good run. I ultimately left to chase a more entrepreneurial career path in a field (real estate) that had interested me since college, but the foundational hard skills and soft skills I developed during my time at EY have stuck with me today. I’m confident I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.

Walking into the office of a VP of Finance of a publicly traded company and asking questions about his books is not the most enjoyable task in the world. Layer on that you’re 6 months out of college and don’t really know what the hell is going on (big picture) and you can see why the job is not for everyone – that and the grind of 70 – 80+ hour weeks can be a combination for high turnover.  That’s not to imply I ever felt like I was on an island – I always had great support from my team members. Regardless, many aren’t cut out for that type of environment. Those who persevere and are successful embrace the Professional Services Mindset that encompasses so many transferable soft skills that create success in any role and any industry.

To list and expand on some of the primary soft skills / traits that become engrained in you as a successful professional services provider:

Client Communication: Hard to think of a more important skill in business than being able to clearly communicate, across all mediums (in-person, phone, email, etc.), in a professional setting. In a professional services role you learn very quickly that you can be the best in the world at your job, but if you don’t have this piece mastered, you’re not going to get very far. There’s nothing worse than wasting yours and your clients time talking past each other, or missing out on pertinent details that you’ll have to revisit later. Or even worse not being able to build rapport with a client that gets everyone working together on the same team (easier said than done in the middle of an audit!).

This goes beyond just communication skills. Responsiveness (with a sense of urgency) lets a client know you’re all over it. Every client should feel like they are your only and most important client. Organized project management ensures you are being respectful of your clients time and covering everything you need to all at once with them. And also understanding of the big picture – moving on from the unimportant minutia, but digging in on the areas the move the needle. Situational awareness and tact are required to appropriately respond in many different scenarios. A few examples:

• How to respectfully be the “squeaky wheel” or follow-up without degrading the relationship;
• Understand when to say “I don’t know, I’ll have to look into that one and get back to you” – as long as you follow through on your promise to get back to them this will create more trust. Nothing worse than feigning knowledge or coming up with an answer on the spot, only to get called out for being wrong;
• Providing bad news in person, not hiding behind your computer.

Foresight: I worked with a partner in the M&A advisory group at EY whose foresight bordered on prescience when it came to always being 5 steps ahead of what the client would want to see or dig in further on or inquire about or challenge our analysis, etc. Seeing those clients’ eyes light up with wonder as he had a detailed and well-thought out response to their every comment/question is something I’ve strived for ever since.

Foresight is a product of preparation and experience. Those who spend the appropriate amount of time preparing, thinking through the problem from multiple different angles, including the shoes of your client, are the ones that are consistently adding the most value and proving their worth in gold. Organized project management, as noted above, also supports this trait, allowing you to see the big picture and letting that guide you to where the questions/follow-ups/challenges may come.

Presentation: Any sort of formal presentation to a client of course needs to be polished and professional – this is not breaking news. I have many examples of the well documented phenomenon of bad presentation negating great content or analysis.

So much so that I would expand on the importance of this from purely formal external presentations, to ALL internal and external interactions. Spending the extra time to put the final finishing touches on presentation type items (formatting, clear summaries, coloring, charts/graphs, etc.) can feel like a poor use of time, until that great analysis you spent an hour putting together and thinking through gets dismissed immediately because you didn’t spend the extra 10 minutes to make your presentation prettier and articulate your point more clearly. I have a very vivid memory of learning this lesson in the midst of a project at EY, and it has stuck with me ever since – I spent a lot of time building an analysis in excel that I was going to walk through internally with a partner. Because it was internal, I left the excel document a bit of a mess, showing all of my “scratch paper” type work and thoughts to get to my poorly formatted/organized output. “What are you trying to show here?”….”It doesn’t show that.”

Become the person that is known for having buttoned up content/analyses at every turn and watch how your reputation becomes one of a clear thinker and great analyst. The reverse is also true – as you continue spending the extra time to make your conclusions more obvious and clear, you actually do become a clearer thinker and better analyst.

Trust but verify: As a professional services provider you are keenly aware of your reputation constantly at stake – your compensation depends on it. When someone tells you they’re going to do something, your mindset is still “the buck stops with me.” That pushes you to high expectations internally and externally, and doesn’t let you become the person that stops caring once it’s “off your plate”. Being an auditor only reinforces this point :).

A practical hack that not everyone knows about: add reminders to yourself in Outlook to specific sent and received emails (right click the flag icon) to make sure you follow-up appropriately on important items that need to get done, but maybe aren’t important enough to make a formal to-do list.

Some ancillary soft skills / traits that tend to come with embracing the Professional Services Mindset:

How to work hard: Generally speaking in client services role, you are going to work hard. Again, your compensation depends on it. Learning how to work hard is a skill that you can get better at. Fresh out of college working 70-80+ hour weeks is a bit of a shock to the system. But you find out very quickly there are plenty of folks in the business world that can handle that and more. I’m a big proponent of work-life balance and ensuring there is no burn-out (overall we’re in a marathon, not a sprint) – but there are times when working hard and working long hours are required, and there is plenty of competition that will take your place if you’re not willing to do it.

You also learn to appreciate there are certain deadlines in business that are not movable. Your schedule needs to be arranged around these deadlines, not the other way around. That can be hard to adjust to for many coming out of college, but quickly becomes engrained into you with the Professional Services Mindset. And that attitude will do wonders to your business reputation (and will do wonders to the negative if you become someone that cannot meet deadlines).

How to work on a team: I had the benefit of playing sports (baseball) through college, but many don’t have that and working on a team in the business world can be different. There needs to be mutual respect, mutual trust, the ability to separate tasks into multiple pieces and then bring it back together, communicate directly and clearly but with social awareness, and seeing the full team in the trenches together (from the lowest to the highest levels). A professional services environment is a great place to see the operations of highly functioning teams (and poorly functioning teams) and implement the best into your environment.

When you approach every situation from the standpoint of a client : service-provider relationship, you subconsciously go the extra mile to ensure you are adding more value than what you’re being compensated. It truly does become a way of thinking. The grind and environment is certainly not for everyone, but I feel strongly that finding success in these types of roles creates a very strong foundation for success in business across many different roles and industries. And I’m grateful and proud of my time spent at EY.