Third Shift Entrepreneur

Chapter 2Small Talk

Standing in the early morning dawn, waiting on the corner for his Lyft ride, the spring air felt good to Matt, especially after coming out of a particularly harsh Chicago winter. He was excited about the client meeting in Cincinnati that had previously been put off. As a Senior Manager for one of the largest management consulting firms in the country, Coopers & Tompkins, Matt was on the cusp of making partner. He had built this relationship on his own with a large consumer packaged goods company and was going to pitch them a strategy project to optimize their pricing decisions around a set of household chemical products. He had done this kind of work before, and though nervous about leading the pitch for this new project, he felt comfortable with the subject matter. Winning this client would represent a significant achievement in the path toward the career milestone of making partner. The meetings would last all day, but he would still be on a same-day flight back home afterward to have dinner with Sabina.

In anticipation of this client meeting and the feeling of the accompanying hunt for this new potential win, Matt was energized. Why, he wondered in these moments of fulfillment in his professional life, couldn't he be happy with his job? Partner, after all, would represent a significant pay increase and arguably the culmination of his career transformation after leaving the Army, earning his MBA and working his way up through the ranks as a management ...