About Quick Prep

Quick Prep exists because the gap between knowing how a case interview works and being able to run one is far wider than most candidates expect. You can read every framework in circulation, watch every walkthrough, and still freeze ninety seconds into a market-sizing question when an interviewer asks you to justify an assumption you have not thought about. Reading is not the same as doing. Almost everything we build is designed around closing that gap.

The problem we set out to solve

Consulting recruitment is unusual. Most graduate hiring processes test what you have already done: your degree, your internships, your record. Consulting tests something closer to how you think in real time, in front of someone, under pressure, on a problem you have never seen. That is a performance skill, and performance skills are built the way any other performance skill is built — repetition with feedback from someone who can see what you cannot.

The trouble is that most candidates prepare in exactly the opposite way. They accumulate material. They collect frameworks. They read case books cover to cover and feel productive doing it, because reading feels like progress and is comfortable in a way that being corrected is not. Then they arrive at a first round having run four or five live cases, against candidates who have run forty, and they lose on fluency rather than on ability.

We built Quick Prep to make the harder, more useful kind of preparation the default: fewer resources, more reps, and honest feedback on the specific things that are costing you marks.

What we do

Case interview preparation. Structured practice across the case types that actually recur — profitability, market entry, growth strategy, pricing, cost reduction, mergers and acquisitions, operations, and digital transformation. Each comes with the scenario, the analysis an interviewer expects you to run, the numbers to work through, and the pitfalls that sink otherwise strong candidates.

Fit interview coaching. The behavioural round is not a warm-up. At several firms it carries equal weight, and it is where candidates who have drilled cases relentlessly are most often caught out, because they have never said their own stories out loud. We work on structure, specificity, and the ability to tell a story that survives follow-up questions.

Sector knowledge. Interviewers reward candidates who can talk about an industry with some grounding — the economics, the metrics, the pressures. Our sector primers cover the case types that come up in each and the levers that actually move the numbers.

Firm profiles. McKinsey, BCG, and Bain run genuinely different processes. Interviewer-led versus candidate-led changes how you should behave in the room. Preparing generically leaves marks on the table.

Community. Reps require a partner. Our Discord community exists so that finding someone to case with at nine in the evening is not the thing that stops you preparing.

How we work

We start by finding out where you actually are. Not where you think you are. The first session is usually a live case run end to end, because self-assessment in this domain is unreliable in both directions. Strong candidates often underrate themselves on structure and overrate themselves on communication. Weaker ones frequently have one specific, fixable habit that is costing them far more than they realise.

We give feedback that is specific enough to act on. “Be more structured” is not feedback. “You spent four minutes on a structure with seven branches, three of which you never returned to, and you never told the interviewer which branch you thought mattered most” is feedback. The second version tells you what to do differently in the next case. The first tells you to feel bad.

We prioritise ruthlessly. Most candidates have two or three things holding them back, not twelve. Fixing the two that matter, repeatedly, beats a shallow pass over everything. If your maths is solid and your synthesis is weak, we will spend your time on synthesis, even if drilling maths feels more productive.

We prepare you for the firm you are actually targeting. A candidate whose first round is at McKinsey should be practising interviewer-led cases and doing deep work on a small number of Personal Experience Interview stories. A candidate targeting Bain should be driving cases themselves and getting comfortable filling silence. Generic preparation produces generic performance.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you that a framework guarantees anything. Frameworks are scaffolding for thinking, not substitutes for it, and interviewers can spot a memorised structure being forced onto a problem it does not fit within about thirty seconds.

We will not tell you there is a shortcut. There is a well-worn route — consistent live practice with real feedback over eight to twelve weeks — and there are a great many ways to feel busy without following it.

We will not promise you an offer. Nobody honestly can. Recruitment decisions are made by firms on criteria outside anyone’s control, and any preparation provider claiming otherwise is selling you something other than preparation. What we will tell you is that the candidates who put in the reps, take the feedback, and fix the specific things holding them back are the ones who convert at a far higher rate. That is the part within your control, and it is the part we can help with.

Who this is for

Undergraduates and postgraduates approaching a recruiting cycle. MBA candidates preparing for summer or full-time recruitment. Experienced hires moving across from industry, banking, law, engineering, or the public sector — a group that is often strong on business judgement and rusty on structured problem solving under time pressure. Candidates who have been rejected before and want to understand precisely why rather than simply trying again harder.

You do not need a business background. Firms recruit from every discipline, and some of the strongest candidates we work with come from sciences, engineering, and the humanities. What you need is comfort with numbers, the discipline to structure before you analyse, and enough business vocabulary to discuss revenue, cost, and competitive position without hesitating.

About the team

Quick Prep was founded by Paul Akin, who brings more than 25 years across management consulting and candidate coaching. The platform is supported by a network of mentors drawn from consulting practice, who between them have sat on both sides of the table — as candidates, and as the people deciding whether a candidate advances.

That second perspective matters more than it might sound. Knowing what an interviewer writes on the scorecard after you leave the room is a different kind of knowledge from knowing how to solve the case, and it is the one most preparation material lacks.

Where to start

If you are early in your preparation, begin with the case interview pillar to understand the format, then work through a few worked case studies to see the standard expected.

If you have a round booked, the fastest thing you can do is run a live case with feedback. Get in touch and tell us your timeline and target firms, and we will tell you honestly where your time is best spent.

If you are simply exploring whether consulting is right for you, the blog and the firm profiles are the place to begin.