“Look, if you want to drift into hell on Earth, stay 24 months in a consulting firm and you are tainted meat for the rest of your life,” O’Leary tells Fortune. “No one’s going to hire you to make a decision because you never have made one.”
“Why would anybody burn all those hours while someone else makes money, and you do nothing of consequence? I respect all the consulting firms that are out there, but I’m going to do my best to keep people from going into that.”
O’Leary says that when he asks his Harvard cohort who wants to go into consulting, about two-thirds raise their hands. But the $4.2 billion SoftKey Software Products founder has made it his mission to recruit them into entrepreneurial life—even if his lessons require some harsh truths.
“What I try and do is disrupt a few of them in every class that I go into at the beginning of the program saying, ‘If I can get four of you to abandon your drift into mediocrity, then I’ve done a great job here.”
“If you’re there for more than two than 24 months, you get the virus. You’re tainted—your resume says you were someone of no consequence,” the 71-year-old tells Fortune.
“So I always take those resumes of consultants that want to get into the real world, and throw them in the garbage,” O’Leary continues. “They haven’t done anything, they just wrote reports. Didn’t matter.”
“You can go to the soccer games, go to picnics. You can do whatever, and it’s a great life. You can provide for a family,” he adds. “But you’ll never be free. You’ll never be financially free.”
