Management consultancy can be a baffling profession to define. Tory Frame, a partner in Bain, the consultant, borrows her explanation of what she does from her grandmother. Ms Frame says: “Her way of describing it was helping people to solve business problems'. That's exactly what I do.”

Ms Frame traces her interest in international business consulting back to her upbringing. Her father worked for a large multinational company and the family moved every few years. Although Northern Irish, she spent a large part of her childhood in Pakistan, before moving to Brazil and finishing school in Scotland.

“It taught me that there's no one way of doing things, that there are different ways of making decisions,” she said. She also picked up economics at a young age. “There can't be many eight-year-olds who ask for their pocket money in dollars because they know that next week it's going to be higher than the cruzeiro .”

This early interest led to a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, with the ambition of becoming Ambassador to Lebanon. “I was fascinated by the Middle East and saw myself in diplomacy, sorting out international conflicts.” However, on taking the post of secretary of the Oxford Union she discovered that she preferred organising events to political campaigning. “I was always more interested in getting things done.”

She joined Cherwell, the student newspaper, as business manager, in which role she was responsible for generating revenue. She said: “It taught me that it is hard to sell advertising, that business is tough and that I had a lot to learn. I would feel enormously responsible if I did not sell many advertisements and there were fewer pages than the week before.”

After abandoning thoughts of diplomacy in favour of business, Ms Frame joined Citigroup, the investment bank, working in credit analysis, before deciding that consultancy offered the opportunity to work on broader management issues. She said: “I like things where you can have an impact. We were just observing ... with companies you could recommend changes.” After a three-year stint in consulting she did an MBA at Harvard and in 2000 joined Bain, helping to set up its New York office.

As a partner, Ms Frame typically works on two projects at a time. While more junior employees are encouraged to be generalists, partners have two areas of expertise. She is a retail expert specialising in consumer products and services, in particular alcohol, chocolate (“very bad for the waistline”) and travel, with a capability in marketing and strategy.

Solving business problems is endlessly satisfying, Ms Frame said. One client, a consumer services company selling financial products (she won't mention names because of client confidentiality), believed that all its customers were profitable and could not understand why it was not making more money. “When we did the analysis, we found that they were making 150 per cent of the money from half of their customers, but a significant loss on the other half,” she said. “We worked out what products they should be offering to attract the right type of customer, what pricing should be, and how to avoid customers who might present bad debt.” Two years later, the division is the highest- performing in the company.

Ms Frame became a partner in 2006 and now chooses to work almost solely with international clients. She has spent long periods in Boston, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, regularly goes abroad on projects and imagines one day joining one of Bain's rapidly growing Asian offices. Most of the time she is on client sites, working closely with chief executives and a small team. Projects last an average of two to six months, although she sometimes stays with a client for multiple projects.

Bain's founding ethos is “results, not reports”. Consultants are paid on delivering outcomes, rather than hours, and a proportion of the fee is subject to client satisfaction. It makes for a lot of pressure, Ms Frame said. “You always have to be at the top of your game. Clients have serious problems, they are often in crisis situations and it really matters what you do. It's not the type of job where you can have an easy day.”

Qualifications

A degree (2.1) is usually required, with science, mathematics, technology and engineering backgrounds particularly desirable, according to the Management Consultancies Association (MCA)

Training

MCA research found that 35 per cent of consultants have an MBA, which is often necessary to progress to senior levels

Attributes

Strong people skills, the ability to work as part of a team, good analytical abilities, an adaptable approach to project work and a willingness to travel

Earnings

Graduate entrants can typically earn between £28,000 and £35,000 a year; a mid-level manager earns an average of £79,000 to £85,000, and a junior partner between £167,000 and £190,000. Strategy consultancies such as Bain, BCG or McKinsey can pay more, although bonuses typically make up a large proportion of earnings

Working life

Hours can be long: 10 to 11-hour days are often the norm. However, at Bain, any consultant working more than 55 hours a week will be asked to see their manager

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