This is an as-told-to essay based on an interview with Sunny Stroeer, a professional adventure athlete and former consultant at Bain, who left in 2015. She owns an outdoor guiding business in Utah and has an expedition company that plans trips for women around the world. She’s also the executive director of the Alliance for Gender Equity and Outdoor Adventure. Bain did not respond to a request for comment.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I knew relatively early on that consulting was really interesting and rewarding, but it wasn’t necessarily something that I was going to build my life around.
Around six months before my 30th birthday, I had a pivotal experience with a consulting case where my longest workday was 43 hours straight without any breaks. I got to a point where I was cutting off my direct reports after four words if they weren’t getting to the point fast enough because time was just so tight.
I didn’t like the person that I was becoming: a very efficient, output-oriented, insecure, overachiever, which is what the business model of the Big Three is built on. I decided that even though it was professionally a very enriching and rewarding path, it wasn’t the path that I wanted to be on.
Consulting was an eye-opening and important time in my life. The amount that I learned while I was at Bain was bar none. And I was good at it. I didn’t leave because I couldn’t hack it. I left because I could hack it, but I didn’t really like what that looked like and what kind of person that made me.
I delivered that case successfully, with the client and the partner thrilled, and then walked away.
I think the truth is, I was in such deep burnout that I didn’t see another way. I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I was going, and the only thing I knew how to do was pull the emergency brake and self-eject.
I became an adventure athlete and own several outdoor businesses
I left knowing I wanted to take some time to explore the things that drove pure joy and passion for me, which were being outside and having adventures. I did not have a concrete vision for what I wanted to do.
By the time I got to the end of those couple of months, I realized I wanted to stay in that realm. That’s when I doubled down on adventure.
First, I was mostly committed to being an athlete — pursuing big adventures, big climbs, big runs, accomplishing “firsts.” I decided to build a career around it, actually, due to the experiences that I had as a woman in the mountains. Seeing gender bias really explicitly in the mountains was a bit shocking to me after I’d spent all of my 20s in male-dominated environments. I recognized that I was in a unique position to drive change.
When people think about leaving consulting for the outdoors, it kind of sounds like having a breakdown in a tent. But that’s not at all what this is about. Big outdoor adventure is as high-stakes, high-pressure, and strategic as management consulting — if not more so. The decisions and choices that I had to make, for example, on the Iditarod Trail were meaningfully more strategic and consequential than any decisions I ever had to make at Bain.
To be a successful consultant, you have to be goal-oriented. You have to be meticulous, hardworking, graceful under pressure, an excellent strategist, and very analytical. I think the same holds true in high-stakes outdoor adventure. There’s a ton of overlap from a skillset and personality perspective.
Consulting prepared me for anything
I took the consulting toolkit and pointed it at something harder and that I was passionate about.
When I’m out and pursuing adventures, the consequences are sometimes quite truly life or death. When you’re out on a 1,000-mile course, or you’re climbing El Cap in Yosemite, or you’re trying to set a speed record, the goals are elective, but the choices and the strategic options are very high stakes.
From a business perspective, what I did as a consultant at Bain is one-to-one applicable to what I do now. My husband and I took over the guide service we currently run in Utah days before COVID hit. I was essentially in a massive crisis situation, facing bankruptcy and trying to figure out how to navigate through it.
It was scary, but I knew, thanks to the years that I spent as a consultant, that I had the skillset to figure out how to get through it. And I did. We grew the business by more than three times since 2020. It was a case study in real life.
As a business owner, having consulting experience has been the best thing that could have happened to me. I have the confidence that no matter what life throws my way, I know how to think about coming up with a solution. You may not be able to solve it immediately, but you know how to wrap your arms around it and turn it into an approachable problem.
Consulting gave me the confidence and the ability to frame and structure things in such a way that I can make sense of them and succeed at them.
I have also recognized that it wasn’t Bain that put me into burnout. What put me into burnout was what I was carrying inside myself — the desire to excel, to have an impact, and to do things as well as I possibly can, which is what I still carry inside myself. Now I know how to regulate it more proactively and thoughtfully.
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