Le Journal

I left Big Law and bought a mobile-home park. I work less and don't get paid as much, but I'm happier and still live comfortably.John KaufmannI worked in law for decades and was paid well, but I got tired of the politics and long hours.After many years, I purchased mobile-home parks that I run full time. I no longer practice law.Though I make less and deal with more inconsistency, I learn a lot and feel satisfied with my work. From my 30s to my early 50s, I was a tax lawyer in Big Law, Big Four Accounting firms, and banks. I've given talks at tax-policy panels, sat on a trading floor, made $400,000 a year, and had an expense account. During baseball season, I took clients to the VIP section of Yankee Stadium and sat behind home plate. My parents grinned when people asked them, "What does your son do?"There was a problem, though. I was miserable.Eventually, I stepped back from law entirely to run mobile-home parksOwning mobile-home parks has been more satisfying for me. John KaufmannBig Law paid well, and it solved the cocktail-party question, but I always felt something was missing.The hours were brutal. I was always on, 24/7. I couldn't touch, feel, or smell the product of my work. I struggled with the politics and zero-sum outcomes. In 1999, three years out of law school, my wife and I bought a two-family house in Brooklyn. It was a few subway stops from my office but felt like it was a world away.We lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs apartment. I found dealing with tenants and doing simple repairs rewarding. When I painted a wall or fixed a pipe, I could immediately see the product of my work. And I didn't have to send memos into the void or polish any apples to collect the rent checks.Real estate, I thought, might be my ticket out. In 2013, I purchased a mobile-home park in central New York and began running it as a side hustle. I did not choose manufactured housing for romantic or social-justice reasons. I chose it out of desperation — I'd read once that mobile-home parks have a high return on investment. In 2015, the group at the bank where I worked was let go. I went to a law firm for a few years, but my heart wasn't in it. In 2018, I bought another park, this time in northern New York. A year later, I left the firm. I'm a full-time park owner now, and my law school diploma is somewhere in storage (where, exactly, I don't know).Since changing careers, I've taken on a lot of responsibilities and roles Owning mobile-home parks comes with a lot of different jobs. John KaufmannMy life has changed since I made the jump.In Big Law, I was one of thousands, with a large support system. Now, though I have on-site managers at each park, I'm the only pencil-pusher and decision-maker. I generally serve as the legal, accounting, IT support, janitorial, and marketing departments. I vet new software products, review resident applications, hire lawyers, evaluate bids for work, and pay process servers. Each year, I print and collate hundreds of leases and copies of park rules, then stuff them into envelopes, stamp them, and make sure they're delivered. If I screw up the pagination, I repeat the process.In certain firms where I worked, more energy was spent on ducking blame than on getting things right. Now, I don't have that luxury. If I buy a bad home or damage a water meter, I acknowledge the mistake, learn from it, fix the problem, and move on.I've also assumed a lot more financial risk. In the corporate world, I was a W-2 employee with a fairly consistent income. Now, I deal with higher stakes and more inconsistency. When a pipe bursts, regulations change, or property taxes or interest rates go up, I'm on the hook.I can't control interest rates, government policies, and many other outside factors that may impact the value of my properties, so I just have to live with them.Though I make less than I did as a lawyer, I still live comfortably. In an…

McKinsey is "really rethinking the nature of the work that we do," an executive told Business Insider.Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesAI is changing the nature of consulting work and the way firms charge for their services.Consulting giant McKinsey said that a quarter of its fees are now driven by outcomes-based pricing.Clients are increasingly looking for support on complex, multi-year projects, the consultancy said.McKinsey & Company says AI is reshaping what it offers clients and how it charges them."We're doing more performance-based arrangements with our clients," Michael Birshan, managing partner of the UK, Ireland, and Israel at McKinsey, told reporters at a media event in London earlier in November.Consultants have traditionally billed clients based on a project's scope and duration, with a portion of their fees tied to the number of billable hours worked by the team.Now, rather than saying, "Here's a scope, what's the fee for that?" clients are coming to McKinsey and saying, "Here's the outcome we'd like to get to," and the fee will be mostly contingent on the performance McKinsey can deliver, Birshan said. Some fixed cost components remain.About a quarter of McKinsey's global fees come from this pricing model, he said.Outcomes-based pricing didn't start because of AI, but the type of work AI transformation demands suits it, Kate Smaje, global leader of technology and AI at McKinsey, told Business Insider in an interview.The shift in pricing developed over the past several years as McKinsey started doing more multi-year, multidisciplinary, transformation-based work for clients, though the proportion of 20% "is probably more recent, the last few years," and they expect it to increase, she added.Clients who were undertaking "big career bets" appreciated the company saying, 'Hey, look, your scorecard with your board is our scorecard, and we're both successful when this transformation works, so let's share in the upside," said Smaje.Success is typically measured against a scorecard that includes factors such as investor targets, hitting revenue or profit goals within a set timeframe, operational measures, and customer satisfaction scores, she said.'Rethinking the nature of the work we do'AI is changing what clients want from consultants, and McKinsey is "really rethinking the nature of the work that we do," Smaje told Business Insider.People may still think of consultants as delivering straight strategy advice, but that now makes up less than 20% of the company's work, she said. Instead, clients are turning to them for "deep implementation expertise" and multi-year transformation projects that require support across the business from data to workforce policies."We're not a supplier, we're not a vendor, we're a genuine partner," Smaje said.The changes unfolding at McKinsey reflect the broader shift across the consulting industry, as AI disrupts talent strategies, organizational structures, and business models at leading firms.Raj Sharma, EY's global managing partner for growth and innovation, told Business Insider in January that the power of AI agents is forcing his firm to reconsider its commercial model.Similar to McKinsey, instead of charging clients based on the hours and resources EY might spend on a project, Sharma said AI agents may call for a "service-as-a-software" approach where clients pay based on outcome."This is a moment where many of the fundamentals of the professional services model are coming under challenge," Smaje said in the media briefing. "The fastest learners that are going to win in this space."Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pthompson@businessinsider.com or Signal at Polly_Thompson.89. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to…