Kim Tran is a former McKinsey consultant, a college drop-out, an internet entrepreneur, and a fierce paragliding competition pilot. He is one of the youngest consultants ever to join McKinsey. His sites and Youtube videos have been viewed tens of millions of times.
Kim studied Accounting at Brigham Young University (the No.1 Accounting Program in the US at the time), where an audit career at one of the Big 4 firms is almost a default option for 90% of students. The other 9% was going to Investment Banking. Kim did a summer audit internship at KPMG and realized he wanted something more. He started to study case interviews at night and wrote down his learning to a blog called McKinseyPrep.
The blog was a personal journal of how Kim structured his study approach: how to maximize learning given the limited time budget. He would devote a very specific portion of his time to specific aspects of case prep, seizing every opportunity to get a little better every day. McKinseyPrep grew quickly, getting tens of thousands of visits monthly in just 3 months.
Kim went on to interview with McKinsey and received 5 “strong-hire” out of 5 interviews he did and became one of the youngest consultants ever joined the Firm. He never finished college.
After quitting McKinsey, the little blog became Management Consulting Prep (later, MConsultingPrep), one of the leading platforms in the niche. Over the 10-year history, MConsultingPrep pioneered many important practices:
Kim shared a portion of his time doing other start-ups (most already failed), boutique consulting works, and air sports (where he almost died once).
Kim started flying paragliders in 2016 and quickly became one of the best pilots in the region, winning multiple international competitions. Since 2019, he is consistently ranked as the No.1 South East Asia pilot by FAI (FÉDÉRATION AÉRONAUTIQUE INTERNATIONALE). He was later recruited to the Vietnam Air Force as the Head instructor of the Paragliding program.
“Paragliding is a great sport, a unique genre of art, and a sophisticated science. You have to be athletic enough to control the glider in rowdy air, you also have to be smart enough to run multiple calculations in your head, but foremost, you must have the instinct of an artist to make guesses with limited data”.
Qualified for the Paragliding World Cup (Status: currently qualified for Continental Championship)
Paraglide in all 7 continents (Status: America, Asia, Africa, Oceana down. Antarctica is the hard one)
Fly 500km in one paragliding flight (Status: Personal best is 225km in Australia)
Start an App with 1 million users (Status: still on my scratch papers)
Run a full Marathon (Status: did a half Marathon and hated it)
Adopt a foreign child (Status: still working on my biological one)
Have a tattoo (Status: still working on the catchphrase)
Bring 1000 people to paragliding (Status: 200 down. 150 of them already quitted the sport)
Bought my dad a house (Status: he bought one for me. 1 – 0 dad leading)
Have an 8-pack abs for 6 months (Status: 1 out of 8, just 7 more)
Start a Music School, teaching kids to improvise and play music from their soul rather than to play somebody else’s music written in unnecessarily complicated notations (Status: ran the course through my mom and she didn’t say anything)
A very well-educated and high-level intellectual audience. You are awesome! I love going deep into the logic at times knowing that you would appreciate it. That’s the cornerstone of my methodology from Resume, PST, to Cases.
Reaching all corners of the world. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I now have readers from 182 countries. I love going into Google Analytics and learning all the new city names, knowing that somebody there is reading my blog. Great feeling!
Preaching life-changing opportunities. Consulting is hands-down the best business career track. It can completely bring anybody to the elite level. It’s so great to read success stories and knowing that I am helping thousands of people just like that!
Internet marketing, education, consulting … all in one! I am grateful for this chance to practice many of my passions in one package.
