Compressed case prep, what to cut when you only have a few weeks
Most consulting candidates with three weeks before a first round treat it like a crisis, but it doesn't have to be one, as long as you're willing to put down most of what a standard prep plan tells you to cover.
I see this most often with experienced hires and MBA students who got an interview invite earlier than they expected. They open a prep guide on day one, see chapters on profitability, sizing, market entry, M&A, operations, and pricing, and try to give each one a week. Three weeks later they can structure any of those cases but none of them cleanly, and the interview comes and they fumble whichever case they happen to draw, because their depth on every single type is shallow.
Compressed prep is a triage problem rather than a coverage problem, and the candidates who do well on tight timelines accept that triage is the entire game, pick the right things to be sharp on, and let the rest stay uneven.
What first rounds actually test
The first round of a consulting interview is a screening round, where the interviewer is trying to figure out, in forty to sixty minutes, whether you can think like a consultant at the most basic level.
They are not testing whether you can handle an M&A case with three unusual regulatory constraints; what they want is to see you reason cleanly through something fairly standard, structure a problem, pick the relevant numbers from a table, and communicate clearly while you're thinking. Those are what get you to the second round.
The exotic case types matter at later stages, when partners and senior managers want to see how you handle ambiguity and pressure on something genuinely unfamiliar, so spending two weeks of your first three on those is solving a problem you don't have yet.
The four case types that actually show up
Across most major firms, four case types make up the bulk of what first rounds ask.
Profitability. The classic prompts ask why margins have dropped, why the company is losing money, or what would get them back to last year's numbers. This is the most common type by a clear margin, and the one most candidates are weakest on, because they reach for a memorised profitability tree instead of building one for the specific business.
Market sizing. Standard prompts ask how big a particular market is or how much revenue a company makes, and sizing questions either stand alone or attach to other case types as a sub-question.
Market entry. Whether to enter a new market or expand into a new geography. The structure draws on most of the same building blocks as profitability and sizing, but the recommendation framing is different.
Pricing or operations. Less common as a full case in first rounds, but frequent as sub-questions or follow-ups, like how to price a product or what's gone wrong in a client's supply chain.
If you handle these four cleanly, you'll be ready for roughly 80 percent of what most first rounds ask, and the remaining 20 percent, if it shows up, is something you can reason through using the structural muscles you've built on the four.
What "depth" actually means
Depth on profitability is about being able to structure a profitability case three different ways depending on the prompt, not about memorising the standard tree better than anyone else.
A retailer losing margin on a single product line needs a structure built around unit economics, while a multi-business-unit conglomerate with falling group profitability needs something built around segment contribution, and a subscription business with rising customer acquisition costs would call for something different again, focused on the cash flow over a customer's lifetime. All three are profitability cases, but each one calls for a different way of cutting the problem.
A candidate who hears the prompt and picks the right structure within sixty seconds is operating at a level interviewers notice immediately, while the opposite, running a generic revenue-minus-cost tree on every prompt, sounds rigid even when the arithmetic is correct.
Depth here is structural flexibility, not memorisation, and you build it by working through the same case type with three or four different prompts and asking what's actually different about each one.
Three real mocks beat twenty mediocre ones
Most candidates double their mock count when prep time gets tight, which is exactly the wrong move.
Twenty mocks with different practice partners over three weeks teach you very little, since each session ends without anyone tracking what you should fix and no one is around to see whether you actually fixed it, and you collect fragments of advice that leave you with a vague sense that some things are working and some aren't.
Three mocks with someone who knows what they're looking for, with each one building on the last, are worth more than the twenty. The first session establishes where you actually stand, the second checks whether you closed the gap from the first, and the third confirms you can hold the new behaviour under pressure.
If you don't have access to someone who can do that, the next-best option is to record yourself doing cases solo and listen back. You'll catch about half of what an experienced coach would, but it's far better than a string of one-off mocks with people who can't see your patterns.
The candidates I've seen do best on compressed timelines spend less time talking through cases and more time being held to a consistent standard across them.
Don't drop fit prep, even on a tight timeline
The instinct under time pressure is to give all your remaining hours to cases. Don't.
Interviewers score fit and case across the full hour, and a candidate who solves a profitability case beautifully but rambles through a leadership story still walks out flagged. Three or four genuinely strong fit stories, structured around the dimensions firms actually ask about (leadership, conflict, impact, judgement), are non-negotiable.
Fit prep doesn't take much time if you do it properly: an hour writing out four stories in a clean structure, an hour rehearsing them aloud until they feel natural, and a single mock fit interview is usually enough to bring fit from neglected to solid.
If you're on a three-week plan, fit gets a half-day in week one and a touch-up in week three, and skipping it entirely is one of the most common mistakes I see, while also being the easiest to fix.
A sample three-week plan
To make this concrete, here's how I'd actually structure three weeks for a candidate starting from scratch.
Week one is the foundation: spend two days getting fluent in profitability across three different prompt variations, two days on sizing with focus on choosing between bottom-up and top-down, one day on market entry, and half a day drafting fit stories.
Week two is for pressure-testing: get two mocks with someone who can give real feedback, ideally on different case types, then use the rest of the week to fix what those mocks surfaced rather than learning anything new, with one day going to pricing or operations as a fast catch-up.
Week three closes the loop: run a third mock to close any remaining gap from week two, do a light review of all four case types focused on the structuring step rather than the math, and rehearse fit stories until they feel natural. The last two days are rest and a calm review of frameworks, not new content.
You'll notice this plan covers four case types reasonably well, fit competently, and almost nothing else, which is the trade-off compressed prep forces. The candidate who tries to cover everything ends up being good at nothing.
What gets you through
A candidate who handles a standard profitability case beautifully is walking into a second round, while one who stumbles through five case types without being sharp on any of them probably isn't.
Compressed prep is a different problem from full prep, with a different right answer: the question is whether the interviewer in the room sees someone who can think cleanly under pressure, structure a problem the way a consultant would, and communicate the answer without losing them along the way. How much you cover doesn't really enter into it.
The plan that works is narrow on purpose: four case types you can structure flexibly, three mocks with someone who can hold you to a consistent standard across them, and fit prep solid enough that you're not hoping to get away with it. Almost everything else is noise on a tight timeline.