Albert Fässler

Albert Fässler is a re-joiner and Partner in Technology Consulting at PwC Switzerland. In the video and interview below, he explains how everything started at PwC, what he missed after leaving and what advice he would give to his younger self.

How did everything start at PwC?

I started my career with Price Waterhouse (PW) Management Consulting Services in Zurich straight after university in 1995. It was a subsidiary of the UK PW firm and had about 30 consultants in Switzerland. Their strategy had been to hire junior consultants with three to five years of experience with blue chip companies. I was the pilot hire for the globally implemented strategy and went through PW’s five-week SAP academy and certification programme in the US.

At that time, we globally hired and trained 100 junior consultants every month. In Switzerland, our SAP team grew to 850 consultants, who were transferred by PwC to IBM Switzerland in 2002.

Can you share a funny story from that time?

When I joined Price Waterhouse in 1995, I had the idea to replace the fax number on the business card with my PW email address.

Shortly after the business cards had arrived, I received a call from our managing partner’s assistant asking me to come to his office. Our service line leader then explained to me that we were management consultants and not the t-shirt and sneakers gang from the West Coast. Consequently, he instructed me to have my new business cards destroyed and order new ones with the fax number on them.

Six months later, we received the order from PW Global to replace all business cards with new ones that had the email address printed on them.

What did you miss about PwC after leaving in 2002?

What I always valued most about PwC is our uncompromised focus on clients and people. Sometimes we forget how much this is actually valued by our clients and recognised in the industry. PwC’s core values and our culture centred around Client – People – Firm have remained unchanged for as long as I know. Our values are very strong and are consistently maintained and lived. The normative foundation of our firm is exactly the same as 28 years ago.

How did you stay connected with former PwC colleagues?

Throughout my entire career, I have stayed very close to my former PwC Consulting team that transferred from PwC to IBM and then spread into many different directions. I also attended the legendary annual alumni parties which were always a large gathering with many former colleagues.

After IBM, I joined a client to overcome my non-compete period as I had left PwC as a partner in 2002. My first action in this role was to bring in three of my former colleagues from PwC. Effectively, I was then for about five years a client for many of my former PwC colleagues.

After this programme was completed, I joined Lodestone, the company many of my former PwC colleagues had founded and grown in the meantime. Joining Lodestone felt like going back to PwC Consulting, as it was not only managed by former PwC partners but also cultivated the same values.

In 2016, I returned to PwC with about 30 of my Lodestone/Infosys colleagues and it felt as if I had never left.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?

All my colleagues from university asked me what I would be doing after SAP. Now, 28 years later, I am still doing SAP. Large transformation programmes are very intense and require a significant amount of energy. It is not common to remain in this business until retirement, as many tend to move on after three to five years.

Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of contributing to numerous large transformation programmes. These programmes were significant steps for my clients which are all still running successfully on SAP systems.

What hobbies do you have, and how do they impact your professional life?

I have always been an enthusiastic maker. This goes from 3D design and printing, Raspberry Pi projects, home automation to fixing bikes, cars, motorbikes and building wood houses. What has always motivated me in all of these activities is to actually solve a concrete problem that I didn’t initially know how to solve. During my spare time, I spend a lot of time on YouTube finding solutions for all my problems.

This curiosity also helps me in my everyday job and being a consultant is for me the exact same. It is all about understanding the client’s problem and then finding a solution for it.

What piece of advice would you give your younger self?

When I started my career, I had the attitude that the world had been waiting for me and I needed to explain to everybody how to do things better. I was extremely impatient. Knowing what I know now, I would be a lot humbler at the beginning of my career, mainly looking out for people I could learn from. This is the most important aspect of our job: Be surrounded by inspiring people you can learn from every day!