Starting as a consulting arm within Bain Capital, Bain & Company left Bain Capital and built up their PE expertise in consulting by taking more than 1/3 of the PE deals in the industry. Bain’s strength lies in analyzing headwind/tailwind, distribution channels, cost profiles, margin growth of different industries, and analyzing proprietary research by speaking to industry experts. These reports helped Bain establish themselves in the PE industry after conducting 16k due diligence on clients.
When I asked Andrew Edwards how he decided that he wanted to be a partner, he said everyone’s career path should depend on whether they got their energy internally or externally. I totally agree that if I brought my true self to work, I would be energetic and passionate about my work. Since people only hire consultants when they don't have the answers to their questions, consultants need to be internally energetic as they have to solve some of the most challenging problems to help other people succeed, while building a team of intelligent individuals around them. According to Andrew, to be successful as a consultant, you need to take ambiguous problems and present them clearly as a story using data analysis skills.
Cameron Capel talked about how COVID-19 accelerated trends in digitization of customer-facing tools, as less real estate is needed in the operation models. The urgent shortage of toilet paper in retail stores stimulated dramatic changes to recalibrate the supply chains to deliver toilet paper to grocery stores instead of the buildings. This could have taken two years normally which made us rethink the productivity in the Canadian economy. Cameron also said his favourite course was MATH 135 because it taught him the structured thinking needed to define the inputs and assumptions before solving a problem in consulting.
In terms of opinions of working from home, Minghao Ji thought that this wouldn’t reduce intimacy, instead, this would bring everyone closer together. Having been highly involved in the solar car team as a Waterloo student, Minghao learned to take ownership of problems and he encouraged us to go above and beyond to allow us to pursue our passion with entrepreneurial DNA at Waterloo.
After interviewing and chatting with Minghao, Andrew, and Cameron I learned that in order to be successful in consulting you need to have a curiosity about a problem, industry peripheral knowledge about how businesses are operated, and the motivation to commit to an interest while being knowledgeable to talk about it. I also learned about the significance of introspection to know where your energy comes from, structured thinking to analyze ambiguous problems, and pursuing your passion.
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