Q&A with Davis Nguyen, ex-Bain Consultant and MCO Founder

Davis: I didn’t decide to apply to Bain or any management consulting firm until my final year of university. I didn’t even know what management consulting was until just before the application deadlines were right around the corner. I grew up in a low-income community where going to college wasn’t the norm and even getting into college was enough reason to celebrate. When I got to Yale and my classmates were talking about wanting to be bankers and lawyers, I thought to myself, “I know plenty of bank tellers making $11 an hour back home, I don’t think you need to go to Yale to be a banker.” That was how clueless I was about what career paths were available to me. My classmates were thinking about investment banking jobs on Wall Street and I thought they were talking about working at the local bank down the street. But I did know I wanted to be an entrepreneur one day because I’ve always loved creating opportunities for others ever since I was young. During my summer in college, I would find companies I wanted to work for that were early-stage startups, think 10 or fewer employees, led by founders and CEOs who had a strong record. I ended up being able to join 2 startups and I would later find out that one of the company’s CEO was a former Deloitte Consulting Partner. The CEO of the other startup had hired McKinsey teams while he was working at JP Morgan, so both had experience with management consultants. At the end of these summers, each of the CEOs and founders said, “Davis you are going to be a great entrepreneur. You have the care for people, the drive, and the hustle, but I think you should consider going to a place like Bain or McKinsey first and become a management consultant.”

These CEOs thought I would benefit from the training that consulting provides you, the network you gain, and the mental toughness you develop.

Looking back at my career now, my mentors were right. I hadn’t really thought of management consulting until that point, but given both CEOs were people I admired, who didn’t know each other but gave me the same advice. They were both people I considered mentors, I followed their advice and returned to campus my final year of study and looked into consulting. On my flight back to campus at the end of the summer, I researched the different firms I would apply to and was attracted most to Bain. When I looked up Bain’s list of alumni who were entrepreneurs, Andy Dunn (Bonobos), Adam Braun (Pencils of Promise), Payal Kadakia (ClassPass), Dave Gilboa (Warby Parker), and so on, I saw that Bain was just a training ground for so many entrepreneurs. I would have been lucky to have joined any firm–McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, Roland Berger, and so forth–but I was lucky enough to get an offer at Bain. In short, it was my mentors who told me to go into management consulting. It wasn’t a grand plan I had all along.

I’ll start by saying that all consulting firms are driven by their people and the training of those people.

The people are the assets.

That being said, there is one thing that distinguishes Bain from other consulting firms. That is the local staffing model.

The local staffing model means that you don’t travel as much, you work from people from your office, and as a result, you grow relationships with people who are in your office.

I think this is so unique to Bain that when I was back at the office on Friday, I knew about 400 of the 500 people in the office. I’d either worked with them on cases or on “Extra 10s” which are extracurricular clubs at Bain such as the poker club or a learning lunch where people share about their experiences.

This local staffing model was the reason I was able to make so many great friends while at Bain. I got to see them through the projects we were staffed on together and weekly activities.

My decision to accept an offer with Bain, as well as the decision to work in consulting, was one of the best decisions I could have made for my career.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for Bain. I wouldn’t be a capable entrepreneur. I wouldn’t be a willing philanthropist. I wouldn’t be able to speak at TEDx.

My experience at Bain was fantastic. In fact, if you told me tomorrow I had to go back to Bain, I’d do it. I still have former Partners and Managers I worked with who have reached out to me for roles if I’d return to consulting.

But when you boil it down, I think there are 3 things that Bain does really well and made my experience fantastic.

1. Training. When I was starting as an associate consultant, I was exposed to a variety of different projects. I worked in private equity, which allowed me to be able to expand on my knowledge of business, to develop the skill to learn as quickly as possible. It was like going through Navy SEAL training, but for your mind and your business skills.
2. A peer culture where I met my best friends. The people I met at Bain will be at my wedding. Every time I travel to a new city, I check for my Bain cohort members or someone I met at Bain through various training events and connect with them. For example, when I was in Tokyo a few years ago, I reached out to some of the Bainies in Tokyo, who I met during global training. You can imagine doing that from around the world. It’s one of the best feelings to know you have a network everywhere you go.
3. Mentorship. I’m still in touch with my group of mentors. I call them my “Jedi Master Council.” Some of them are now partners at Bain. Even those who have left Bain continue to support me to this day.

The short answer is to get away from the cold winters.

I am from outside Atlanta, Georgia, so growing up I didn’t really know what winter was and after 4 years of living in New Haven when I was a student at Yale, I was done with winter and said “California here I come.” I ranked Los Angeles and San Francisco as my top 2 choices when Bain and other firms asked where I wanted to be.

I gave San Francisco the higher preference because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and figured that being in San Francisco would allow me to connect with other entrepreneurs and work in tech for my projects at Bain.

My rent was twice as much as what my friends in Texas and Atlanta paid and that was for a space the size of a closet! But Bain San Francisco surrounded me with people who were like-minded.

We have a joke that once you meet other Bainies around the world, you just know you are very similar, but there is something unique about the people who came to Bain San Francisco and chose to live there.

So I would say it was less about the office and more about the people who also wanted to work in tech, wanted to enjoy the food scene in SF, and also wanted to avoid winter while enjoying nature.

You also get to work on more tech projects in the Bain San Francisco office because Bain has a local staffing model and there are so many tech companies in the Bay Area.

I’m pretty bad at answering this question because there were no surprises. 

Ever since high school, if I was going to start something new, I’d reached out to people who had come before me to learn as much as I could. If I was able to take an economics course in college, I asked for study notes, recommendations, and advice from older students.

I did the same with Bain and researched what to expect so I knew the long hours were coming, I knew there would be times when my love for Bain would be tested on a hard project, and I knew that there would be times when I’d have to travel.

So, I didn’t have any negative surprises.

The most positive surprise was the people. You hear a lot about the Bain culture, but honestly, I can’t stress it enough. Some of my best friends come from Bain. And even today, some of the people I hang out with the most are from Bain.

And I didn’t think I would have such great friends after college. Bain just became such an amazing place for me in terms of mentorship and in terms of friends.

I did about 13 projects total during my time at Bain across mainly private equity, tech, biotech, and my favorite project which was in public education.

My favorite thing about Bain was its culture. “A Bainie Never Lets Another Bainie Fail” both professionally and personally.

It really meant people were invested in you.

I’ll share a story. Since I was in college, I have been a promoter and donor to Pencils of Promise, a non-profit that builds schools around the world.

Before Bain, I was a volunteer and during Bain continued to volunteer. In fact, a percentage of the profits from My Consulting Offer goes to Pencils of Promise each year.

While I was at Bain, I was a member of the West Coast Leadership Team for Pencils of Promise and was tasked with raising $30,000 to fund 3 new schools.

One Thursday afternoon, I sent an email out to the office explaining my goal and why I was a promoter of Pencils of Promise, and by the end of the following week, we had raised the entire amount.

My favorite project at Bain was a 3-month project helping a low-income school system in the Bay Area figure out how to retain their best teachers.

As I mentioned earlier, prior to college and Bain, I came from one of the poorest communities in America. I grew up in a single-parent household and, like a lot of my friends, we lived below the poverty line.

I could relate to the challenges this school system faced because they were similar to those faced by the low-income school system I had attended.

The problem that we had to solve was how do you retain teachers when the salaries you can pay are a fraction of those other school systems like Palo Alto, where Facebook is, or Mountain View, where Google is? This school system was really struggling to retain teachers.

We were brought in as a pro-bono project to figure out how to turn that situation around.

This project was impactful because I got to sit down and interview over 100 different teachers about what keeps them in the school system or what made them leave. I got to build out programs and think about the strategic question – “How do you retain great talent when you can’t just offer them more money?”

After the project, I continued to be engaged and see the school system’s progress. I checked in with the clients to figure out how everything went after our recommendations were rolled out. In fact, during my time at Bain, I organized an annual event where we actually went down and mentored the kids and we even taught the teachers how to use Excel to keep track of their students’ progress and so forth.

For me, it would be the local staffing model and the culture that results from it.

It’s important to get to know the people at the firms you are potentially going to be working with, so I recommend you network during the recruiting process.

I could tell from the people I met, that Bain was where I wanted to be. After helping over 400 people get offers in consulting with My Consulting Offer, I’ve helped a lot of people turn down offers at Bain for other firms because Bain wasn’t where they would thrive.

Like picking a spouse or a university, what might be a good fit for one person might not be for another.

Bain has global training programs for people at all levels within the firm. These programs bring people together to learn the skills for the job as you’re starting in consulting, and when you’re moving up to positions of more responsibility.

For example, as an associate consultant you attend Associate Consulting Training, orl ACT. 

During your first year at Bain (at least when COVID is not affecting the world), you travel to one of two places for ACT. You get to meet about a 100 other ACs, you get to bond with them, and you get to learn from them. But really, it’s more like a two-week spring break, similar to college, where did you get to learn and meet new people and have fun. It feels like college all over again. 

Yes, you learn how to build excel models and make beautiful slides, but the real value was meeting people from around the world.

What your day-to-day role looks like at Bain and in consulting in general depends largely on the project you’re staffed on and what role you have on the team.

This is to say, your role is always changing. This is the appeal of consulting for a lot of people.

But what you are always doing is learning to break a problem down, learning to work on a team, and learning to manage your own time to help a client improve their business.

It doesn’t matter if you are the case team leader on the project, if you’re the consultant, or if you are the associate consultant, you are going to be responsible for a workstream. We call it “owning” the workstream.

On a Private Equity deal where a firm is deciding if they should acquire a Chinese sausage farm, you might be responsible for building a model to estimate the market size for the Chinese sausage market in North America. Or you might be working on a Merger and Acquisition project where you’re designing with the COO what the newly-merged leadership team will look like.

The short answer is no. I was never specialized. And in fact, at Bain, particularly, you’re not forced to specialize until you reach the Manager level.

My mentors and PD coach at Bain always pushed me to try new projects and industries so I could get a breadth of experience versus specializing early on.

The hours you work at Bain will depend on the project and the team. For example, if the project has a fast turnaround time, you might work late nights. If the project is pro-bono, you might work fewer hours.

I’ll give you extremes and my norm.

While I was on the pro-bono project my average day started at 7 am since our team wanted to start early but we would be done around 5 pm so I cooked dinner each night and went to the gym in the evening.

When I was working on a 2-week private equity deal with multiple interested buyers, I worked from 6 a.m. until around 3 a.m. for those 2 weeks and had weekend work too. That was the extreme.

An average work schedule for my time at Bain started with a meeting at 8 a.m. and ended around 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday with Fridays ending at 5-6 p.m. I didn’t usually work on weekends. I only had 2 projects that had some weekend work that was very much needed.

At Bain, we have a Staffing Manager, who helps assign you to new projects.

You also get a weekly email of all the upcoming projects in your office as well as requests from other offices.

Since Bain uses a local staffing model, the projects will be all based in your office or at most a combination of close offices. For example, you might see a project that is a combined team of Los Angeles and San Francisco consultants.

Bain has a transparent culture. The company shares what projects are coming up and who the manager and partner on the project are, so if you want to learn more before having your meeting with the Staffing Manager, you could do some research. If you’re up for staffing soon, which happens when your current project is wrapping up or you are “on the beach” (your previous project ended and there wasn’t a project for you right away), it’s a good idea to keep your eye on upcoming projects.

Before I started at Bain and even when I was recruiting, I wondered, “Will I be able to keep up with the fast-paced and intense environment I kept hearing about in consulting?”

I’ll go ahead and tell you that you only have to worry if you are expecting to work a routine job where you sit there waiting for the next thing. 

While the pace is faster than your average job, you don’t start Day 1 running at the average pace. You start with the basics and are actually a loss to the firm (they pay you a lot but you don’t contribute at your value). This is expected as you learn the job and ramp-up. This also happens at the beginning of new projects. You’ll be in a lot of training and then when you finally get your project, you start off with a small piece of it where someone is double-checking your work. Once you are more comfortable, each project or phase of the same project you get to own more and more of the final recommendation.

The way to think about it is similar to working with a gym trainer the first time. You might think, “Wow this person is going to work me until I can’t get up tomorrow.” But really, they start you off slow and build up over time. You might start with a 45-minute workout before you work up to the 2-hour intense workout with cardio. 

I have had a lot of people we’ve helped at My Consulting Offer ask me whether they’ll be able to keep up. After four-five months on the job, they usually ask me, “Davis, it gets harder right?” because they adapt to the pace and actually want more. I usually laugh, forward them the email when they asked me if a career in consulting would be too much, and tell them to use the time to do something like learn a new skill or get to know people at the firm. 

On the rare occasion that someone’s first project is fast because they just need people to run right away, firms usually correct for this in your second project because to ensure you get the proper training. Also, they don’t want you to burn out right away.

This depends largely on the available projects. For example, a large client might hire a Bain team for most of the year. In this case, you can have a chance to do three 3-month projects with the client. But if they take a break during holidays, for example, then you might be staffed to a new client. 

Some clients have projects going on year-round, though the teams may change as well as the business units within the company that is sponsoring the work.

You might work on a go-to-market case for the U.S. team, for example, and then roll into a project for a go-to-market strategy for their European product launch.