David Collins is a management consultant for entrepreneurial development. Collins worked as a management consultant for Deloitte in Toronto, Ottawa, New Zealand, and New York. He is the founder and CEO of the Red Beans Group, a consulting team that moved with him from Canada to Mississippi.
Collins first worked in the kitchens of an Italian restaurant as a teenager. His entrepreneurial journey started after he decided that “chef” wouldn’t be his career path. He attended the University of Waterloo, known for its technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Waterloo is the hometown of Blackberry, Pebble, Lyft, Instacart, WattPadd, Substack, and others.
“I studied something called ‘knowledge integration.’ The basic idea behind it is that, for 21st-century problems, you have to approach them in a multidisciplinary way, or you’re going to miss really critical insights and opportunities,” Collins said.
He was student body president in college—which, at his Canadian university, meant overseeing a budget of over $19 million for student healthcare, six businesses and two catering companies comprising 350 staff and 1,000 volunteers. After his years traveling the world with Deloitte, he returned to the prestigious University of Toronto as a fellow, studying the intersection of artificial intelligence and political theory. From there, his career took a unique turn—he served the Canadian government as the Chief of Staff and Chair of the Senior Management Committee for the National Gallery of Canada, balancing the deferred maintenance needs of that institution with maintaining its art collection worth billions.