The Innovate Mississippi team is pleased to announce that David Collins will work with us as 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.
After another stint with Deloitte, Collins refocused his management consulting firm into a high-tech space—that firm moved with him to Jackson, Mississippi, when his wife took a position with Jackson State University. After a year in Jackson, Collins is excited about Mississippi’s potential to be a vibrant entrepreneurial community.
“We should be the envy of the states, in my view,” Collins said. “Honestly, we have distressed assets everywhere that are ripe for things like warehouses or significant tech offices. We have fantastic opportunities for women, for example, to accrue equity in their homes by encouraging people and families to come to this region and build something significant with the new work-from-home culture.”
Collins said one thing that excites him about this position at Innovate Mississippi is that he’ll be able to work long-term to help several companies reach their goals. He says he’s “inheriting a portfolio, which is an absolute envy” for most consultants, who often have a shorter time with clients to try and solve specific issues. He credits outgoing Director of Entrepreneurial Development Tasha Bibb as “a wonderful partner in helping me transition into this role.”
Next up? “What I’m looking to do right now is to understand how we keep taking these programs and these ideas and these tools that have been developed,” he said. “How do we make sure that we’re providing access to the next generation of entrepreneurs?”
He notes that Innovate Mississippi has many of those tools in place—not the least of which is the second year of the CoBuilders state-wide accelerator program—and that he’s eager to dig in and get to work helping startups succeed.
“There’s a real energy that I feel in the state of change of people saying, ‘We, we can go up from here,'” he said. “And I think that’s a great place to be.”
