Share
Ben He is a Manager in Advancy's Strategy Consulting practice, focusing on food ingredients and specialty industrial clients. Ben's experience includes four years at Advancy's New York office, a Master's in Business Analytics from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, and a Bachelor's in Business Administration from Emory University. He sat down with Vault to answer a few questions about his practice and experiences at his firm.
Vault: Can you describe for us what your practice area entails?
Ben He: I primarily focus on two verticals: food ingredients and specialty industrial. The food ingredients practice covers a very broad spectrum of products, and from my past projects, I have had the chance to work on additives such as fermented flour, preservatives, flavor compounds, and on ingredients such as fruit preparations, cheese, dairy products, and even truffles. For the specialty industrial practice, we cover a variety of segments, including polymers and films, catalysts, and water treatment chemicals, as well as high-specialty pharma-grade plastics and containment equipment.
Vault: What types of clients do you work with?
Ben: We work with C-suite members from both corporate and private equity clients. For the food ingredients practice, the mix is probably 50/50 between corporate or strategic clients and middle-market food industry private equity specialists, while for the specialty industrial practice, we get more engagement with the top-tier private equity houses for the multibillion-dollar deals.
Vault: What types of projects do you work on?
Ben: Half of the projects are corporate strategy, which typically lasts three weeks to two months. For these, we help the C-suite to better assess their addressable market and growth, develop strategic road-mapping to drive sales, and create differentiation versus competition. We also help them identify inorganic growth pathways with M&A screening and expansion into adjacent markets. The other half of the projects are due diligence, which we perform for both the sell-side and buy-side. The focus, again, is on market assessment and business planning, but usually for the next business owner: first, trying to help our client to correctly evaluate and price the assets, and second, unlocking the value through business planning and identifying and executing growth levers.
Vault: How involved are you in the actual implementation or execution of your recommendations? Is this more reflective of your firm’s specific services or your practice area in general?
Ben: It depends on whether it is private equity due diligence or corporate strategy, as the scope and approach can be very different. All in all, I wouldn’t say implementation or execution is necessarily an area that Advancy would specifically focus on; it all comes down to what our client needs and how we define the scope of work, but we definitely have the toolkit and expertise available should they need our support on it.
Vault: What is a typical day like for you? What are some common tasks you perform?
Ben: For me, a typical day will start with alignment with the whole team on priorities and key objectives for the day. My role as manager is to ensure that the full team is well-coordinated and aligned on the analysis we need, so everyone can work efficiently on their respective streams. Then, usually later mornings and early afternoons will be packed with multiple expert interviews and client meetings, from which we gather our intel on the market and feedback from clients that we use to feed into Excel modelling. Late afternoons and early evenings are usually a time for some more focused analysis in Excel and preparation of the slide deck deliverable. My main responsibility is to brainstorm and develop the project thesis from data, analysis, and market insights, design a framework, and draft slides to present them. There are also different ad hoc tasks that I will need to catch up with the team and help them solve the bottlenecks or roadblocks together. Late evening, before we wrap up for the work, we will usually have a quick end-of-day debrief to re-align on the daily progress and next steps.
Vault: What training, classes, experience, or skills development would you recommend to someone who wishes to enter your practice area?
Ben: I think any background is welcome; what matters is strategic thinking, and there are many different routes to get to and improve it. Case books are definitely helpful, not for the sake of memorizing frameworks to be used in interviews, but for learning about different elements to consider when assessing a market or company. I also found that some corporate strategy or product management podcasts are quite helpful for new ideas. To speak about my practice area in food ingredients and specialty industrial, following the market and domain news in The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will be helpful in keeping up to date on market trends.
Vault: How did you end up in your practice area? Did you actively pursue it?
Ben: To be honest, I wasn’t actively pursuing a consulting career back in college, and like many of my peers, I kept the options open and applied to different roles. It happened that I received some consulting interview opportunities, and during the preparation and interview process, I found that facing different challenges and finding ways to give strategic solutions was interesting and aligned well with my intellectual curiosity. So, I gave it a try, and it ended up being a good fit; here I am today.
Vault: How is your firm innovating in your practice area? What are the biggest opportunities for innovation? How have your firm’s capabilities evolved since you joined the firm?
Ben: To answer the first question, Advancy, like many of our peers, is actively leveraging new technology to improve our work efficiency and project quality for our clients. We have been launching internal AI tools that can retrieve useful insights from our own database, as well as an AI assistant that streamlines the expert interview process, which frees up some time for our juniors to refocus on more valuable work for our clients.
From a capability perspective, food ingredients and life science are two industries in which Advancy New York has been actively developing its internal knowledge and gaining more credentials with top-tier clients in the market.
Vault: Finally, what do you like best about your job?
Ben: What I enjoy most about my role is the people and the pace. I get to collaborate with incredibly sharp, driven colleagues and learn from diverse clients across industries. There's something energizing about working on high-impact challenges where no two projects are exactly the same. The fast problem-solving cycle, paired with the constant exposure to new business models and strategic questions, keeps me intellectually engaged.
Want to learn more about Advancy? Visit the firm's Vault profile!
Share
