Associate
Margaret Downs
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Margaret Downs’s career has spanned management consulting, private equity, and general management. Currently she leads Downs & Associates, a practice she founded in 1997 to advise clients on strategic and organizational challenges. Margaret began her consulting career in 1985 at Bain & Company, where she served as a consultant and manager for five years.
Through Downs & Associates, Margaret has advised clients in strategic planning, business development, organization design, management restructuring and leadership development, as well as marketing, acquisition analysis and merger integration. She has served in a range of industries including marketing and media information, healthcare, investment banking, management consulting, environmental services and engineering, and manufacturing. Sample engagements:
- Corporate reorganization: facilitated top management dialogue on strategy and organizational capabilities. Helped realign management structure, roles and responsibilities, and redesign corporate services.
- Merger integration: in one instance co-chaired a senior executive task force on strategy for two merging media information companies; in another advised board of a joint venture partnership formed to combine two information companies.
- Strategic planning interim management: managed all aspects of strategic planning for marketing information company with ten divisions, including evaluation of acquisition targets.
Prior to founding Downs & Associates, Margaret served as General Manager of APM’s strategic consulting practice. (APM, a leading healthcare consulting firm, is now CSC Healthcare, a division of Computer Sciences Corporation). Early in 2000, Margaret left Downs & Associates to join Bain Capital LLC, a private equity fund, where she served as an Executive Vice President until mid-2002. At Bain Capital, she acted in a business development role, identifying and evaluating potential private equity investments.
At Bain & Company, Margaret managed engagements in business strategy and operations across a wide range of industries. For example, she developed a major asset redeployment program for a real estate company, led a task force to reduce product complexity for a division of a U.S. motor vehicles manufacturer, designed a plan to raise market share and return on equity for a consumer durable products business, and led a cost reduction program for a processed foods manufacturer.
Margaret has held management positions across the private and public sectors. She left Bain & Company in 1990 to join the newly formed U.S. subsidiary of Daneco Danieli Ecologia S.p.A., an Italian-based company active in design, construction and operation of waste processing facilities, where she served as Vice President and President. From 1979-1983, she served as a legislative director and education and environmental policy aide in the U.S. Congress.
Margaret received an M.B.A. degree from the Harvard Business School. She earned her B.A. degree from Harvard College, magna cum laude with highest honors in history and Phi Beta Kappa. She has completed additional graduate work in organizational psychology.
