David Goffin met with our alumni team to share how he took the skills he picked up in consulting and transferred them to his career as a producer in the entertainment industry. David was one of the early members of CDI (a legacy business that was later acquired by Mercer and then Oliver Wyman), who later left the firm to pursue film school at USC. David has gone on to produce  several hit shows, including American Idol and Survivor, and recently built the fan section for the LA Clippers.

Tell us about your career journey and what you’ve been doing since you left the firm.

I spent about five years at CDI and left the firm to go to film school. I got into the producing program at USC which only had a class of about 20 students a year.

I wanted to combine what I learned in business at CDI with what I thought I would become — more of an artist, as a producer. A producer straddles both the business side and the creative side. A producer’s job is to get the film or TV show made. So, it's part business, part art. Some people think we're “the suits”, and some people think we're just crazy creatives, and both are true. Most of my classmates went into film, but I went into television, which was a bit unexpected.

I got a job with Fox Sports coming out of USC film school (probably because nobody from USC film school ever applied to Fox Sports at the time), and that was the greatest thing I could do because I worked in sports, which was super cool, and I worked in nonfiction television, which if you think about the total revenue in entertainment, most of it is nonfiction (news, sports, documentaries, reality TV). Putting on my CDI/Oliver Wyman hat, I thought there's more money over here, and I’d have a better chance of getting some opportunities, both were the case. Even better, I got to travel to the World Series and many sporting events, I had a show where my host interviewed top athletes, so I would go anywhere the athletes would be.

At that time, nonfiction television was just beginning with Survivor. If you know your TV history, most of all television at that time was either scripted drama or scripted sitcoms. What you see more of today is what we call reality TV or nonfiction television or unscripted television. That was just starting. I got a call from Mark Burnett who had just started this new show called Survivor, and he knew that I had some skills as a nonfiction producer. So, I started working for him. In terms of TV history, Survivor was one of the last shows that America watched together, at the same time – it had a 50 share, which means all the people who are watching TV in the country, half of them watched that show, one show on one night at one time.

My next role was at American Idol, which was live two nights a week. Live is the ultimate in producing because you have to be right, right now. You can't fix it later. You can't talk about it for two weeks. It has to be right, and it has to feel right. I worked on the show for about 150 episodes.

Then I did my own show with Mark, which was a rock and roll show called Rockstar. The show was about finding a lead singer for the band INXS (a huge band in the 80s andearly 90s) after their lead singer died six years earlier. It was a crazy idea to give a legitimate band a TV show to find their next lead singer, but we made an epic show that was on three nights a week with global voting. It worked.

Starting around 2009-2010, I ran Mark’sdigital studio for six years. It was the first time I learned about social media and streaming, and I tried my best to stay on the edge. That's one thing I think Oliver Wyman and CDI taught me is you can't just do your job and expect that that's good enough. You have to keep an eye out to what's going on next because it's going to eventually affect what you do and how you do it. And if you don't have an answer for that change, you're going to miss it and probably make a mistake and maybe lose momentum. I always thought that was true in my career. And to bring this back to Oliver Wyman — to have the training for five years of understanding potential future trends and how to react to them, giving our analysis to clients, prepared me for this. Oliver Wyman helped me develop this attitude of having this eye out for what's coming and how to anticipate it and how to be successful at it, and I was able to bring that to my work in the entertainment business.

Had I just gone into film after film school, I would just be doing film, which really hasn't changed in a long time, other than going from analogue to digital. But television has changed a huge amount, going from mostly scripted to mostly unscripted, from a linear model to on-demand, from a network-controlled universe to anyone making their owns shows on YouTube or TikTok. And I was on the edge of that. I wanted to be part of each trend lest I get phased out. Thankfully, I learned you can never be phased out if you are a good at the fundamentals:  storytelling and understanding audience appeal.

So, I have this very varied career, whether I'm producing a huge show or a sports show or small films on YouTube, I learned how to do that.

How does your role change as a producer for a hit show?

As a craftsman, I try to tell the best story possible. I want to tell a story in the best way possible to get a reaction out of you, my viewer. I want you to feel something and learn something at the same time. And so that doesn't change fundamentally because that's my job, that's my craft. But as I'm telling my story on a hit show, there's about 25 more people telling me what to do. Because it's got more impact on everybody. The ones that aren't hits, I'm usually in a room working alone, but it's still airing or showing somewhere, whereas the ones that are hits, I'm in a room with 30 people looking over my shoulder. I'll give you an example  with season two of American Idol. I'm in post-production of the premiere episode of the second season, and I'm getting notes not just from my boss, but also from his boss, and we're getting notes from her boss in London, too. I'm getting notes from the head of the Fox network, not just the head of the reality side. Then I'm getting notes from the head of the film studio and then Rupert Murdoch chimes in! Well, whose notes do you follow? What's the pecking order when every voice is involved? So, we just threw them all out and did our own thing. But you can imagine how crazy that was. That's one difference.

What advice do you have for current colleagues at Oliver Wyman?

There can be many factors that pull you into a job but at the end of the day, what makes you happy is loving the process of what you're doing. And if you don't love the process of what you're doing, if you don't get a kick out of the how we do it, you’re going to burn out.

I really enjoy the process of learning how to entertain people, of producing a story that's going to have some lasting impact, or at least let people lose their cares for 60 minutes. I love that process. As Jerry Seinfeld, calls it, “love your torture.” He's exactly right. Just because you love the process of something doesn’t make it super easy, but you have to love some part of it in order to struggle long enough and hard enough to make a great show or product.

What advice did you receive at Oliver Wyman that has stuck with you?

I have to give a lot of props to David Morrison, who was, more often than not, my boss, when I was at CDI. There's a lot of advice he gave me, but the most important one was a confidence that I knew he believed in me and that I was going to provide something of value.

As much as you can believe in yourself, you often don't see the potential of your own work. But if you have a boss who, just in the glint of his eye talks to you as a person he respects, that is enough to get you through anything. So, one small piece of advice, might be to seek out human beings that are capable of empathy and can see your best maybe before you see it yourself. David was that for me and I am forever appreciative of our relationship.

This page was originally published on January 23, 2025.