Class of 1974; Elected 2012
Ted graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Amherst College in 1978 where he captained the varsity soccer team in 1977. After a training program at Bankers Trust in NY, he began a career in finance and worked as a commercial lending officer at both Bankers Trust and Shawmut Corporation. Placing in the 97th percentile on the GMAT, Ted received his M.B.A. from Harvard in 1985, and began working in the Boston office of Bain & Co., a leading strategy consulting firm with offices across the globe. He was first among his peers to be promoted to partner. He co-founded Bain’s Dallas office in 1990 and helped grow it into one of the largest, most profitable offices in the 26 office Bain system. In 1999 Ted was a founding principal of Carlyle Management Group, a private equity firm in Dallas with $80B of assets under management (AUM). He became the founder, CEO, and Managing Partner of Insight Equity, a private equity buyout firm in 2002. Insight focuses on middle market underperformers with transformational upside and manages $800M AUM. He is Chairman of the Board of 11 of the current 12 companies in the firm’s portfolio and the firms boasts a 74% rate of return over 10 years, placing it in the top decile.
Ted sits on the Trinity (TX) University Board of Trustees and is founder and chair of the Ted and Laurie Beneski Foundation which supports charitable causes around the world and includes, among others, a $1.6M turf field at Suffield High School and $15M to Amherst College for a new earth science building and museum of natural history. He and his wife Laurie have 3 children and live in Colleyville, TX.