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Resume Snippet
Managing Director, RedKey Education LLC
RedKey Education is a rapidly growing supplementary education firm with offices in Cambridge, MA, Providence, RI, New Haven, CT and Paris, France. The company provides one-on-one personalized education services both in the home and through online applications and tools. RedKey hires only graduates of global brand-name universities (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown) and provides premium educational services to high-income and aspirational families
Founded in 2004 with a compelling value-proposition, the company enjoyed rapid early growth. Between 2006 and early 2008, however, the company drifted due to lack of operational expertise and poor execution. I have been working with the company to bring my operational and business experience to the task of growing the company and expanding its geographic reach. Since I became involved, the company has opened three new offices (Providence, New Haven, and Paris), hired key staff, implemented professional sales and client management processes, dramatically improved financial management, and re-energized marketing.
Partner, IntelliStance LLC dba MarketStance
I am one of three owner-members of MarketStance. The firm started in 1997 as the MarketStance division of Conning & Company. In January 2001, through a management buyout, the division was taken outside Conning and setup as an independent company.
Today, MarketStance is a recognized insurance industry leader for its proprietary quantitative Business Intelligence (BI) information resources and analytical consulting services. These products and services support market development, agency management, underwriting and planning. MarketStance is recognized as a provider of innovative, cutting-edge analytic solutions, and has earned an outstanding reputation for data quality and client service.
Clients are primarily the thirty top national property casualty insurance carriers and the very largest insurance brokers.
Founder, Connecticut Executive Business Owners Forum (CEBOF)
CEBOF brings together owners, partners and C-level executives in established and successful small to medium-sized Connecticut companies. Members meet with their business peers to share experiences and insight into all aspects of growing a small business, to improve their management and leadership skills, and to network with some of the most dynamic and successful business people in Connecticut.
DIY Green Energy Associates
Currently in the conceptual development stage, seeking to attract interested partners and investors to an opportunity in the renewable energy field. The insight driving DIY Green Energy is that the huge and uniquely American do-it-yourself market can play a significant role in the transition to a renewable energy economy. For more information, visit DIY Green Energy.
Director, Film Fest New Haven
Principal founder and director of this independent not-for-profit film festival which brought alternative cinema programming to the Connecticut community.
Founder, The Electric Model Shop
The company developed mathematically-based astronomical modeling software for amateur astronomers and the education market.
In Depth
See below for Building a Business.
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Building up the operations of a new business from scratch is a daunting -- and exciting -- challenge. I've done that twice: Film Fest New Haven and MarketStance. Following are some details of what that involved for MarketStance.
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Staffing
I recruited many of the company's key employees, including: the company's VP of Client Services, the current Chief Marketing Officer, the developer of our company's web-based applications, and the company's information analysts.
Office Space
A critical challenge when the firm became independent was to build the company's operational infrastructure. We found space in a Class-A office building in Middletown, Connecticut that solved several problems at once:
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Marketing: modern, professional offices in one of the area's most notable office buildings
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HR: Amenities such amenities and free parking, a fitness center and cafeteria
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Communications: telephone and internet connections provided as part of our lease
Over the past seven years, setting up our offices at that location has proven to be an excellent decision: not only has the building supported the company's reputation and image, but supported our expansion, as the company's leased space has more than tripled over the years.
Infrastructure
I/T played an absolutely vital role in our success. As a data intensive, statistical modeling and analytic consulting firm, the company today processes multiple terabytes of data on a daily basis. Finding I/T vendors, translating our business needs into "geek speak," proactively managing the vendors, finding new, better and more capable vendors as our needs and budget grew, and constantly evolving and upgrading our systems was another critical factor in the company's success.
Our I/T infrastructure grew to the point where we needed to move many of our servers offsite to a secure data center. A local Connecticut data center met our initial off-site needs, but several years ago we outgrew them and I relocated our expanded and growing server "farm" to a world-class corporate data center in New York. It is from this award-winning data center, also used by many of New York city's large brokerage houses and investment banks, that the company's web-based products are served.
Building and operating our network was only part of the I/T challenge -- keeping it and our data safe from external and internal threats was also critical. During the past seven years the network, under my management, experienced only a single, very minor, intrusion (which resulted in no data loss or corruption); and only one extended period of loss of connectivity to the internet (the result of the building's I/T staff misconfiguring a router and taking more than a day to diagnose the problem).
Organization
Office space, equipment, and staff: all absolutely essentially, but without the organizational structure and management to make all the pieces work efficiently and productively together, there would be no vital, growing business.
A particularly critical challenge as we grew from the three partners in January 2001 to the nearly twenty staff today was shepherding the emergence of an effective organizational structure. Too much structure too soon would have reduced our flexibility and speed of execution; too little structure too late would have reduced efficiency and created chaos and confusion. I learned that it is an art, not a science, knowing when to add additional structure, when to split roles and responsibilities, how to make those changes, and when (and who) to add without demotivating existing staff or disrupting the company's ongoing work.
Financial Management
Cash flow is the alpha and omega for the financial management of a small, internally capitalized firm. Revenues must grow rapidly, receivables kept to a bare minimum, and receipts invested back into the firm in ways that support both long-term grown and current operations -- two demands that usually conflict.
In a professional firm such as MarketStance, producing only information and services, a very large fraction of total expenses in such a firm are staff salaries, benefits and office space. Because hardware and software these days is relatively inexpensive, I/T costs actually represent a surprisingly small share of total expenses. Add these together, and the result is that the fixed-to-variable expense ratio is heavily tilted toward fixed. On the other hand, revenues are variable.
Because such a large share of the company's expenses are fixed, staying within the annual budget and hitting sales objectives is critical to successful growth. During my tenure as COO, the company never significantly exceeded budgeted expenses (and usually came in under budget) and hit or exceeded its annual sales targets.
Legal
The legal aspects of the data and information business are very important. MarketStance develops proprietary data and information resources, and maintaining control of the information licensed to clients is critical to preserving the company's intellectual property. Working with the company attorneys, I evolved the company's standard data license and consulting contracts and evolved those over time as our products changed. I also reviewed and signed all individual contracts with clients and vendors.
Vendor Management
"Focus on what you do best, out source the rest." That was my motto from day one. Some needs had to be out sourced: accounting and legal for example. For many other support needs, we faced the "build vs. buy" dilemma. For these decisions, unless meeting the need was part of the company's core competency, I preferred to find quality vendors rather than take a "do-it-yourself" approach. As COO, I acquired and managed all external professional services and vendors, including attorneys, accountants, and I/T providers.
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