After graduating from Syracuse University in 1994 with a BS in Information Management & Technology, I joined American Management Systems (AMS) as a Business and Technology Analyst. Like most large system integration firms, AMS oriented their packaged solution offerings according to vertical industry segments.  The organization within AMS where I worked had a uniquely different charter, being primarily responsible for incubating new vertical industry groups by staying ahead of new technology trends, determining how to apply new technologies to support breakthrough business results, and designing repeatable productized solutions that could be applied across the entire industry.

During my tenure with AMS, I helped :

• The World Bank embrace Internet technologies to allow IMF loan recipients to track payments through the company's cash management application via the Web.
• A bankrupt airline food services organization redesign their food services operations model to consolidate costs to emerge from chapter 11.
• The United States Postal Service define a 10-year technology investment plan to regain competitiveness in package delivery.
• A public enterprise integration software company define a data warehouse product strategy leading to an acquisition by Oracle approximately 12 months later.

In addition to supporting other clients including the IRS, the Federal Election Commission, the Resolution Trust Corporation, the State of New Mexico Health Policy Commission, Merck, and Johnson and Johnson, I developed a specialization in Internet technologies and co-led the development and management of AMS’s first eServices practice: “Extending the Enterprise.”

In 1998, once the market had developed its own internal capabilities and fully embraced the Internet as an innovative and disruptive business technology, I left AMS to return to graduate school at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business to focus on marketing and entrepreneurship.  Upon acceptance, I was awarded the James E. Dingman Fellowship to study entrepreneurship; and in the first year of my MBA, I founded my first company, CompareRepair.com.

CompareRepair.com was the first online auction site for automotive repair and maintenance services, which allowed car owners to receive multiple quotes from local providers to increase their buying power in a traditionally poor customer service industry.  On the strength of the business plan, I was able to raise $900,000 in start-up financing to begin the development of the site; procure agreements with AllData, the industry’s leading automotive data provider; and register over 500 repair sites and over 2,500 car owners for initial participation in the network.  As the site was about to go live, however, the Internet bubble burst and the west coast boutique venture fund who capitalized the company folded.  This left the company without the last two tranches of capital to move the company forward.

Nevertheless, I was able to use my experience with CompareRepair.com to my advantage.  Armed with the experience of developing the business model, creating the branding and creative design for the site, and coordinating all the marketing, PR and sales efforts, I began consulting with other early stage, venture-focused companies to help close early, concept-validating deals; secure financing; and expand their sales and marketing efforts.  Having worked with a number of companies ranging from an online product collateral management system to a sales contact management platform to an innovative synthetic agricultural hyrdoseeding company EnviroTek, I finished grad school part time.

In 2001, I was hiredCysive as their Product Marketing Manager to help drive the transformation of the company’s business model. Cysive, a public Web service provider for such companies as Cisco, First Union Bank, and Schneider Transportation had stockpiled over $150M in cash after two very successful public offerings, and they made the decision to shift from a custom solutions provider to an enterprise software company.  I was primarily responsible for taking inventory of the company’s intellectual property assets, conducting competitive and market assessments, talking with top technology analysts, and determining what product strategy the company should pursue.  At the time, the concept of mobile device integration with enterprise data and applications was in its infancy.  As is true with most early stage, cutting-edge technologies, those who were early adopting these innovations were doing so without a clear or full understanding of the additional management overhead, systems integration challenges, or costs involved.

Thus was born Cysive’s the concept of the Enterprise Interaction Server.  Positioned as a 4th tier to the typical 3-tier enterprise technology stack (web server, application server, database server), the Interaction Server would detect the device attempting to connect to the enterprise, determine its display and bandwidth constraints, gather the requested data, and dynamically format it according to accepted device types and other methods such as web services calls.  As the Product Marketing Manager, I created a new category for this technology and positioned Cysive as the leader in this new technology.  I accomplished this by managing a $30,000 per month analyst relations campaign targeted at Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Giga, ghostwriting articles in dozens of trade outlets like CIO Magazine, Network World, Computer Week on the behalf of Cysive’s CEO and VP of Engineering and managing a $1,000,000 product launch at two Internet World conferences in New York and San Jose.  After building all the sales support materials to effectively arm a 15-person sales force and helping to land FedEx as an initial beta customer to validate the technology, the company was taken private through a leveraged buyout and ceased operations.

Around the same time that Cysive was winding down, I met the founders of Router Solutions.  Similar to what Microsoft accomplished with the introduction of the Windows operating system for the PC market, Router Solutions had developed a graphical user interface, NetInspect, to assist those responsible for managing network equipment.  Because every major network equipment vendors only supports their own proprietary command line interfaces and the typical enterprise network environment has hundreds to thousands of network devices constantly requiring support, the value proposition was simple: spend significantly less time navigating to and interacting with network devices in their complex, proprietary interfaces.

The challenge, however, was that Router Solutions was planning to sell NetInspect under a seat license model to network engineers individually.  Knowing that line network engineers would require purchase signoff from management, I suggested that we first understand what directors of network management thought about NetInspect so we could better determine how the value was aligned to their agendas.  Furthermore, we should solicit the opinion from those with the largest networks under management: Telecom and IT Service Providers.  At this point, I was invited to take over as the new CEO of Router Solutions.  In this capacity, I led the effort to penetrate into EDS, SBC, and AT&T to gather market feedback.  It quickly became apparent that NetInspect had potential, but in its current form it was not aligned with what managers truly needed.  While NetInspect helped improve per engineer efficiency, managers were more concerned with ways to shave significant cost out of their operations by doing more with less.

Working directly with the Director of Global Network Management at EDS, and using their production network as an R&D test bed, we set out to create a platform approach to the software that would be capable of delivering the cost reduction these organizations were seeking.  Using these relationships and a validated product concept for how to elevate NetInspect to a truly enterprise grade offering, we raised $600,000 in early stage funding from Monumental Venture Partners and the Commonwealth of Virginia through its Center for Innovative Technology grant program.

Even with a detailed development roadmap for a validated platform model and deals with AOL and MCI, Router Solutions never reached a high enough operational run rate to attract the next round of venture capital necessary to bring the full product vision to life, and the company folded due to under capitalization.

Seeing first-hand the numerous challenges involved in getting a concept to market, performing according to plan, and experiencing the realities of raising large capital infusions, I brought these experiences to bear as a catalyst for new growth, and once again returned to consulting with other early stage companies.

During the next several years as an independent marketing and business development specialist, I helped:

• MCI – conceptualize, analyze and justify development of several on-demand networking business and automated support models to further differentiate against emerging competition, lower costs, and create new revenue models within the Federal government network management sector;
• Network Learning Institute – develop and implement a more focused niche marketing strategy that elevated its core value proposition over that of numerous larger and more broadly focused competitors in the IT and network training segment; institute a corporate training offering; and redesign the company's branding, web presence, and direct, email and radio campaign executions;
• Digital Sandbox –  a provider of risk optimized preparedness solutions, reposition its approach to market by offer state and local homeland security buyers a more personally empowering and compelling rationale to champion with state legislators the necessity for  the company's risk analytics platform to further quantify and justify Federal Homeland Security grant proposals;
• Netquation – design, implement, and launch a go-to-market strategy for introducing the first fully automated, 100% Microsoft Visio software compliant network documentation utility and establish key affiliate and cross promotion deals that continue to funnel dozens of trial downloads per month;
• TNI Solutions – package numerous independent cable provider services into a Subscriber Lifecycle Management framework to provide target markets with a more logical, comprehensive, and phased approach to benefiting from all the productized solutions the company offers;
• Passion Into Practice – develop a new business model and marketing strategy around life fulfillment services to return the company to cash-positive operations, and increase its ability to develop and commercialize additional intellectual property assets from its affiliate life coaches;
• TKC Technologies –a small, Alaskan native-owned, 8(a) company’s redesign its product collateral catalogue to support expansion into commercial markets;
• Nippon Telegraph and Telephone America (NTTA) – an $88M-per-year enterprise IT hosting provider to elevate their position in the market, minimize the impact of a smaller data center footprint versus competitors, and align their core value proposition to a previously ignored element of IT outsourcing, namely proactively managing technologies to support any planned or unplanned growth acceleration.

Presently, I continue to pursue opportunities where my experience as a twice venture funded entrepreneur, expert marketing strategist, and overall no-holds-barred business developer can be a catalyst for achieving new breakthrough growth results.