Darin Mcauliffe Email & Phone Number

Atlanta, New Orleans, Amsterdam, And The Gulf Coast

Topside is a consultancy designed to support business leaders facing a wide range of transitional planning and implementation challenges, from emerging start-ups experiencing rapid growth to more mature businesses (including non-profits) re-positioning and seeking competitive advantages in saturated or declining markets.We also provide specialist resources to private equity firms to ensure investment returns and high-impact value creation.An efficient, accurate assessment of business problems and orienting clients to solution implementation defines our approach.Topside has worked with over 50 start-ups and small to medium businesses in the last two years and secured equity and debt financing for many.

Greater New Orleans Area

Print and DIgital media company marketing a variety of print and digital publications.

Greater New Orleans Area

Co-Founder of The Idea Village, a private 501(c) (3) non-profit organization with a mission to identify, support and retain entrepreneurial talent in New Orleans. Founded in 2000, The Idea Village received the Gold Excellence award from the International Economic Development Council for the Entrepreneur Season model in 2012 and recognized as a top 3 leading entrepreneurship ecosystem developer in 2014 by the Global Innovation Summit.

Greater New Orleans Area

Mentored and coached fifteen start-up companies.

Greater Atlanta Area

Global Sales and Management position representing Ultra-Direct, ODD, and any distribution facing products.

Greater New Orleans Area And Atlanta, Ga

• Successfully negotiated the purchase of intellectual property from a publicly held Austrian AG. • Established global headquarters in New Orleans, LA, whilst managing split offices in the United States and Austria. Ensured legal and financial compliance were adhered to in each location.• Hired and trained Sales, IT, QA, and Customer Service staff and developed operational procedures and reporting that streamlined communication and ensured adherence to goals and objectives.• Responsible for all cost, forecast, and profit and loss statements.• Developed and implementing the North American, European, and Asian sales strategies to accommodate business and cultural differences, resulting in first year sales of $4.2 million globally.• Developed “Offering Memorandum” and negotiated with institutional venture capital that successfully raised $5million in investment.• Hired, trained, and managed global sales team, resulting in client acquisition of 102 distribution and 14,000 hotel customers• Expanded market segments to include five new verticals.Hotel Booking Solutions was sold to India based IT firm I Believe Systems (IBS) in 2008.

Greater New Orleans Area

• Negotiated the purchase of the domain name neworleans.com for $10k.• Hired and trained IT and web design team and oversaw the creation of 9k plus pages of content and 11 applications to capitalize on the newly created revenue streams of advertising, revenue share, hosting, domain sales, product sales, website design, and website marketing.• Hired, trained and mentored sales team and created a broad knowledge based sales force successfully representing multiple products, resulting in over 800 hosted clients, 1300 client websites designed, and over $1million in annual revenue share and product sales.• Purchased and published a local print restaurant magazine and successfully blended its content and advertisers with neworleans.com’s Internet presence and metrics.• Negotiated content partnership with New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, Louisiana Office of Tourism, New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corp, and New Orleans Publishing Group.• After successfully creating a strong 1.8 million a year company, neworleans.com was sold to the Hammack – Jones Group in 2007.

Greater New Orleans Area

• Ground up creation of business model and hiring of all staff members including, call-center operations, IT support, hosting and maintenance, software development, QA, customer service, accounting, general sales, affiliate sales, and senior management.• Hired, trained, forecasted and managed a Global Sales team that continually exceeded annual forecast and country development by 197% year over year. • Lead the development of the world’s first online booking engine, utilizing in-house design and developed in an Oracle environment.• Responsible for all forecasting and budgeting from start-up of $0 revenue to annual sales of $48 million by 1998.• Contracted and managed six CVB’s, one State office of Tourism and one Tourism Marketing Corp to provide destination specific revenue solutions for their membership, encompassing hotel, air, car, special events, restaurants, sporting events, merchant sales, and welcome centers.• Managed multiple advertising agencies to ensure branding integrity between on-line and off-line initiatives.• Developed new product creation and procedural documentation across all departments resulting in a dynamic 197% growth in year over year revenue growth and the acquisition of over 55,000 hotel partner inventory contracts.• Developed and implemented first “Affiliate Program” resulting in over 18,000 destination specific partner website distribution agreements. • During acquisition process was responsible for SEC compliance.• Negotiated incentive agreement between Jefferson Economic Development Corp and Turbotrip to relocate business from New Orleans, LA to Metairie, LA.• Negotiated and successfully sold business to hotels.com.