Joined the amazing team here at Black Box Intelligence. The GuestXM network, the Black Box Intelligence analytics platform, gives the most rounded and recent view of the local, regional, and national trends that affect every part of restaurant operations.Black Box Intelligence tracks and analyzes over 250 metrics covering 99% of US DMAs. It includes data from 2.4 million employees, over 50 million guest reviews, 80,000 restaurant units, and $153 billion in annual sales across 6 segments. These include fast casual, quick service, family dining, casual, upscale casual, and fine dining.

STARTUP | ADVISOR | BOARD MEMBER | STRATEGY | EXECUTION | INVESTORWorking with the CEO to resolve and address start-up challenges and improve operations.Conducting research on emerging trends within industry and capitalized on finds to develop new products, services and strategies.Partnering with the CEO to build the business plan and operational plans.Built a financial model to assist in raising funds.Directed technological improvements, reducing waste and business bottlenecks.Board Member - Trusted advisor and sounding board of the CEO.Source and collaborate wtih off-shore development teams

STARTUP | PRODUCT | PARTNERSHIPS | DATA | STRATEGY | R&D | DEAL TEAM Member of the deal team that successfully sold PowerReviews to 1WorldSync. Recruited to PowerReviews to lead their Product, Engineering and Analytics teams. Expanded to include, Strategic Partnerships, Strategy and M&A.PowerReviews is a SaaS platform that powers Ratings & Reviews, Q&A and other User Generated Content (UGC) activities for leading brands that include Gap, The North Face, Ulta, Albertsons, BJ's Warehouse, Post, Hormel, Hoka, Coach and 1,000s of global brands. Executive sponsor for clients including Walmart, Albertsons, Gap, and key clients. Established strong relationships to understand their strategic goals and supported a 92+% client retention rate.Spearheaded strategic partnerships to fuel innovation and enhance product offerings that were rooted in revenue generation. Partnership examples include Ibotta, Walmart, BazaarVoice, Fetch Rewards, Meta and more supporting $30 million in revenue. Led efforts to transform the platform, enabling management of escalating product volumes, review coverage, and syndication. Added Walmart’s 350 million products to our existing 500 million product DB and improved processing time by over 20x, from 72 hours to 3 hours.Championed a data science-oriented approach that reduces costs, accelerates time to market, and drives innovation across the organization. Estimated to save $350,000 in costs in the 1st year. Cultivated a product-centric culture, emphasizing business outcomes and solutions, employing an MVP methodology supported by active client engagement. Revitalized engineering and product leadership teams to embrace empowerment, learning, and customer-centric values driving an 92% retention rate and improved delivery quality and time.Successfully led and managed though a cyber security incident with nominal business impact.

STARTUP | DATA | MACHINE LEARNING | R&D | SUCCESSFUL EXITRecruited to the role as a commercially minded and client focused CTO and to facilitate readiness and sale activities, contributing to an amazingly successful sale/exit of the company.Lead the Data Science, Data Operations and Engineering teams.Label Insight is a SaaS and data company that takes the complex information on CPG product packaging and translates it into actionable product attribution data that can be leveraged for multiple use cases. Customers include FDA, Google, Walmart, Target, Unilever, Conagra, Instacart and many others.Technology Platform Transformation: Led the Engineering and Data Operations team on the consolidation and simplification of multiple platforms into a unified data platform. Streamlining the overall process enabling product information to come in, be processed once and published out to many destinations.Customer Centric Data Operations: Brought a new customer first mindset to the data operations team that drove the product turn around time down from 45+ days to 10 days.Data Science first approach: Maximized the use of data science/machine learning to drive operational efficiency, quality improvements, cost reductions and overall automation benefits. The Cost per Product has decreased 41% and data processing offshore costs are down 53%.Product & Engineering leadership: Working in partnership with the CPO to drive a culture of product and engineering lead organization that focuses on business outcomes and solutions taking an MVP approachPartnership and Commercially focused: Introduced Label Insight to Walmart Connect, Fetch Rewards, Ibotta and many other companies. These introductions led to the largest company contracts at that pointe. Extensive collaboration and partnership with sales to make introductions and drive sales.Innovation mindset: Built new concepts and formed strategic partnerships with AWS and FARE to create new go to market paths and solutions.

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT | RETAIL MONETIZATION │ DATA MONETIZATION │ DIGITAL MEDIA │ AI/MLRecruited to build a product and platform organization. Focused on driving the development of a new data driven platform for media buying that will diversify Triad's overall product portfolio. In addition working collaboratively across the organization to stand up a new Product organization. Launched the first AI/data driven media product for Triad and it delivered $5mm in the first year. The MVP also spawned 3 new products that are in market or in development. In the process of creating new measurement tools, an white-label Augmented reality SDK and many other exciting products. Triad has worked with leading retailers such as Walmart Media Group, CVS, Office Depot, Sam's Club, Staples and more retailers to monetize their digital platforms and data monetization through a suite of media products, strategy and services. Triad was the first generation of what is now Walmart Connect, which is now an almost billion dollar business unit for Walmart and Walmart Connect is a leader in Retail Media.

PLATFORM MANAGEMENT | PROJECT MANAGEMENT │ TRANSFORMATION │ DUE DILIGENCE Led the digital media marketing company’s buildout platform capabilities based on needs identified in a review conducted by McKinsey. Oversaw the Product Platform and Technology unit in defining the Catalina platform and product features/capabilities to be leveraged by all global products. Served as conduit between all Catalina teams. Managed a product portfolio of $45M in Capital spend that supported over $600m in Revenue. Key leader and active participant in M&A initiatives. Ensured product roadmaps were aligned to deliver products, and overall value in a timely, transparent and predictable manner.STREAMLINED INFRASTRUCTURESpearheaded cross-functional initiative to simplify legacy infrastructure – reducing investment level by 50%.ACQUISITION GAINSParticipated in evaluation/due diligence in acquiring a company to accelerate personalization capability – enabling new market entry 12 months faster and saving over $2M in development costs.MARQUEE RELATIONSHIPSDeveloped and managed strategic relationships with partners, including Target, ShopRite, Meijer and vendors like Microsoft, Adobe, YouTechnology, Inmar, and Informatica that supported $600M in revenue.CROSS-FUNCTIONAL ALIGNMENTManaged the buildout and definition of Portfolio Management team, aligning Sales, Media Operations, Technology, Product, Finance, Legal and Analytics functions.AGILE IMPLEMENTATIONLed Agile implementation and execution – driving productivity, which enabled improvement of delivery estimates by 70%, with greater flexibility to pivot directions to fit organizational need.PMO BUILDOUTEstablished a 20-member Project Management Office (PMO) consisting of Project Managers, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters. Led an Agile Transformation.RESOURCE EXPERTSlashed number of active projects by 50%, enabling the organization to focus on better investment of the $45M capital budget and eliminate waste.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM LEADERSHIP │ P&L │ COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE | DIGITAL | CHANGE AGENT Turned around a Digital Business that was on track to lose millions of dollars and refocused it to gain competitive advantage, as opposed to a “me too” digital strategy. Led Catalina’s Digital Rewards business centered on delivering personalized syndicated digital media to retailers and publishers’ websites, mobile apps and email solutions. As GM for product and business line, set strategic direction, collaborated across organization to ensure alignment and successful execution. Managed multimillion-dollar P&L across Digital Rewards BU and 25 employees.TURN-AROUND AGENTRepositioned and refocused groups’ alignment, reversing potential $9M loss within three months; got it back to plan and then to the budgeted investment amount vs. overspending by leveraging overall company strengths and setting successful strategic direction.PROFITABILITY DRIVERRefocused the team to contribute $3M back into EBITDA.IMPROVED MARGINSCollaborated with cross-functional groups to improve and maximize margins by 40%.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND LAUNCH │ DUE DILIGENCE │ TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATIONBrought the Catalina business model to current and next generation, starting with Internet, mobile, social media, and emerging platforms and mediums. Prioritized, managed and communicated the global digital product road map to the organization. Managed multi-million-dollar capital budget, five direct and 25 cross-functional reports. Partnered with global teams in France, UK and Japan, extending and building digital products in those markets. Managed cross-functional teams to successfully deliver products to market.PROFITABLE & GLOBAL PRODUCT LAUNCHESLaunched a $15M revenue SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, enabling retailers and brands to have a secure, fully white labeled coupon solution with embedding capability in all media channels. Led the replatform of CPG digital coupon & loyalty platform. Partnered/led global teams in the US, France, and Japan to launch a new coupon platform in 18 months, while launching seven websites (four in US/three in France).MARQUEE ACCOUNT LEADERLed team in launching a $7M SaaS coupon platform for large retailer, Target.com (http://coupons.Target.com), in six weeks, supporting two million impressions per day–providing instant credibility of Catalina’s delivery capability.MARQUEE PILOTLaunched a pilot program with Pepsi, Safeway and Foursquare (2009), based on a consumer’s purchases, in real-time a message was posted to Foursquare.LEADING-EDGE TECHNOLOGYEvaluated emerging technology and marketing services/tools at the time, including Foursquare, Beacons, QR Codes and Geolocation.ACQUISITION LEADERActively participated in evaluation and due diligence of the E-centives, Local Offer Network and Cellfire acquisitions while at Catalina. STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP GAINSSet strategy and led team in building the $10M revenue driving digital coupon and “Load to Card” product through partnerships and deep integrations with retailers point of sale systems.

CHANNEL DEVELOPMENT │ DIGITAL MARKETING │ PROFITABLE GROWTH │ PROJECT MANAGEMENTGrew and managed a $30M e-commerce business, and set global vision, strategy, P&L and product roadmap of professional camera, photo/video equipment retailer’s Ecommerce and Technology teams, while serving as key member of Calumet’s Board of Directors. Managed a global cross-functional employees. Provided strategic direction for CalumetPhoto.com, an Internet Retailer Top 500 site, along with three international sites (UK, Germany, and Netherlands). REVENUE DESPITE RECESSIONGrew Ecommerce revenue from 8% of total company revenue to 10% during a major recession period – managed Ecommerce P&L of $30M out of company’s $300M revenue from web, mobile, email and social media.MARKETING TRANSFORMATIONGrew top line revenue by 2% and increased profitability of each new customer by 20% through transforming marketing approach to generate a positive Return-on-Ad Spend from one that lost money on every new customer.GLOBAL ECOMMERCE EXPERTConducted Ecommerce platform evaluation/selection for international Ecommerce needs, including Demandware, Big Commerce and Venda.SOCIAL MEDIAIntroduced/launched first social media initiatives in early days of Facebook, LinkedIn and others, expanding quickly by gain of 20,000 members with primary audience being professional photographers.SEO GAINSCatapulted search ranking to first page on Google and Bing, leveraging multiple SEO methods.RELATIONSHIP BUILDEREvaluated/selected marketing and technology partners to assist each channel in every country, including YourAmigo (SEO), LinkShare and Commission Junction (affiliate marketing), Google Analytics and Omniture (Web Analytics and A/B testing), Elastic (on-site search) and digital catalog providers.AGILE AND PROJECT MANAGEMENTCreated and led successful execution of the Project Management methodology and Agile Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE (SDLC) │ TEAM COLLABORATION │ PROCESS IMPROVEMENTSet consumer acquisition solutions provider’s technology vision, strategy and roadmap to achieve success and business alignment by working closely with cross-functional team to prioritize, plan and schedule the release of new products and enhancements. Managed all aspects of 40+ member technology team, including Development, Quality Assurance, Technology Operations, Database, Architecture, Networking and Project Management teams. Managed a multimillion-dollar operating and capital budget.GROWTH DRIVERInstrumental in catapulting company growth from a 10-person start-up to over 300 employees and a $100M company.M&A AND INTEGRATION LEADERConducted technology due diligence for M&A activities, consisting of gap analysis, staff integration, technologies and evaluation of technology processes.CHANGE CONTROLImplemented a structured change control process to review and approve all infrastructure changes ꟷ enabling a scaled and stable environment.FINANCE EXPERTISECollaborated with finance to track, classify and audit $50M product development costs into either capital or expense based on GAAP regulations.PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND AGILE EXECUTIONDeveloped and executed the Project Management methodology and Agile Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Q-Interactive, Chicago IL, Vice President, Technology 2002 – 2005; Director of Development 2000 – 2002Q-Interactive, Chicago IL 1997 – 2000 Senior Developer | Baxter Healthcare Developer