Kennesaw State University - Michael J. Coles College of Business

Leading Finance and Operations Executive

Tropic

Chief Financial Officer

Elate

Advisor

Versapay

Vice President, Financial Planning & Data Analytics

An amazing hyper growth journey characterized by the business quadrupling in both recurring revenue and employee base during my tenure.

Led the creation and scaling of multiple critical teams inclusive of: Analytics, Data Engineering, Data Science, FP&A, Accounting, IT, Legal, Security, Compliance, Customer Support, Customer Success, Procurement and Revenue Operations. This required spanning a wide array of leadership purview and influence. 

Facilitated a major Series B round of $350 million valuing the business at over $3 billion.

Maintained SaaS best-in-class unit economics for the business in the midst of rapid growth.

Bolstered the delivery of timely, accurate, relevant and proactively persuasive insights across the business and enhanced employee awareness of the revenue engine.

Helped establish key operating cadence system, tools and processes for the leadership team. 

Supported key transformative initiatives spanning: billing system migration, price increase initiatives, virtual card deployment and the selection and rollout of multiple back office tools.

Drove key aspects of the move from a physical office environment to a remote-first culture with employees across the U.S. serving as both key liaison to the employees and overseeing the operational aspects of such a move.

Calendly

Led the Accounting, Finance and Analytics teams during a season of strategic repositioning, cost containment and investor transition. Included line of credit renegotiation, covenant navigation and several rounds of additional investor funding.

Keap

Oversee the FP&A and Analytics functions spanning budget, forecast, variance analysis, Board preparation and weekly leadership dashboards and reporting.
Identify key levers for expense and revenue improvement and the necessary operational plans and prioritization to achieve.
Drive collaboration with data science, data analysis and business leaders around Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in service to growth acceleration. 
Lead internal analytics projects, including in depth funnel analytics, customer journey modeling, key heath indicators and evaluation of new growth initiatives.
Create a strong bench of engaged and effective Finance and Analytics talent capable of supporting Infusionsoft's exciting future.

Vice President, Finance & Analytics

Process development, execution and improvement for lead development, sales and marketing.
Sales Training – including the development and delivery of classroom training, ad hoc training, train the trainer(s), skill refresh training and also thinking about content delivery and technology to enable.
Systems and Tools - identify technology needs to best enable the teams. Develop system and tool requirements and then partner with IT for development and implementation.
Call Center Operations – responsible for staffing levels, scheduling, process, metrics and enablement. First line of defense for phone systems.
Strategy – help lead cross department strategy development and ongoing management of progress vs. initiatives.
Analytics – drive deeper what if scenario modeling and also operational analytics for business improvement
Program Management – lead the PMO function to help drive cross-org projects.

VP of Sales and Marketing Operations, Enablement and Strategy

•	Partner with the General Manager to launch a brand new division within the business to include: strategy development, market positioning, pricing model, staff requirements, logistics and end-to-end process flows.
•	Key driver in ramping employee base and operating infrastructure from zero to critical mass in just six months.
•	Integration of a customer-back approach to sales operations to ensure that we consistently solve for driving high customer and transaction Net Promoter Scores
•	Manage the selection, requirements, development and launch of all systems, tools and processes that support the business operation from lead to customer fulfillment- spanning Marketing, Product, Sales and Care teams.
•	Integrate multiple cloud-based systems together to include: Marketo, Zoominfo, Salesforce.com, Tableau, DocuSign, Qualtrics, Amazon AWS, and various other API-related integrations.
•	Leadership of the Analytics, Project Management Office and Sales Operations functions.
•	Organize the setup and deployment all key business dashboards driving the business.
•	Oversee Salesforce.com administration, development requirements and end-to-end usability within the enterprise

magicJack for BUSINESS™

VP Operations and Strategy SMB

Selected by the Division President to serve as Chief of Staff based upon my analytical rigor, broad business acumen, process orientation and ability to make the complex simple.

-Aligned $3B+ division team with strategy through a cross-functional execution framework.
-Developed “Journey to Quadrant 1” story and analysis used for over 2 years by the division.
-Prepared monthly business reviews, quarterly Board decks and annual strategic overviews.
-Authored articles, keynotes and presentations for President to deliver to large audiences.
-Served as strategic adviser and translated priorities and goals into actions. 
-Gathered and assessed key insights across the business, assimilated what was most important and deployed executive summaries that improved productivity. 
-Oversaw customer experience survey process (Walker, Net Promoter), including root cause analysis, text analytics and improvement action plans.
-Drove planning process to operationalize the long-term vision.

NCR Corporation

Chief of Staff, Financial Services

Recruited by Division President to serve as single source of truth for analytic insights for the business. Led department of analysts that provided insight to: sales, marketing, product and finance teams. Quadrupled team size and remit in the span of several years.  Recognized Spotlight Award winner (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).

-Served as core diligence team member in the sale of Digital Insight to Thoma Bravo for $1B and 3 months later for $1.65 billion to NCR.
-Administered pricing strategy hypothesis formulation, modeling, testing and deployment to drive 10%+ improvement in retention rate and 20%+ client net promoter scores.
-Automated manual reporting deliverables thereby improving accuracy and cutting processing time by 50% .
-Owned monthly forecasting and pipeline reporting deliverables in collaboration with the Finance organization.
-Performed ROI analysis on over $50M in revenue producing strategies to help the organization choose the right balance of timing, investment and results.
-Oversaw sales funnel/pipeline transformation via SalesForce.com.
-Deployed market segmentation to understand opportunity magnitude and better resource allocation decisions.
-Interfaced with industry analysts, deploy market-facing white papers and give Webinars and presentations to internal and external teams on various financial services analytic topics.

Intuit

Senior Director, Analytics

Prolific career with Harland Clarke spanning a decade of service. Demonstrated a consistent ability to progress in the organization by solving business problems, improving processes, delivering valuable insights and productivity for the organization. Roles spanned FP&A, Business Performance Management, Information Systems and Analytics. 

-Managed business to profitability in the midst of a 30% erosion in top line revenue by pro-actively identifying and implementing targeted and purposeful cost reductions.
-Achieved 125% of cost synergy target following the acquisition.
-Provided strategic counsel to the EVP/GM of the $70M+ Marketing Services business on investment, staffing, performance assessment and key drivers of business results.
-Led the line of business 5-year strategic plan, budget and forecast processes to include the narrative portion of these reviews.
-Oversaw the Balanced Business Plan, Goal Deployment and Action Planning cycles.
Improved pre-sales efficiencies 2x via development of a contract and commissions database.
-Coordinated due diligence and modeling for potential acquisition candidates.
-Administered the quota assignment and deployment process to the sales organization.
-Innovated pricing strategy moves and led associated processes to include systems used to track, estimate, price, propose and contract in support of the pre-sales processes.
-Created and deployed new measurement instruments designed to track division performance.

Harland Clarke

Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis

Pioneered the BPM discipline through the recruitment, hiring, training and deployment of a seasoned team of business analysts focused on providing insight to top clients.  Achieved 3 client testimonials for the division from top 20 financial institutions on results from the new service.

-Assisted in the sale of two of the largest clients in company history with combined revenue of nearly $80M annually.  
-Identified and launched delivery service improvements totaling over $14M in 2006, $1.5M in 2005 and $500K in incremental profit in 2004.
-Developed economic valuation models to project the financial impact of implementing new products, services and/or strategies.  Advisory on the results of these valuations.
-Owned all customer-facing aspects of performance reporting, benchmarking and measurement.  Interfaced with senior executives for all top clients.
-Strategic analysis and consultation to the Vice Presidents of Marketing for all potential new product/service offerings to include pricing, promotion and positioning recommendations.  
-Ongoing revenue, expense management and forecasting for marketing programs totaling over $100 million in annual revenue.
-Customer segmentation and performance benchmarking of marketing program participants using test and control groups.

John H. Harland

Director, Business Performance Management

Owned all systems that provided customer intelligence to the sales and marketing divisions during bid and contract negotiation situations.

-Developed and delivered the corporate strategic plan to include market segmentation, value proposition, situation analysis, business intelligence and new market entry.
-Conceptualized and managed the negotiations "war room"- a business intelligence hub within the company that provided customer and competitive intelligence to the sales force to facilitate higher hit ratios and improved decision-making on the front-end.
-Pioneered the development of the first interactive, map-based view of the customer and prospect base for Harland.
-Performed customer, prospect and industry pricing analyses.
-Helped promote smarter pricing based on benchmarking and bundling of the right solutions for the right customers.

Manager, Customer Information Systems

Managed the collection, analysis and reporting of revenue, profit, ROA and ROI information for the sales and marketing organization using a variety of querying, statistical and database tools to include Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay.

-Designed, developed and maintained PeerVisionTM- performance benchmarking software that identifies cross-sell opportunities for credit unions. Acted as product manager of system. Received departmental "High Performance Award" for 2000 and CEO recognition as one of the top three employees in the company to foster innovation in 2001.
-Designed, developed and maintained CheckSmartSM- a software tool that helps customers determine key areas for improvement. Acted as product manager of database. Received CEO recognition for one of the top three people in the company to facilitate competitive advantage.

Senior Marketing Analyst

Promoted over peers to manager of department with analyst-level direct reports. Designed and implemented an automated, online procedure for budgeting and tracking marketing projects.

-Conceptualized an online system used by over 30 executives that allows real-time report writing, queries, searches and sorts of marketing initiatives.
-Managed $15 million in marketing funds and rebates allocated to over 500 yearly campaigns.
-Tracked budgets for marketing and sales campaigns to analyze success, profitability and cost per lead via Microsoft Access database utilities.

Agilysys

Marketing Funds Manager

Oversaw end-to-end accounting functions to include accounts payable and accounts receivable management, journal entries, spreadsheets, graphs and general ledger reconciliations.

-Special projects for management including the creation of complex Excel spreadsheets and databases that analyzed sales revenue and tracked sales representative profitability drivers.
-Calculated sales projections, customer service error tracking, month-end closing figures and financial statements.
-Created presentations to assist in explaining sales information to non-sales personnel.
-Chosen by President to formulate a procedures manual outlining tasks performed for each position in the company.
-Assisted in software conversion through training of fellow employees.

Russell Lester