Guiding Leaders on a Journey to Scale Their Business and Create Value
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Blessed with a great foundation
I was blessed to grow up with a great family in a wonderful community in rural Arkansas. My parents instilled in me a farmer’s work ethic and an entrepreneur’s grit. They never read Patrick Lencioni’s book, “The Ideal Team Player”, but every day my parents lived and preached the virtues of hungry, humble, and smart. I was the first in my family to go to college and like most young people I didn’t know what I wanted to do. One summer night after my senior year in high school I was working 2nd shift on a refrigerator assembly line in +90 degree heat. Suddenly the assembly line stopped and people wearing white shirts and ties and carrying clip boards came out of the air conditioned offices to see why production had stopped. I asked the lady next to me who they were, and she told me those are the engineers. At that moment, I made a career decision. I wanted to be an engineer and set off on a path to become an electrical engineer.
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Data storage and my path to leading a business unit
Graduating from college I was fortunate to join the emerging data storage industry, and early in my career I landed at one of the winners in that industry, Seagate Technology. I am so indebted to my Seagate bosses, mentors, and teammates as this was where I received my most valuable education. In my 20 years at Seagate, I was fortunate to gain deep functional leadership experience in product development, product management, and sales and marketing. I even had the opportunity to do a two-year expat assignment in Singapore, gaining exposure to the rapid growth of the Asia market in the 90’s. Seagate even picked up most of the tab for my MBA that I did while working full time. The capstone of my Seagate experience gave me my first taste of being a CEO as I was given the opportunity to lead the company’s $4 billion enterprise storage business unit. It was a mature business, so we developed a ‘move the cheese’ strategy to dramatically change industry server and storage array design standards, as well as create a new architecture for what is today known as the ‘cloud.’ This strategy created industry disruption that helped enable the acquisition of a direct competitor. The team aggressively consolidated and removed significant cost from the combined businesses. During our three-year effort, we delivered 27% average annual revenue growth, 43% average annual gross profit growth and a 10-point gain in market share basis points. What a ride it was, and it gave me a taste of being a CEO.
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The move to software and executing a transformation
In 2009 I was recruited to Rimage to lead a turnaround. Rimage was a profitable, publicly traded technology company, but the solutions and technology were becoming obsolete by the adoption of web content management and delivery. In fact, the company had a negative enterprise value. Our first objective was to stop the revenue decline and we did it by focusing on the fundamentals – team, strategy, and execution. The reinvigorated team successfully rolled out a product that had been stuck in development and they created several vertical solutions that stopped the revenue decline. To complement the product efforts, we went from a 3-tier to 2-tier sales channel, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and giving us more insight to the market. Lastly our efforts to develop a more results oriented culture started paying dividends as execution improved dramatically.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t continue to outrun technology obsolescence, but we were able to slow down the revenue erosion and buy time to drive a full technology transformation of the company. Over the next couple of years, the team made two acquisitions within a new enterprise software category – enterprise video content management. We rebranded the company as Qumu, one of the acquired companies. Our software revenues grew from $10 million to $35 million, and we were named a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader. This enabled us to divest of the Rimage business and become a pure software company. I retired in 2015. -
Failed retirement, back to my roots
In 2016 I realized I wasn’t ready to retire. I was just tired. After catching my breath and doing a lot of soul searching, I started taking calls for new opportunities. Late in 2016, I joined Conservis, a digital agriculture technology scale-up that provided a farm management software solution focused on the harvesting and grain storage processes. I had now gone full circle in my career and was back in agriculture where I had my first job as a child.
Conservis was venture backed and had undergone rapid growth in clients and people. They were also a first mover in the industry, but emerging competition had resulted in stalled sales and significant churn. Furthermore, the Series A funding was depleted. Over the next five years we built a great team and culture, allowing us to expand the platform from a harvesting app to an end-to-end ERP solution for farming operations. Leveraging Nick Mehta’s “Customer Success” model, we created a SaaS service delivery model, significantly reducing churn and improving the user experience. Along the way we identified the need for merging farm financial and operations data inside of our platform. This unique data set enabled valuable channel partnerships and led to an exit in 2021 to a newly formed joint venture owned by TELUS Ag and Rabobank. -
Why TruGrit360?
Technology leaps and business model revolutions are occurring at a jaw-dropping pace. It has never been more rewarding or more challenging to be the leader. I know. I have walked in your shoes, and I have had lots of ‘at bats.’ Over the last three decades, working in some of the most demanding industries, I have had the opportunity to serve and create teams with the best and brightest people.
Through both success and failure, I have learned valuable lessons about the hard and soft edges of business. The most joy I have had in my career came from developing teams and leaders and watching a strategy transform into execution. As I enter the 4th Quarter of my life, I have founded TruGrit360 so I can pay forward the things I have learned and continue to make a positive impact in the lives of others. I would love to help you find your purpose, scale your business, and create value.