I normally am involved in a number of consulting and advisory activities. I thought it might be helpful to provide some information on what I am currently doing or have recently done, updating their status from time to time. You can see that there is a broad scope of interests represented. Please click through the list below to get a sense of my involvements.
My current activities include:
Richard Whitfield of Money Matters TV and I are co-sponsoring a new event to put entrepreneurs together with potential investors and advisors with the goal of creating and building new and successful companies. Our Penn State Great Valley students and other entrepreneurs from the Delaware Valley are invited to make a “pitch” for their business and investors are invited to engage with them. The first of our planned series will be held on September 16th from noon to 2:30PM, with networking to continue to 3:30PM. The location is The Conference Center at Penn State Great Valley, 30 E. Swedesford Road, Malvern, PA 19355. The phone number of The Conference Center is 610.648.3278. The second event in the series is scheduled for October 27.
Rich is the driving force behind this event, and has dedicated his energy and talents to promoting entrepreneurship, especially in the Great Valley and surrounding region. It is a privilege for me to work with him on this endeavor.
A brief flyer can be seen here.
The event was sold out and was a rousing success. We had a great mix of private investors/angels, venture investors, advisors, entrepreneurs, and others. Pitches were given by a number of startups, including:
Dr. James Chan gave a very well-received talk on "Secrets of Doing Business in China". His enthusiastic approach and his experiences with the subject matter were both entertaining and informative.
Stay tuned for information on the next Start-Up Showcase
I've been more actively engaged in more of the various opportunities to be of service at Penn State Great Valley. These inlcude participation in various of the faculty meetings and the new Sustainability curriculum committee. I've redeveloped the BUSAD 575 course, renaming it “Developing Technology Ventures”. This summer (2011) I taught sixteen talented graduate students New Ventures 1 again (which I love to do), and will teach another class of this course in the Fall. I am scheduled to teach New Ventures 2 again in the Spring.
In February, 2010, I began a long-term project for Kantar Media. The work is for their customer, DIRECTV. I worked with an international group of Kantar Media people, as well as the DIRECTV team. This project is a core part of what DIRECTV calls "ASAP" (Advanced Satellite Advertising Program).
We met face-to-face as needed, but we did a substantial portion of our meetings via web conferencing. The project included a wide array of other vendor partners and the scope of the project is substantial. The list of partners in the project included Invidi (their “Advatar” system), Invision (their “DealMaker” system), Wide Orbit (their traffic systems), NCC Media (their Spot Advertising systems), Experian (their profiling data), and all their content management technology partners.
We all worked to get addressable advertising to DIRECTV's national subscriber base. There are a wide variety of types of advertising, including zoned, aggregation, and ad hoc targeting. My responsibilities involved managing the Kantar Media project. Theirs is the system of record for measuring ad impressions (that is, counting exposures to the ad), and determining when (and if) the advertiser's required threshold of impressions has been met so that they can be billed for the targeted ad. There are challenges involved in obtaining the information sufficient to make these measurements, which is what made this project interesting. That, and the very large multi-subsystem (and multi-vendor) integration aspect, and that the end result is a game-changing innovation for the customer and the industry.
The project was delivered by Kantar on time an within budget to DIRECTV and it is now in production, delivering addressable ads to their customer base.
Kantar Media is a part of Kantar Group, which has more than 20 companies and 27,000 employees working in about 80 countries around the globe. They are, in turn, a part of WPP, the world’s larget media intelligence company and one of the “Big Six” advertising holding companies, with nearly 140,000 employees in 2,000 offices in over 100 countries. Their companies include The Grey Group, Olgivy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, and JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson Co).
Beginnning in late 2007, I was involved in performing a systems audit, performing project analysis, and preparing strategy and documents in advance of litigation regarding a very large, multi-year, international software development project. I performed this work under contract through a consulting firm for the plaintiff's attorney (KPM Group LLC). This involved reviewing the weekly project plans, status reports, time sheets, memos and other documents to determine how the project got in trouble, costing millions more and producing far less than the contracts and work orders detailed. Project plans typically ran to well over 1,500 tasks at any given time with upwards of dozens of key resources assigned domestically and off-shore. The scope of the analysis required automating some of the analysis. My goal was to tell a top-down story of what happened and how certain decisions resulted in the issues. The reporting providing a starting point of high-level graphic displays, drilling down to successive levels of detail. The result is a clear picture of the evolution of the circumstances and the actions that created the problems.
I began working in 2009 with Chris Burkhard, founder of The CBI Group and his COO, Joe Guariano on their Advisory Group. My goal here is to help this great HR professional services company continue in its rapid growth. It has been on the Philadelpia 100 Fastest Growing Companies in successive years, as well as being in the INC 1000 (# 50 professional services company in growth). We are developing and refining strategies, identifying resources and processes, and leveraging the excellent regional customer base, expanding well beyond the Delaware Valley region. See http://www.thecbigroup.com.
Dr. Bill Creamer and I teamed up to provide a series of seminars to businesses facing the need to make changes in their strategic direction in order to regain or maintain their competitive advantages. Our topics include:
Stay tuned for more information regarding these seminars and our new venture, SustainEnomics.
This firm was created by a former New Ventures MBA student in pursuit of a vision regarding finding certian kinds (which I cannot disclose at this time) of media, using a new paradigm to make finding and manage the search and results significantly more meanignful and aesthetically appealing. I am helping him with his business plan and search for funding, and as a business and technology development advisor. This product, when released, will blow the socks off of its segment.
While at TargetTV (funded by QVC and Comcast), we developed new measurement technologies, methods, and analysis of television audiences. Without trying to upset the applecart of the current media buy/sell models, we quietly introduced much more precision and accuracy in audience measurement, and broadened the scope of what could be measured. The market is just now, years later, adopting this kind of measurement.
Part of my former team and I are partnering up to create this paradigm shift to yet another venue. I cannot talk about what that is yet, but keep watching to learn more in the future.