All of us came out of corporate America positions where we grew up as operating managers in sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing and finance.  Through lots of hard work and long hours over the years, getting our fingers dirty, running through airports and grinding away at business plans and spreadsheets along with a bit of luck, we all became senior executives at companies such as Honeywell, Becton Dickinson, Kontron Instruments, Control Data, Price Waterhouse, Zoom Telephonics, and Litton Industries.  

With a senior manager background largely formed at Becton Dickinson, Datamedix and Litton Industries, Jack formed Derby Management in 1990 after successfully selling his most recent company, Mayer Electronics.  Over the past twenty plus years since then, the firm has grown steadily with senior additions of partners such as George Simmons, Jan Olmstead, Frank Porter and George Pilla.

Today, we believe that we’re experts and have deep experience in strategic and business planning, sales and marketing, finance and both venture and private equity financing.   Having said this, there are lots of consulting firms that can do the same.  The specific value that we know that we provide for our customers and the skills that differentiate us from other consultants and earn us the right to say that we’re business coaches is that we actually have deep hands-on operating experience, and all of us have had very successful direct P&L responsibilities earned across a wide variety of industries.

We’ve sat in the CEO, CFO and VPs of Sales & Marketing chairs.  With our teams, we’ve been responsible for great successes, but along those paths, we’ve also worked our way through very difficult survival and turnaround times when it did not appear that there were any opportunities for growth.

We focus specifically on both early stage and middle market companies, located primarily in New England, New York and Eastern Canada, with annual revenues between $5 and $250 million.  Our customers range across a purposefully broad spectrum of markets from industrial manufacturing to healthcare services to IT hardware, to software to financial services and they include both family businesses and investor-owned companies.

We’d welcome the opportunity to talk and provide you with a sounding board to share your ideas.