Jack Derby, Head Coach
Jack Derby, Head Coach, Derby Management
As founder and Head Coach of Derby Management, Jack Derby and his managers provide strategic planning, and sales and marketing optimization services to growth and middle market companies. Prior to forming Derby Management, Jack served as CEO of Mayer Electronics Corporation, President of CB Sports, President of Litton Industries Medical Systems, CEO of Datamedix Corporation and President of Becton Dickinson Medical Systems.
For his work in the entrepreneurial community, Jack was named to Mass High Tech’s All Star Team. He also received the distinguished Pro Bono Publico award from the Smaller Business Association of New England, the Meritorious Service Award for the Association for Corporate Growth, and the Vincent Fulmer Distinguished Service Award from the MIT Enterprise Forum. He is a frequent speaker at numerous sales meeting and business organizations including the Association for Corporate Growth and the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, where he was Chairman of both organizations.
He is a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, where he teaches two courses: “Entrepreneurial Marketing” and “The Art & Science of Sales”. In 2015, Jack received the Henry and Madeline Fisher Award given to the best teacher on campus, an award that is voted by the graduating students and the faculty. He is the first faculty member from the Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Program to be given this recognition.
He is also a lecturer at MIT, where for the past nineteen years, he has taught classes in business planning and marketing to undergraduate and graduate students in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Jack is currently an active board member in a number of companies, including the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, Accounting Management Solutions, Aviant Hospice, Brainshark Corporation, Chase Corporation, Rome Snowboards, Reiser Inc, and Tufts University’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Advisory Board. He is also the past Chairman of Common Angels Ventures, one of the most active seed and early stage investment funds, now rebranded by Jack and management to Converge Ventures.
Last weekend at this time found me in Vermont deep in shoveling the debris and dirt left from the floods and repairing the ATV trails in my woodlot. Filling one five gallon bucket at a time, hauling them to the tractor, driving into the woods and filling the holes in the trails, inches at a time, reminded me again of how lucky I am to have my day job which, although complex and pressure-driven, as my friend Bernie Gordon, CEO of Analogic, used to repeatedly tell me “doesn’t involve any heavy lifting.”
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sales optimication
I escaped from the end of the quarter Sales Crunch Time late last Friday, and went to Vermont this past weekend for the The Annual Fall Cleanup. It’s always a chore but also a relief to get through another summer season and start preparing for the winta'. It’s just a bit of disbelief that the summer came and went, and I only made it back to my home state of Vermont once, and that trip was with customers for an offsite. Those six generations who came before me were doing the proverbial rollover wondering what the heck happened to their Vermont son. But my addictions to the NH beach and now Stratton’s beckoning snowboard trails help me put everything into perspective. I just follow the seasons and the rhythm of our customer’s annual business calendars, and everything seems to fall neatly into place-very hectic and squeezed-but in place, all the same.
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business planning
Each of the three CEOs I met with on Monday used the same term, “crunch time” to describe the end of the quarter this Friday. A software company, a financial services firm and a retail product manufacturer-the industry didn’t make any difference; it was the same phrase, “crunch time”. Every month, every quarter, in almost every industry we work in, it always comes down to this last week. It is what it is, and it’s what we deal with as managers every year, which, of course, doesn’t make it right or wrong, it just brings too many decisions down to too little time leaving no room for errors. The bottom line of which, in any crunch situation, is that unfortunately something somewhere gets squeezed out and falls through the cracks. I guess I could paint an analogy to the Red Sox here, but that crunch time story is just too depressing and painful.
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Last year was my first winter living on the New Hampshire beach. Commuting to Boston for work and to Vermont on the weekends to snowboard proved not to be such a big deal, and I had this stupid belief that living on the ocean would not produce as much snow. My brain kept tossing around phrases like "Gulf Stream" which I then very nicely translated into "less snow". In reality, the beach yielded just as much snow as the 120 inches we received in Vermont. The key difference (I learned the hard way) was that Vermont possesses one very important component that's missing in the tight confines of a NH beach, and that's plenty of space to plow and dump the stuff. I also quickly learned that even in The Live Free or Die State, there are zoning laws about when, where and at what volume one can actually move snow. In Vermont, snow is snow, and the only law is just dump it anywhere...and quickly...because there's more coming tomorrow.
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small business management,
October,
strategic planning
With anxiety and the fear of the unknown, I headed to Vermont last Friday night for the first time since the floods to see for myself what had happened to our house. Since friends had already walked the property and checked things out, I knew that we were one of the lucky ones and had no damage. With our road now fully reconstructed, it was now time to venture into the bustling metropolis of Bondville, population 647, at the base of Stratton Mountain. After confirming that the house was okay, I drove to the general store in stunned silence shocked by the surrounding damage that our tiny river had caused ripping out bridges and tossing 100 pound rocks by the hundreds into our field which, at the height of the storm, had been under five feet of water.
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Sales quota,
sales training,
management
With the passing of Labor Day, I found myself giving a sad “see ya next summer” to my friend, Jack McAvoy, the head lifeguard at our beach. Older, serious, dedicated and always razor sharp, good weather and bad, Jack, on any weekend, is not only out there as the protector of the beach, but he’s often the diplomat and mediator between feuding siblings and sometimes forgetful adults.
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sales training
“It’s been dirty, and it will be a little tough, but we’ll be fine.”
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Sales quota,
sales training
In just 24 hours, I was instantly transported from Sunday’s watch and worry on our NH beach to yesterday’s calm of deep green oceans and blue sky, but the same was not so in our Vermont hometown. With bridges and roads washed out, our little town of Bondville took the full brunt of 12 inches of rain blasting its way into already overflowing rivers. The unfortunate result has been a real life, film-at-6, disaster with many towns under water, roads split in two and countless bridges destroyed-all of which in a couple of weeks will be forgotten except by the hardy Vermonters people who live here. Kevin Cullen has a piece in The Globe today which puts everything into perspective.
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sales productivity,
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sales management training,
selling skills,
closing sales,
sales training
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As we wind down the last few days of summer, and I was reading The Globe on the beach yesterday, I was drawn to Red’s comment about the end of summer.
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