Jack Derby, Management Coach, Tufts Professor, Entrepreneur, Author
Jack was responsible for the Tufts University Entrepreneurship Center where he teaches and managed a highly engaged and active center of 17 professors, coaches, investors and 700+ students constituting the largest minor on campus. The Center hosts 30+ entrepreneurship events each year culminating in the $100K New Ventures Competition. Jack individually coaches 20 Tufts student startups each year. Today, he continues to teach a marketing course and a sales course in the Center, where he received the Henry & Madeline Fisher award voted by students as the highest rated professor on campus in the Department of Engineering. Prior to stepping down as Director in 2020, due to his wife’s health issues, Jack was the Cummings Family Professor of Entrepreneurship. For 20 years, he has taught business planning and marketing in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department where he continues.
In 1990, Jack founded Derby Management, a regional consulting firm specializing in strategic and business planning with deep expertise in the specializations of business planning, sales productivity and marketing optimization. Prior to starting Derby Management, Jack served as CEO of Mayer Electronics and President of CB Sports. He is or has been a board member of 21 companies.
Jack’s 17 years of corporate background consisted of being President of Litton Industries Medical Systems, CEO of Datamedix and Executive Vice President of Becton Dickinson Medical Systems, a market leader in hospital monitoring.
For his work as an entrepreneur, Jack was named to the Boston Business Journal’s Mass High Tech’s All-Star Team, he received MIT Enterprise Forum’s Vince Fulmer Award for his work as chairman, and in 2019, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Corporate Growth of Boston for his work as long-term chairman of this leading M&A organization. Jack has founded or co-founded nine startups over the years acting as CEO in eight.
Today, Jack is an active and highly engaged board member with a long investing history as an early stage investor as General Partner at Kestrel Ventures, Chairman of Common Angels and currently as a General Partner at Converge Ventures.
As everyone who knows me, I'm an over-the-top planning kind of guy 7 days a week. It's how I'm wired working with customers, teach Sales & Marketing at Tufts and how I live my life.
Arriving in snowbound VT last night around 8:00, my first thought was to figure out how I could straighten out the not-so-perfect snow plowing from the 18 inches of snow. I had to rationalize plowing perfection balanced against the need to get the wood stove started to warm the house from its 50-degree sleep. The wood stove plus not incurring the wrath of my neighbors across the field again, from the noise of Big Red, won out.
Read More
Tags:
Your 10 Day 2024 Sales Playbook
As a skier since I was 5 and a snowboarder-only since I was 50-the beginning of the snow season continues to bring immediate positive emotions and a few practicalities to the forefront especially at this time of year. I've been involved in the ski & snowboard industry as a board member, as an entrepreneur and as a manager off and on for decades. Very exciting and rewarding times, and for those of you who may think that working in the industry would be a wonderful opportunity to be out on the hill, the reality is just the opposite since from Thanksgiving through mid-February, you're working every day, all the time.
Read More
Tags:
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
No matter who you or I voted for, it's good to have this election behind us, so we can get back to work.
-too much division
-too much distraction
-too much caution
Time to get back to work and focus on moving ahead!
Read More
Tags:
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
At the end of every semester, I end with "The 3 Rules of Jack" which focus on life lessons. Rule #2 is to consistently practice life-long learning in everything that one does. Maybe that's an advanced degree (60% of my students do this post graduation). Maybe it's an individual work-related course, or perhaps it's pursuing a personal love of painting or sailing, learning another language, or in my wife's case, welding. After watching two generations of students and many, many generations of friends, those individuals that are the most stimulating, those that have the most fun, and those that live the longest are those who stretch themselves to continuously learn.
Read More
Tags:
HubSpot Tips,
Inboound,
writing business plans,
writing your marketing plan,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
DavidMeermanScott,
howtowriteamarketingplan,
inboundmarketing
I have the excitement of living on the NH beach, working in Boston, teaching at Tufts and spending time in Vermont. If it weren't for the NH-Boston commute, the daily rhythm would be perfect, but it is what it is, and even the length of the commute has a seasonal rhythm of its own with the fall being the worst. At least the drive is a good time for podcasts.
Read More
Tags:
Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning
I don't know about you and your college experience, but my undergraduate years at BC were largely focused on balancing classes, taking copious notes, prepping for exams, working part time jobs and commuting back and forth-rain or snow-on my $250 motor scooter. I was younger than most, wicked naive about what to expect and how to act, and very rarely got the opportunity to critically think. When I had the opportunity 22 years ago to teach at MIT, which I still do every fall, and I'm now in my 20th year at Tufts teaching Marketing and Sales, I structured everything around activating critical thinking among my students by working in teams around complex projects. In fact, that's exactly what we've been doing in our consulting practice so transferring that discipline of project-based critical thinking to the classroom has been very direct.
Read More
Tags:
Sales Management Best Practices,
how to write a business plan,
business planning meetings,
Teaching at Tufts University,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning
Surprise! Surprise!
The leaves are falling in Vermont!
When I was in in Vermont last weekend cranking up the leaf blower, I realized that the natural rhythm of the Fall was well underway. 30% early color in my woodlot and lots of buses full of leaf-peepers. Stratton's ad this morning featuring this picture marketing the fall festival next weekend and early discounts on ski passes made it official for me.
In the very unique state of Vermont, 25% of the annual tourism dollars happen in the next two or three weeks with busses from Ohio rolling in daily filled with seniors waiting to buy tiny, overpriced jars of maple syrup. Right now, the rhythm of the seasons in Vermont is all about marketing as it should be!
Read More
Tags:
sales and marketing best practices,
how to write a business plan,
improving sales productivity,
how to write a marketing plan,
how to write a sales plan,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning
I know that my Marketing manager friends who are reading this title are now cringing since they live in the real world of attempting to balance strategies and long-term initiatives with the day-to-day necessities of filling Q4 MQLs metrics. And then of course, at this time of year, there's the requirement to figure out their 2025 marketing plans with the added pressure from their CFO of keeping their expenses the same. And all of this within the very compressed time period of the next 8 weeks. This is exactly why I try to make Marketing simple; otherwise, there's just too much to deal with and too often the resulting plans never gets to the results we need.
Read More
