30 years of experience providing executive leadership and strategic advisory services to private middle market companies, developing and executing business improvement initiatives, turning around distressed operations, managing M&A transactions, valuing companies, and securing equity and debt growth capital.
Ken is a frequent speaker at national and regional conferences and private business owner functions, and has authored numerous articles on business value growth, corporate valuations, mergers & acquisitions, and turnaround management.
Ken’s Story:
Ken spent 18 years, of his 40+ year career, turning around distressed companies for some of the largest private equity firms and commercial banks in the U.S., the likes of which included such firms as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Santander, and a whole host of others.
The rest of his career was focused in corporate finance, business valuations, and M&A advisory services, and what he learned was that each of these professional disciplines has its own separate and distinct knowledge base that can be super impactful on a private company.
However, as valuable as each knowledge base is, nobody had ever combined them in way to leverage each other - in a way that could put the power of all of them at the fingertips of any advisor.
That’s the knowledge that we’ve combined into the software and process that we created. It’s the same process that we’ve now been teaching in our Certified Value Growth Advisor (CVGA) program for seven years, to hundreds of very seasoned advisors who wanted to elevate their practices.
The VOP Story:
At the peak of the 2008-2009 recession, Ken's turnaround partners were getting a lot of “assessment” engagements from the workout groups of some of those big banks. They were getting flooded with companies getting pushed into workout and they needed help triaging the influx.
Their mandates were to go spend a couple weeks in the field, interview management, assess the company, and deliver a report to the bank with our conclusions. These assessments were taking way too long to complete because they didn’t have a standardized approach. Their fees were capped at flat rates per engagement, so they weren’t making enough profit. They were spending too much time writing reports and not enough actually solving the problems for the banks and the companies. And, lastly, the practice wasn’t scalable because of all the above reasons.
They needed a system that would solve our issues in the way they provided services. He took on the challenge to search for existing systems, software, tools, anything that might help. He looked high and low but didn’t find anything that was worthy of the quality that they wanted to deliver. They decided they'd have to build our own.
So, again, he took on the challenge to build a prototype that would bring all of those knowledge bases together, collaborating with functional experts and industry experts to build a really powerful assessment and value creation software platform. At some point along the way, the teacher in him realized that what we were creating needed to be shared with the advisory world, because it was simply too good to keep to ourselves.
So, he decided to go all the way and build it into a cloud-based platform. After several years of intensive field testing on live companies, conducted in collaboration with a U.S. Department of Commerce agency, the MEP, the Value Opportunity Profile software was launched. Since then, Corporate Value Metrics has continually released new editions, new features and functionality, and built a whole community of independent practitioners.
CVGA (Certified Value Growth Advisor); CM&AA (Certified M&A Advisor); CTP (Certified Turnaround Professional); CPA (Certified Public Accountant); ABV (Accredited in Business Valuation); MSF (master’s degree – finance);
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