Biography

I grew up in New York on Long Island in a town called Plainview. From a very young age I always had a passion for business. Before the age of 14, most of my businesses were in my head, unless you count me selling jolly ranchers and other candies to my 3rd grade schoolmates and hiring the biggest kid in my class to protect my market share as a real business!

Early Business Ventures

I began a sunglasses distributorship business when I was 14, which didn’t last long. In late 1993 I started to use on-line advertising through Prodigy Internet Services to advertise products.? I was one of the first businesses to use online advertising as a way of promoting products.? In 1995, my company, A&W Distributors, partnered with Barron’s in a venture aimed at selling licensed books to customers on-line. The idea of buying common products on a 2400 bps dial-up connection seemed absurd to most people at the time. I had a brief foray into the vending machine business when I was 15 and had a variety of different business ideas and plans by the time I was 17.? From the age of 16 throughout the early years of college, I got my first real professional work experience. I worked for a company called Fabric Bonanza (now out of business) where I worked for the Chief Financial Officer and also for the IT Director.? It was while working here that I gained my first real exposure to Lotus 123, the spreadsheet program which would later lose to Microsoft Excel (the backbone of today?s finance function).

Formal Education

I graduated from Plainview-Kennedy High School and decided to attend Binghamton University. My reasons for attending Binghamton came down to financial considerations, but looking back retrospectively, it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. I learned a tremendous amount, and it was there where I decided to major in accounting, which I see as the foundation of business.? I graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2001. In 2002, I completed the exam for my New York State Certified Public Accounting license and maintain an active CPA license.

A&W Enterprises

Fabric Bonanza went out of business soon after I went away to college, so I had to come up with another way to earn some side income. All of my businesses to date, for the most part, had been under the name A&W Worldwide Distributors. At this point, A&W Worldwide Distributors had been into some simple money-making ventures, mostly conceived from ideas coming straight out of my passion for reading?Entrepreneur magazine. But in 1999, I started calling the business A&W Worldwide Solutions and transformed it into a service business. At the same time, I also brought in a partner who was concurrently helping to build the business in the Boston area. Two additional partners were brought in during 2001, and two more partners in 2003. During this period of growth, I stepped down from active duty in 2001 and remained as Chairman of the Board until the business wound down in 2007. This business had 4 different service lines/offerings over its life:

Computer Training Classes (1998?2001)? I offered introductory computer training classes to adults focused on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Quicken and MS Money, and the Internet. These classes were initially taught by me at a local community college in Binghamton and later were rolled out and taught at over 40 universities across the Northeast by hired instructors following my curriculum.
Web Hosting and Building (1997?2004)? We built and hosted over 200 websites in?the first?3 years. These were simple websites with cookie cutter designs using Microsoft Frontpage, but we had extremely high margins. This became our ?bread and butter? and really allowed us to expand into the more successful cost-efficiency consulting business (see below). In 2000, we realized that we no longer had the real expertise to build any advanced sites, so we essentially allowed this business to run-off and simply hosted and updated existing sites. In 2004 we sold this part of the business altogether.
Cost-Efficiency Consulting (1999?2007) ? This was the part of the business that really flourished and became far and away the most profitable segment of the business. The simple idea was to target small businesses with 10-20 employees and help them cut costs through shared spend/leveraging of our network of service providers. For example, we could help them cut their costs in 4 major areas: health care, office supplies, computers and travel. We negotiated deals with one major provider in each of these areas and as the number of clients grew, our pricing pressure grew and increased the savings we could provide to these small businesses. Additionally, we would help analyze items such as utility and telephone bills and almost always would find errors and overcharges in billings. We would operate on a fixed cost arrangement with clients and would guarantee that we save them at least double our fee?in the first year or else we would refund part of it. If we saved them nothing, they would pay us nothing. This part of the business really took off because of the fixed pricing arrangement and in retrospect, (and after seeing other successful companies use a contingency based model) we probably would have done significantly better had we taken a percentage of the savings. To put some color on it, during the entire period of this business, we saved each client on average $82,000 a year and charged our clients an average of $25,000 + expenses (travel etc.). As discussed above, the business wound down in 2007 and this was the only part of the business that was sold off. We were quite happy with the results.
Business Venture Division (2001?2005) ? This part of the business was formed as a wholly-owned subsidiary of A&W Worldwide Solutions and was 100% owned by me. The intention was to focus on entrepreneurial ventures similar to those I had been involved with before college. Unfortunately, there was no major project started within this entity, and it was shut down as we started to consider the sale of the business.

All in all, A&W really taught me a number of lessons:

The importance of bringing smart people aboard to help develop a vision. As it states in one of my favorite books, ?Good to Great?, people should not be intimidated to bring smart people in to work with or for them. This is a key to successfully developing a plan and having important dialogue on the issues.
How to build out the infrastructure of a small, work-from-home business and take it to the next level. When you are interfacing with customers consistently and trying to appear to give a bigger company feel, this is challenging. I believe that we worked successfully to create a professional environment whereby our customers felt there was true depth behind our services.
Conflict management. At a number of times, my partners fought with each other and I disagreed with them. We had some pretty large issues that we needed to work through and I believe that I became more of a peace broker than a contributor to the friction in the later years.

Growing Interest in Venture Capital

In the beginning of college I had become involved with a start-up company called Where2play.com. The idea of this business was to create a database where traveling businesspeople could go no matter where they were in the world and find sports-related activities, such as a pickup basketball game or a place to find a racquetball partner. I was the Chief Information Officer and my duties were supposed to entail focusing on the actual content of the site. We put together a detailed business plan and in 1999 we attempted to get start-up capital. Unfortunately, the writing was already on the wall portending the tech bubble collapse, and the venture capital markets had started to dry up. In the end we decided to call it quits, but I was intrigued by the venture capital community and how it operated. I decided at that time that I wanted to be involved in some way in the venture capital world.

Professional Beginnings

In 2001, after I graduated from college, I began my full-time working career at Deloitte & Touche in their AERS practice (the audit practice).? By chance, my first client was Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the first and most successful premier venture capital firms in the world. I felt lucky to have been placed working with them, especially considering my Where2play.com realization. At Deloitte, there was a Private Equity Investor Services group, part of the Financial Services Industry practice. I performed quite well on my first engagement at Bessemer, and came to essentially co-lead that audit the following year and then lead it the two years after that. I also worked on other large audit clients such as The Blackstone Group, Merrill Lynch, Ripplewood, Olympus, New Mountain Capital, and worked on pieces of other large Private Equity clients. I realized over the course of my 3 ? years in the Private Equity group that I enjoyed the traditional LBO community much like the admiration I had for venture capital back in 1999, so I joined the Mergers and Acquisitions practice in early 2005. I was able to work on some very interesting deals, both with large private equity clients (The Blackstone Group and Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe mainly) as well as on strategic takeovers. But, in August of 2005, after only about six months in the group and after getting promoted to Manager a year early, I resigned from Deloitte and joined New Mountain Capital, a former client.

Current Employment

In August of 2005 I joined New Mountain Capital?as the Firm’s Controller and am now a Principal of the General Partnership and a Director?of the firm. In this role, I was originally tasked with:

Taking over the accounting for?the private equity fund
Helping to create what was needed for the second private equity fund (which had just started)
Helping to develop and create all of the back office systems for the launch of our hedge fund (New Mountain Vantage)
Being involved with investor relations and reporting

My role has transformed over?my tenure in a number of ways.? A few examples are:

I became involved with the fundraising for our third private equity fund and now generally am involved with investor due diligence and fundraising throughout all parts of the firm
I helped to build out an operations and accounting team
I have been extremely involved in compliance and helped to prepare our firm?to be a Registered Investment Adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission
Together with the CFO, we head the?finance and operations of the entire firm

When I started there, New Mountain had approximately $770 million of assets under management. Today we have almost $9 billion, and there has been unprecedented growth, new challenges, and excitement over that time. The best part of this job has been my ability to get involved in all aspects of the business. From investment decision making to real estate expansion to special projects, it has been a place where I have significantly expanded my skill set.?

Other Activities

Since 2005 I have began to do a number of other outside but related activities.? One of the things I began to do was to speak at a number of conferences on hot topics within my industry.? I spoke on panels addressing such issues as SFAS 157 (valuations and fair value accounting), carried interest tax changes, IT infrastructures, investor relations and reporting and fundraising.? Some sample conferences?I have spoken at are?as follows:

Financial Resources Associates “Effectively Administratoring Private Equity Firms” and “Private Equity Financial Management Summit”
Private Equity International’s “Private Equity Strategic Financial Management Conference”
“Private Equity Leadership Summit” at Dartmouth College
Private Equity International’s “CFOs and COOs Forum”

I have become involved in an organization called the New York Hedge Fund Roundtable.? Bio from their website: “The New York Hedge Fund Roundtable creates a forum for the exchange of information and ideas that will enlighten participants about topical issues. Participants in the hedge fund community are also provided a dynamic setting to identify new professional opportunities. Our initiatives will result in attendees profiting from stimulating and innovative ideas (including best practices) and useful information, contact with colleagues, and development of higher ethical standards.”? I am a member of the Steering Committee which helps to drive the organization’s mission and am also the Chairman of the Sponsorship Sub-committee which helps fund the organization through corporate sponsorship.?

Current Side Ventures

Since 2004, I have been involved in a number of different start-up business ventures.? My involvement has mostly been advisory in nature, but?I am also an investor and?have provided some seed capital for both start-ups and businesses at or near profitability.??I am involved in a number of different projects spanning different industries.? A few examples are:

Promagination ? A promotional products business, of which I am a co-founder and investor. This firm has only recently started and has a lot of good prospects to grow and expand itself.? It is not fully operational yet, but should be up and running soon.
BioMass Heating Solutions?- Biomass Heating Solutions Limited has invented and patented the worlds first on site process for converting traditionally low value by-products such as poultry litter and other agricultural residues into heat and electricity using Fluidised Bed Combustion. The innovative process is ideal for industries with a high energy requirement and existing or increasing disposal problems.
Rainbow Broadband, Inc.?- Rainbow Broadband creates broadband neighborhoods in the air using the rooftops of tall, fiber connected buildings to beam bandwidth to customers in neighboring commercial buildings.

I am always interested in other ideas.? Please contact me if you have any ideas or thoughts.

Politics

Since the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, I have had a?strong interest in politics.? It was not anything specific about that race, but rather the broader political process that I gained a bit of insight into during the Fall of 2001.? From the?early years of my political interest until the mid-1990s, I didn’t specifically?support any one political party.? I was, and still am, a realist.? I don’t subscribe to divisive ideology?and I?believe it is?almost impossible for any one person to agree with all the philosophies of a party.? However, I believe political parties are necessary to facilitate a smoother political process and help push an agenda (most of the issues that?party faithfuls believe in).? Around 1995, I began to lean towards the Republican Party.? I was impressed with its history, development, party members?and agreed with many of the principals for which it stands.? The Republican Party in the mid-1990s was an exciting place, flowing with inspirational ideas and people (i.e. Newt Gingrich).? Regardless of my party membership, I do not vote along party lines, I believe that I am?in the center?on many of the issues.? I vote for the?candidate that I trust and believe in the most, whether they are a Republican,?Democrat or Independent.