BOSTON, MA, April 10, 2013– BSG Team Ventures (BSG) announced today the appointment of Susan Hawkins as Vice President. Susan brings twenty years of experience working with boards, CEOs, and private equity leaders in identifying, assessing, and recruiting executives. She has deep experience and a proven track record of recruiting C-Level executives across a broad spectrum of industry sectors and company stages, with a specialty in private equity, Fortune 1000 technology, and venture-backed start-ups.

Prior to joining BSG Team Ventures, Susan spent six years as Director of Recruiting for Sun Capital Partners and their portfolio companies across North America and Europe. In that role, Susan led over 100 board level searches, with a focus on portfolio company CFO roles. These mandates encompassed a number of different industry verticals, notably, manufacturing and consumer. In her last year there, Susan successfully recruited both CFOs and CEOs across a broad range of Sun’s eighty portfolio companies.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers alum, Susan’s background also includes retained executive search experience and human resources roles in information technology and cleantech. Susan has a BA in Economics from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario and a Masters of Science from Nova Southeastern’s School of Psychological Studies in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

A Canadian native from Montreal, Susan is bilingual in English and French. In her spare time, she enjoys biking, tennis, and exploring the outdoors with her husband, Uri from their home base in the Boston area.

BSG Team Ventures Managing Director, Clark Waterfall, expressed excitement over Susan’s joining the firm, emphasizing that “BSG, over the last several years, has developed a strong track record of search execution across private equity-backed portfolio companies in the education and technology sectors. Susan’s addition brings both a deeper functional expertise in CFO recruitment, as well as a broader industry specialization of including sectors important to private equity, such as manufacturing and consumer.”

“I’m excited to be joining BSG,” Susan adds.  “Their boutique orientation and depth of experience combine to create the best possible outcome for the customer, in terms of delivery and results.” 

BSG Team Ventures is proud to announce the successful completion of the chief executive officer search at Harvest Automation Inc. (www.harvestai.com) in Billerica, MA.

BSG recruited John Kawola to replace Charles Grinnell, who will assume the role of chief operating officer at the innovative robotics start-up.  “John’s experience commercializing hardware technology and leading companies thru the various stages of growth will be invaluable as we take the company to the next phase.” Grinnell stated.

Clark Waterfall, who led the search process added, “Charlie and his team have built an exciting company, and we were excited at the prospect of working with him and the Board of Directors to identify a commercial-stage CEO who could leverage prior experience and success as an impact player to help bring Harvest into the customer market.”

For the past four years, Kawola served as the President and CEO of Z Corporation.  Z Corporation was a manufacturer of 3-D printers and hardware peripherals.  Z Corporation was acquired by 3D Systems at the beginning of 2012.  While serving as CEO at Z Corporation (at the time owned by private equity firm, Ratos (www.Ratos.se), he managed 45 million dollars in revenue and over 130 employees.  Participating in all facets of the company, he had worked his way up from Sales Manager, when he joined the start-up in 1997.

“I am extremely excited to be joining Harvest,” recently said Kawola. “They have a robust technology that is focused to address clear customer pain points. Agriculture, like most industries, is always looking to become more efficient and productive and our aim is to bring solutions that address specific labor constraints. Charlie [Grinnell] and the team have done a fantastic job so far and my goal is to help lead the company through strong market introduction and scale-up.”

Harvest Automation develops and engineers robots for the agricultural industry.  By addresses labor scarcity issues, Harvest creates a workforce of sustainable robots that can safely work alongside people.  Backed by Entrée Capital, Founder Collective, Life Sciences Partners, Cultivian Ventures, and Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, Harvest Automation is headquartered outside of Boston, MA and was founded in 2008.

For more information, please see the Harvest Automation press release: http://bit.ly/UgRxle.

Read the recent article about John Kawola’s new job in The Boston Globe:  http://bo.st/SAAvBq.  

BSG Team Ventures is proud to announce the successful completion of the CEO search for the Virtual High School Collaborative (www.govhs.org).

BSG recruited Jeffrey A. Elliott to replace Liz Pape, who retired as CEO of the nonprofit pioneer of K-12 online learning in July.  “We conducted a nationwide search to find a CEO who has the experience, expertise, and vision to build on VHS’ 15 years of success and help set our direction for the future,” said Kevin Lyons, chairman of the VHS Board of Directors. “Jeff’s extensive business experience, as well as his in-depth knowledge of the online education market, and his commitment to VHS’ values and beliefs made him the right candidate for the job.”

Ralph Protsik, of BSG TeamVentures, who led the search process, added, “I’ve known Jeff as a client for more than ten years. That the timing—and opportunity—for Jeff’s move to VHS were right was, frankly, a bit of luck. He will fit well into the culture of this highly respected, mission-driven company.”

Previously, Elliott served as President and CEO of Advanced Academics (a division of DeVry), one of the leading providers of online education for public school students in the country. There he led the company’s pioneering strategy to serve at-risk students and the deployment of its comprehensive online learning model. Prior to that, he served as vice president of development for the Wright Group/McGraw-Hill, where he oversaw three divisions of this leading educational publishing company. He is a graduate of University of Chicago – Graduate School of Business and University of Missouri – School of Journalism.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Maynard, MA, The VHS Collaborative (formerly Virtual High School Global Consortium) is the pioneer of K-12 online learning, having first brought online learning into secondary education. Since then, the nonprofit organization has been setting the standard for quality online education. VHS provides co-synchronous courses taught in global online classrooms for secondary school students and online professional development in 21^st century teaching best practices for educators.  The organization also meets the unique educational needs of schools through custom course development, private course offerings, and support for blended learning initiatives.

VHS’ design and delivery standards were the model used by the National Education Association in their recommended standards for online learning.  The organization has won numerous awards, including the Stockholm Challenge Award for Global Excellence in Information Technology and is a three-time winner of the United States Distance Learning Association’s (USDLA) award for Excellence in Programming and Excellence in Best Practices.

For more information, please see the VHS press release:  http://tinyurl.com/9sjhy47.

September 13, 2012 marked our 6th annual charity tennis tournament pitting venture capitalists against entrepreneurs on the grass courts in Chestnut Hill.

At stake? Another year’s bragging rights.  A combination of Ryder Cup meets Davis Cup meets… a half-day out of the office playing hooky for a great cause.

What made this year special?

The weather:  A perfect 75 degree, zero-humidity, crystal-blue fall day.

The turnout:  40+ tennis players making up 20 doubles teams, paired as investors or entrepreneurs.

Nic Bollettieri coaching VC and Entrepreneur team members

The tennis legend:  Silicon Valley Bank, one of the event’s charter underwriters since our first year, inspired the players and the greater Boston tennis community by bringing in Nick Bollettieri for half-hour coaching sessions with players, family, and enthusiasts. Throughout the day more than 30 aspiring junior and adult players participated in a series of clinics and learned from Nick’s coaching expertise while listening to Nick’s anecdotes of top ranked players. Nick Bollettieri is best known for the IMG Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Maitland, Florida.  The Academy has produced players like Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, Maria Sharapova, Andre Agassi, Venus & Serena Williams and other pro tour all-stars.

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Pioneering custom reimbursement solutions for companies with mobile employees

Our client designs and administers vehicle reimbursement programs and expense management solutions for companies with mobile employees.

Companies are under increasing pressure to reduce costs, administration, and liability while increasing employee satisfaction and productivity. Our client’s reimbursement experts, technologists, and tax specialists ensure these goals are achieved.

Each program maximizes the benefits of combining tax-free reimbursements with an easily managed and automated process for administration, resulting in lower costs, enhanced productivity, and increased employee satisfaction.

The Position

Reporting directly to CRS Founder & CEO Gregg Darish, the Vice President of Client Services will play a senior leadership role as part of the senior executive team, overseeing all client services operations, holding leadership responsibility for a team of 30+ account managers and call center service representatives.

Responsible for overall client satisfaction, the Vice President of Client Services will recommend appropriate strategies, tactics and operational initiatives to continuously enhance client satisfaction. The VP of Client Services will provide vision and leadership to our Call Support and Account Management teams.

This role will also work closely with both the VP Sales on the business side to help close, onboard, and review CRS users.  The VP Client Services will also work in concert with the CTO, participating in SaaS implementation of CRS software, product roadmap recommendations, and internal management software development including CRM software and other management software as required.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the CRS VP Client Services shall:

•  Successfully lead & manage a client services team of 30 to 50 staff

•  Be responsible for hiring, training, measuring and motivating the team

•  Working with global B2B Global 2000 client relationships in onboarding new relationships, and managing & growing existing customers

•  Travel when needed to meet key client stakeholders to establish, develop, and maintain those relationships, including the management, expansion and renewal of multi-year customer contracts

•  Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary actions

•  Set up processes for project team selection, resource loading, KPIs, etc.

•  Own & drive overall client satisfaction

•  Manage & expand internal call centers with a follow-the-sun client support capability

•  Be able to support SaaS software-powered services solutions via training and technical proficiency within the client services team, and strong interface to the software development organization

•  Be responsible for business planning and proposals, operating budgets and financial terms / conditions of contracts for both internal and external customers.

•  Set up and monitor a set of customer SLAs to which the entire company will adhere

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

 Ideal Candidate Profile

Click the hyperlink below for a  diagram illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the VP Client Services position:

VP Client Services Competencies Heatmap

Staff

The team reporting into the VP Client Services runs at about 30 staff.  Departments that report into this role include the following:

•  Account Management (enterprise side corporate B2B relationship managers)

•  Call center (driver-side customer management)

Compensation

Compensation is competitive with the marketplace.  In a performance-based environment, this will include base salary, incentive bonus structure based on qualitative and quantitative MBOs, and the opportunity to participate in any liquidity event/change of control that may occur in the future of the company.

Tennis Legend Nick Bollettieri Headlines

Boston’s VCs vs. Entrepreneurs Tennis Fundraiser

Sixth annual tourney to raise money for Tenacity, the award-winning non-profit

providing tennis and scholastic programs for inner-city youth

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass., September 11, 2012: A who’s who of investors and entrepreneurs from the Boston-area innovation community will take to the legendary grass courts in Chestnut Hill this Thursday to battle for the title of best tennis doubles team.

Iconic Tennis Industry Hall of Famer Nick Bollettieri – mentor and coach to such international superstars as Agassi, Becker, Courier, Hingis, Jankovic, Rios, Seles, Sharapova and the Williams sisters – will preside as more than 50 players take up their racquets during the round-robin tourney to raise funds once again for Tenacity. Using tennis and physical activities to meet a critical need for safe, healthy, productive after-school, in-school and summer programs for urban youth, Tenacity’s initiatives have served more than 20,000 children. Importantly, they are closely integrated with literacy programs to help build academic motivation and achievement.

BSG Team Ventures is hosting the tourney. Sponsors include Silicon Valley Bank, Burns & Levinson LLP, Grant Thornton LLP, Xconomy, Weston Racquet Club and CHEN PR.

A few spots remain for interested players, so sign up as soon as possible. Silicon Valley Bank has kindly organized for Coach Bollettieri to provide several clinics during the day. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, space is limited. Request participation when registering for the tourney.

What:                       VCs vs. Entrepreneurs Tennis Tournament

When:                      Thursday, September 13, 2012, from 2:00 – 7:30 p.m.

Where:                     564 Hammond Street, Chestnut Hill, MA

Donation:                $175 for tennis, cocktails, dinner, networking and fun

To Attend:                Register here or contact Karlap.Franco@gmail.com

Conservation Services Group (www.csgrp.com) is the oldest and largest energy efficiency services company in the US, focused on the residential home market. The company engages in the design, development, and delivery of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. It offers various services, such as appliance recycling, commercial building performance, renewable energy, clean energy market development and generator representation, solar electric power design/installation and service, and other residential energy efficiency services.

Based in Westboro, Massachusetts, CSG was founded in 1984 by current CEO Stephen Cowell and 4 others to change the way utilities perceived of and operated their power generation facilties on behalf of rate payers across the country.

Today, CSG is in 22 states with 6 regional divisions, and has grown from the original five founders to more than 800 employees and $100M in revenues.  Given the initial pioneering economics of CSG’s value proposition, it was founded as a not-for-profit, and remains one today.  However, the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep, and CSG has benefited from this, growing particularly rapidly in the last 5 years.

With clients across the country like NStar, National Grid, Con Edison, Alliant Energy, Nicor Gas, San Diego Gas & Electric, and NYSEG/RG&E, Conservation Services Group has firmly established itself as the market leader in residential efficiency services.

Reporting directly to CSG President Tina Bennett, the Executive Vice President of Software & Technology will play a senior leadership role as part of the senior executive committee, overseeing all software development and technology infrastructure across the enterprise, holding leadership responsibility for a team of 70+ technologists building and maintaining internal and external software, data, and systems that interconnect CSG, their residential field auditing teams, the utilities and their rate-paying residential customers.

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BSG Team Ventures is excited to be engaged on the CEO search for an emerging, venture- backed robotics company that develops and sells automation systems into an $8B+ market where tasks are currently executed entirely via manual labor.   The first product is in beta and moving toward commercial launch September of this year.

The current co-founder & CEO has successfully taken the company from concept through design & beta launch.  He’s driving the search for his replacement as they enter their next stage of growth to maximize the company potential they’ve built up over the last 3+ years of research, development and customer learning.  He’ll step into the co-pilot role with the new CEO driving commercial adoption, sales expansion, and next generation product roadmap.

The company is looking for a strong sales, marketing & strategy savvy builder-leader to step in and take over the pilot role.

________

COMPANY HIGHLIGHTS

• ONE OF MOST EXCITING NEW INNOVATION FRONTIERS Robotics/automation
• DEEP ENGINEERING BENCH with  founding team members responsible for the initial success and IPO of iRobot
• LARGE ADDRESSABLE TARGET MARKET–$2.5B for first product, $8B+ market for planned 2nd generation products, automating an otherwise manual-labor intensive industry with a first to market solution
• READYING FOR COMMERCIAL LAUNCH NOW with growing backlog for commercial units driven from successful field beta trials over the last 6+ months
• WELL-FUNDED with 9-12 months of runway

________

THE CEO NEED

As CEO, we’re looking for the following 4 prior experiences as a builder-leader:

• Success in companies that integrate hardware, software, and electromechanics

• P&L leadership of  a direct sales-driven and field services intensive organization selling into a large global customer base

• Strong grow-it/scale-it-stage experience, having grown companies or divisions from new product launch to $25M or more in revenues

• Prior track record of recruiting and motivating A-caliber teams

Companies that might be part of this executive’s career progress cover a broad spectrum of industries sectors, including industrial automation, light vehicle developers, medical devices, aerospace & military technologies, or mission critical hardware/software systems.

The following bubble diagram frames the key success attributes critical to the role—

About VHS

Virtual High School Global Consortium (VHS) is a membership fee-based educational nonprofit which partners with schools to expand their course offerings. Founded in 1996, VHS is a collaborative of over 600 schools in 31 states and 42 countries. In 2011/2012, VHS had nearly 18,000 course registrations in over 250 middle and high school VHS courses, including Advanced Placement, core, elective, and credit-recovery courses.

VHS is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools and Northwest Accreditation Commission, and has won numerous awards for course quality and teacher professional development. Virtual High School is the education industry’s leader in providing high-quality online courses to high school students and in preparing classroom teachers to be effective online teachers. VHS is committed to offering schools the highest quality courses at the lowest possible price, and to its goals of high instructional standards, responsiveness to member schools, and affordability. Its greatest strength is its global, cooperative school membership, which offers students and teachers alike the opportunity to participate in a worldwide community of learners.       More…

As executive recruiters, we often get asked about executive compensation.

So often—after we finish up a search—we aggregate the compensation data we’ve collected across the search, and share it back with the innovation community. In this case, we recently finished a VP Engineering search for an early-stage Internet client located here in the Northeast in May, 2012.  Note that there was a specialization required in this search requiring the VP Engineering to have prior experience with Ruby on Rails development environment.

Here is the snapshot of compensation highlights from our search—

The footnote at the bottom of the image above articulates the following criteria for the majority of companies in this data set:

• Internet content/e-commerce providers

• Primarily B2C (business-to-consumer) focused

• This compensation data was specifically from those who had at minimum software development team responsibility that included all architecture, development, user interface & QA

• Although a number of these companies had venture capital/external funding, several were bootstrapped but still with engineering teams of more than 10.

• Companies were located in in the Northeast, with highest concentration in Massachusetts & New Hampshire (New England)

There are many variables to consider that influence where to pinpoint one’s own compensation vis-a-vis the above:

• The more urban locations, the more likely compensation will be higher

• The later the stage of company development, the lower the incentive compensation, the earlier the higher. Yes, this is counter-intuitive, but usually the larger the company, the more mature and capped the incentive compensation plans become

• Equity is represented here as a percentage of total outstandng stock options or share grants a company has issued or available. The more mature/de-risked a company, and the more recently an executive has joined, the lower the typical options grant.