Bob Norton, Founder, CEO and Chief Consultant Inventor of the AirTight Management Six Systems Black Belt Expert in All Six Systems ("Guru") with 30+ Years Management Experience Robert Norton is an author, speaker, and world-class adviser and consultant to CEOs, corporations and entrepreneurs on scaling, entrepreneurship, organizational development (OD/OCM) and strategy.  He has been a full-time CEO and board member since 1989 and has grown and sold several businesses. He has grown two start-ups $100M and $156M in sales each within five years and returned over $1 billion in profit to his investors representing a 25X ROI. Today these companies generate billions in sales annually.  Mr. Norton works with companies to get to smooth growth at 25% to 100%+ annually. He helps clients create high-performance teams and a culture that attracts and keeps the highest quality people.  In 2004 Mr. Norton developed The CEO Boot Camp. This training has graduated thousands of CEOs, entrepreneurs from 40+ countries. In 2021 (during COVID) thirty more courses were added to create five more certifications for managers and C-Level executives in Management, Strategy, Scaling, Marketing Strategy and an MBA equivalent we call a Master of Business Acceleration.  All programs are available on-demand and online at www.EntrepreneurshipU.com.  In 2009 Mr. Norton created the AirTight Management framework after having developed this intellectual property over his entire career. The systems incorporate ideas from over a thousand business books he has read since 1984 on business.   Mr. Norton is a specialist at injecting long-term competitive advantage into businesses to develop superior growth rates and profits, as well as long-term equity value in a company. Almost any company can do this by leveraging technology, intellectual property, and a dozen other techniques.  Since 2002 Mr. Norton has trained and coached thousands of CEOs and helped hundreds of companies in Strategic Planning, Management best practices and scaling more rapidly. He helps any company get to the next level of growth through rightsizing systems, management style, polices and all infrastruture.  Mr. Norton has now launched eight different startup companies, several non-profits, two companies that grew from $0 to over $100 million in annual sales on a full-time basis and many, many others in a consulting capacity.  He has also worked for two different multi-billion dollar companies, giving him a broad perspective on corporate growth through all stages of corporate development from raw startup to a mature company.  Companies and products he has been responsible for include Thomsin-Reuters, ISI Systems (a Grumman Aerospace subsidiary at the time), FIRST CALL, InvesTEXT, VideoMunifacts, Portia, HomeView 9sold to Prudential), TechnologyForKids, and the International Thomson Organization (ITO).  Many products he developed grew rapidly and some even dominated their respective markets globally.  Mr. Norton speaks at associations, universities, and corporations on many business topics including vision and business model optimization, organizational change and development, entrepreneurship, and professional management best practices.  He was a technologist early in his career growing to Vice President of Engineering and CTO by age twenty-six and before founding his first company as CEO in 1989. Mr. Norton has been a member many organizations including: The CEO Group, IdeaSphere, Gathering of Angels, WPI Enterprise Forum, The Association for Corporate Growth, The MIT Enterprise Forum, The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), and a Chairman and group leader of the SMall Business Administration CEO Dialog program.  Mr. Norton has also been an angel investor in several companies and acts as an independent director in some circumstances.  Mr. Norton participates on non-profit boards and supports various children related causes regularly.

Specialties: Strategic Planning Leadership & Management Best Practices Dashboard and KPI Design Strategic Budgeting Process Improvement Human Capital Acquisition and Development (HCAD) Organizational Change Management for Higher Performance Use of technology for competitive advantage Innovation & creativity enhancement

 Word Cloud of Bob's Resume and Experience:

 

 

Full Resume

Robert Norton, CEO, Interim Executive and Consultant in Organizational Change and Improvement

     Phone: (619) SCALE06        

EXPERIENCES C-LEVEL EXECUTIVE AND CONSULTANT

Seasoned Management Consultant and C-Level Executive.
Expert in management, leadership, strategy, and using technology for competitive advantage.

Entrepreneurial and technology savvy consultant skilled at starting, building and growing companies from start-up to $250 million. Experienced strategic planner, team builder and value creator who has generated over $1 billion in shareholder value for clients and investors. Highly creative and skilled at strategy, marketing, innovation, process management, P&L management and performance optimization to maximize growth while balancing short-term profit and long-term equity value creation to create sustainable competitive advantage.

 

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

-    Top Consultant – Doubled and tripled growth rate at many client companies. Helped hundreds of companies break through their limiting factors to increase profit, improve market position and competitive advantage.

-    Visionary - Achieved $156 million annualized sales within one year of start-up launch creating new market and disrupting an industry by introducing an innovative multimedia service which penetrated 72% of market

-    Operator - Drove sales from $0 to $100 million with 26% pretax profit in 5 years; added $35 million to revenue in one year, created continued growth and ROI

-    Entrepreneurial - Founded three companies and ran product development and innovation groups for a Fortune 500 company.  Have launched over 100 products in a dozen product lines and in seven different industries.

 

AREAS OF SPECIAL EXPERTISE
High-Performance Best Practices and Culture Change	Business Intelligence/ Dashboards/KPIs	Executive Coaching & Mentoring	Software Development/SDLC Skunkworks, Agile, Waterfall, Innovation
Strategic Planning/Marketing and Market Entry Strategy	Management Consulting	Organizational Change Management	Complex problems
Strategic Selling/BD/Sales	Web/E-commerce/CMS	Process Management	Innovation/PD
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

C-Level Enterprises, Inc. and AirTight Management, MA/FL                                                     2002-Present

CEO & Chief Consultant

CEO and executive level consulting, training and coaching for B2B and B2C clients doing product and business development. Help clients grow by implementing best practices in all areas of the business. Industries included: Web/eCommerce, Healthcare, Software, Hardware, Personal Development, Neuroscience, Medical/Healthcare, IT, Robotics, Legal, business services and more.

-        Develop Strategic Plans to help clients develop sustainable competitive advantage

-        Design and installed Management Systems and trained CEOs and management teams in best practices to enable profit growth and optimization of a company’s market opportunities and sustainable competitive advantage

-        Act as an interim/virtual CEO, CTO, CIO, COO to fill gaps in SMB management teams as needed

-        Created first ever standard for Management Systems for SMBs, AirTight Management (www.AirTightMgt.com). Developed and ran a CEO and Entrepreneurship Boot Camp (2004-2007), now sold as video product. Produced over 100 training videos on best practices plus a Strategic Planning Kit.

-        Author, speaker and thought leader in leadership, management, organizational culture and innovation

Blue Ripple, Inc., MA                                                                                                                      2001 – 2002

President, Chief Executive Officer

-        Recruited to turn around floundering VC-backed start-up.  Prepared it for sale after 9/11 closed the Series B-C VC market for an extended period.

-        Slashed capital needs 50% by developing go-to-market niche strategy and converting to enterprise software model.

-        Cut burn rate 30%+ while also developing channel/OEM strategies; produced $700K sales pipeline within 90 days. Made significant changes in Venture Capital funded incubator by installing start-up best practices and philosophies.

-        Developed an unstructured content data collection and distribution system which collected internal data, encrypted and delivered, using a sophisticated business rules engine, to any Content Management System (CMS) of resellers, customers or distributors. Used by financial companies, manufacturers and information distributors, like Fidelity Investments, to maintain their partner and resellers’ remote databases automatically.

Technology4Kids(formerly A+America)                                                                                     1994 - 2000

President, Chief Executive Officer, MA

Created network of over 22,000 K-12 schools and over 200 corporations using an e-commerce online shopping mall, customized database with GPS and other technology to facilitate 1-1 local target cause marketing through schools. This B2B2C venture was funded by socially conscious investors.

-    Recruited by Board to salvage this troubled start-up; renegotiated debt to 15¢ on the $1 and raised $3 million in equity financing to restart a modified strategy.

-    Raised millions for schools and launched new business model with e-commerce website, achieving profit in 18 months.

-      Propelled key website metrics to as much as four times industry averages, including a 9.4% visit-to-purchase ratio.

HomeView, Inc., MA                                                                                                                  1989 – 1994

Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer,

Launched first full-service multimedia information services company for the real estate industry to deliver virtual tours of residential real estate shaking up industry; raised $12 million capital and structured $34 million corporate financing deal with IBM.  Created the first zoomable GPS map technology now used in all GPS devices, remote kiosks, remote data queries and image distribution and other IP which are still used in many products/patents today.

-      Penetrated 72% of metro Boston home listings; increased productivity more than 300% over industry average.

-      Launched 3 retail locations growing revenue to over $150 million in only 18 months.

-      Drove customer acquisition cost from $278 to <$70 within 1 year.  Sold to private investor group in 1994 who changed strategy and closed the business after franchising it failed.

Thomson Financial Services, (Now Thomson-Reuters), MA                                                  1984-1989

Vice President of R&D, CTO

Ran skunkworks and all product development creating five product lines in five years that all developed into $20MM+ businesses quickly. Created proprietary software platform which allowed more rapid development, code reuse and portability before such commercial products were available to create competitive advantage. This catapulted Thomson from zero to $100 million in 5 years; drove brands to worldwide market leadership mainly via technical supremacy.  Helped open UK and Japanese offices and adapted products for Europe and Far East. Helped parent company and portfolio companies upgrade their technology and innovation

Products built included:

-        FIRST CALL – World-wide, real-time, fault tolerant, multi-point collections and distributed database solution delivering research, real-time earnings estimates and other data from virtually all Wall Street analysts to most top portfolio managers world-wide. Did what the Internet now does, before the Internet, as a private network and dominated market for over a decade.

-        PORTIA – Real-time portfolio valuation and risk assessment system that interfaces with minicomputers and mainframes.

-        Bond Buyer Video Munifacts – Municipal bond network system, rebuilt using PC technology

-        InvestText – Online industry and company research database used by most portfolio managers and Wall Street firms

Former positions as: Software Engineer, Systems Architect, Consultant for BCG, Addison-Wesley and others.

Lecturer: MIT, Babson, Boston University and WPI. 
Affiliations: MIT Enterprise Forum, SBANE and Dialog CEO Roundtable, IdeaSphere and other business forums

Education: Boston University, Dual Degree Program, Business Administration and Computer Science

Life-long learner and thought leader who trains Ivy League MBAs and PhDs and has equivalent of Ph.D. from vast experience and creation of state-of-the-art Management Science systems and techniques.