Susan B.

With an MBA from a top tier business school, and over 20 years of experience in finance and marketing, I have a unique combination of skills that can help your business create a sound business and marketing strategy, get funding and grow -- especially if you are in technology. My marketing experience includes working in various aspects of product marketing management and business planning in Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Software Division (aka OpenView). As a business planner, I was responsible for taking a new technology developed by HP Labs and bringing it to market. As a product planning manager, I performed market research, and visited and surveyed customers to determine their evolving needs, then worked with an engineering team to bring new products to market and update existing products. I participated in product launches, including creating marketing collateral, sales presentations and sales training. I later worked as a solutions planning manager to create a unique marketing strategy for the entire OpenView portfolio in the financial services industry. My greatest claim to fame at HP OpenView was discovering that the highest value we could provide would be to evolve from monitoring and managing the health of hardware devices and mega-applications like SAP or Oracle, to being capable of monitoring the health of all applications making up our customers’ mission critical business processes. HP now has a range of products addressing this opportunity. In terms of my financial experience, I come from the unique perspective of having worked for nine years as a professional investor, a loan officer helping small businesses obtain credit, and an equity analyst at an investment bank helping emerging companies sell their stock. I know what investors are looking for, and I know how to craft an enticing overall business pitch. Most of my work during that time was focused on investing in, or recommending investments in, high tech companies, mainly semiconductors, semiconductor capital equipment and other hardware-related technologies. In addition to helping you create a solid business plan, I can also help you with the following: Refine financial plans and projections: I have created financial projections for hundreds of companies who were successful in obtaining loans or investments. Create or polish your value proposition and investor pitch. When I was at Hewlett Packard, I was sent to multi-day training to learn how to create compelling sales presentations and sales and marketing collateral based on the story-telling techniques taught by communication and presentation guru Nancy Duarte, who created the slide presentation for Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.