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TESTIMONIALS

Jeff Bekos

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EVP SALES, LIFECLINIC & STAYHEALTHY
 

Jim and I first met when he was the VP of Marketing at Buckingham Wile, a large Wine and Spirits importer. After I left the wine and spirits industry, I became the GM of the Frozen Yogurt at Johanna Farms.  We hired Jim to be become the outsourced CMO for the Warehouse division of Johanna Farms. He led multiple rebranding projects that generated significant revenue and increased brand awareness for our products. Years later,
 

I hired Jim twice, when I was EVP Sales for 2 different B2B health related companies.
 

I needed to rebrand and build new “Go to Market” strategies to grow the business.  Working closely with Jim, we successfully built marketing plans that were wildly successful.
 

Each time he became my partner and helped set the strategic marketing direction for each company to set ourselves apart from the competition, honing our message and helping us deliver results. 

Gary Knight
 

PRESIDENT, JOHANNA FARMS WAREHOUSE DIVISION

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I hired Jim twice.

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We knew we had a great tasting yogurt, La Yogurt. However, the product was viewed more as a private label yogurt rather than a brand that brought value.  Jim became our outsourced CMO and his first step was to have us step back and reassess our market and products.  His knowledge and experience in business strategy helped us to realize that we were not capitalizing on a huge hidden market in our product category.  Jim saw that the Hispanic market was underserved and through his market research techniques determined the Hispanic market disproportionately purchased our yogurt.  His extensive knowledge on how to create a brand that targeted a specific customer facilitated a product focus that
 

helped expand the La Yogurt franchise by launching La Yogurt Sabor Latino which added +15% to the franchise. 
 

He took a good product and created a great brand.
 

AND AS CEO, GERARD'S BAKERY

Gerard’s French Bakery was a regional bakery that started to expand nationally through first-rate baked roll and bread products for the foodservice industry.  We turned to Jim and his company to help us in creating a name and image that supported our national expansion and bring new regional and national foodservice chains as customers.  Jim’s vast experience in marketing a company and its products to the marketplace resulted in a remake of the business name, now Gerard’s Bakery, its focus, now The Custom Bakery, and making its name as a regarded brand that brought additional profitable volume to the customer. 


 

His repositioning of the company as a brand not just a bakery led to new customer acquisitions.

John Moser

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CMO, DENIHAN HOSPITALITY
 

As CMO I worked with Jim for over a decade at Denihan for all of our hotel brands. He quickly became an integral part of my team developing marketing plans and programs to drive the business. In particular, Jim was instrumental in strategically repositioning our collection of independent hotels to the umbrella Affinia Hotels brand with a position of Comfort by Design. Jim always had my back and the best interest of the company in mind.  He took the time to understand the customer and helped me to integrate our marketing with operations.
 

Jim’s branding process included supporting research with both guests and prospects. The results led to our Affinia brand always generating the most significant revenue for the company.  
 

The ability to create insights from data and then turn it into motivating marketing messages and programs is why we became the hotel brand that beat competitors in driving bottom line revenues and extraordinary customer loyalty without a point program. 
 

I never thought of Jim as a vendor. He was a partner and a resource.  Someone you want by your side as you go into battle.  I cannot think of anyone I trusted more.

Fred Schroeder
 

I hired Jim as my outsourced CMO three times.
 

Jim has been 3 for 3 in helping me drive growth. He is committed to our mission, a business as well as a marketing strategist, a creative thinker, a trusted partner who is quickly embraced by my team, and after knowing him for over 20 years a good friend.​

 

AS NE REGION DIRECTOR,
THE MINUTE MAID COMPANY


I first met Jim when I ran the sales team for the NE Region of The Minute Maid Company. He had just finished a successful competitive campaign for Minute Maid Premium Choice OJ vs. arch rival Tropicana called The Sunshine Showdown in Florida. They doubled sales and got into Publix and Winn Dixie for the first time in years. This campaign was then taken nationally behind Minute Maid Frozen OJ. With these results I was asked to target the small stores in Manhattan which generated a big chunk of Tropicana’s national profits because of both their dominance and the lack of trade spending. I hired Jim and he worked intensely with me on strategy and together with my DSD sales team on execution.  Jim’s innovative strategies of sampling and in-deli/bodega POS signage helped us get into 800 NYC delis from 0 and generated sales in many stores that were equal to Tropicana.



AS CEO OF MEI SOFTWARE

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I became Chief Restructuring Office after MEI filed for Chapter 11. As CEO, I tapped Jim once again to become part of my management team as CMO as we came out of restructuring. Within 9 months Jim helped us completely reposition and rebrand the company to the surprise of the Trade Promotion Software industry. He then helped us to leverage the strong support of our current customers for our team, our solutions and our services, via a classic competitive comparison campaign. 2 years later we jumped to the front of the TPM niche providers closing 15 new CPG client acquisitions in 1 year.

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AS CEO, ADESSO SOLUTIONS

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MEI was sold and I ended up as CEO of an old competitor, Adesso Solutions. Adesso was in very bad shape having lost significant sales through client defections over the previous 3-4 years. Within a few months of arriving I brought Jim in again to help us develop a strategic plan to turn the company around. As a critical part of my management team we first clarified our message focusing on current clients which stopped the defections. Based upon new industry trends Jim uncovered that the industry had grown and that many clients had started to better handle Trade Promotion Management (TPM), so the newer focus was on wanting to see their trade promotion spending become more “effective”. So Jim created a new category position called Trade Promotion Effectiveness (TPE) that we could own. We weren’t just offering a TPM tool like everyone else. Our deep bench of employees with client side TPM experience allowed us to help our customers with both software solutions but also strategic guidance and insights into making their trade spending more effective. We also recognized the benefit of bringing our clients together in a “TPE community” to learn and grow our solutions for them collectively where everyone benefits. Jim’s rebranding of the company as a “TPE Community” was immediately embraced by our customers and new client acquisitions which started initially as a trickle are now flowing in.

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Ramesh Shah

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EVP, GREENPOINT FINANCIAL CORP.
 

We were looking for marketing help to significantly and quickly grow deposits for several of our financial products. We selected Jim and his team because of their commitment and recommended approach. We started with FREE Checking supported by a fully integrated campaign called Going To GreenPoint. The campaign was unique to the banking industry, so we first tested it with consumers and it received an exceptionally positive response. Upon launch, it brought in so many new accounts that we quickly expanded the advertising budget to target wealthier new customers with $10,000 deposits behind The GreenPoint Advantage campaign. Since it kept working
 

we kept feeding the marketing budget and by the end of 2 years we had spent 4x the initial budget. But it was worth it as the business grew significantly faster than plan.
 

In follow-up years we took the campaign to other products such as Business Banking.
 

Each time he became my partner and helped set the strategic marketing direction for each company to set ourselves apart from the competition, honing our message and helping us deliver results. 

Dave Zilko

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HURON OPERATING PARTNER,
VICTORIA PASTA SAUCE COMPANY BOARD MEMBER 

 

Jim’s work with Victoria was exceptional; both personally and professionally.  

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Professionally what struck me most about Jim was his mastery of both strategy and design,

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and his understanding that both had to work in concert with each other to truly be effective . . . that’s a rare combination of traits to possess, in my experience. Personally I found Jim to be extraordinarily collaborative; he truly welcomed points of view from everyone involved in any of our programs, he only wanted Victoria to succeed and believed that only by working with all the stakeholders involved could that truly be achieved. My highest recommendation, then, to anyone considering hiring Jim...he was genuinely a pleasure to be associated with.  It’s not often in our professional lives that we encounter someone we not only look forward to working with but that we genuinely grow to care about, simply due to a respect and admiration for the character being exhibited.
 

For me Jim was one of those rare instances, and I’m grateful for not only the work he did for Victoria but for the time I was privileged to spend with him. 

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