Rod Stoddard
Managing Director at Salt Creek Capital
Rod Stoddard
Managing Director at Salt Creek Capital
Manhattan Beach, California
Overview
Work Experience
Operating Partner, Managing Director
2021 - Current
Lead investor in acquiring attractive companies on a nationwide basis with a long-term investment outlook. Support the profitable expansion and growth of our portfolio of companies in partnership with management. • Source and identify attractive acquisition opportunities of small to mid-sized companies between $1-15M of EBITDA, and up to $100M in revenue. Sectors include business and consumer services, technology, manufacturing, and education. • Lead underwriting, financial modeling, and due diligence. Negotiate price and purchase agreements. Secure equity capital and debt financing. • Identify revenue growth, cost savings, and process-improvement opportunities while developing strategic plan to achieve objectives. President/Chief Restructuring Officer – Blue Ribbon Dispatch (portfolio company) • Restructured transportation company by implementing SaaS and BI solutions and off-shoring to boost productivity. Also working in similar capacity with Varo Capital, Reef Acquisitions, and Blue Water Acquisitions - Independent Sponsors with 50m+ in committed capital actively seeking acquisitions of lower-to-middle market companies.
Senior Vice President, Portfolio Operations
2018 - 2021
Skyview Capital is a private-equity investment firm that specializes in the acquisition and strategic management of middle-market businesses in the Technology, Consumer, and Service sectors. SVC has completed over 40 transactions in its 15-year history. • Led the underwriting, financial modeling, operational planning, and due diligence for investments. Identified revenue growth, cost savings, and process-improvement opportunities while developing strategic plan to achieve objectives. • Directly oversaw the acquired company's CEO and Senior Management while collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure streamlined execution. Typically led the Board of Directors. • Collaborated with portfolio CEOs and Senior Management, led cross-functional strategic initiatives teams to ensure execution. • Led the financial analysis, operational planning, and due diligence of a $400M corporate carve-out of a publicly traded company. Division had 18,000 employees in 35 locations over 15 countries. • Planned and oversaw the 1.5 yr effort to separate and stand-up the entire corporate software and technology infrastructure. • As interim COO, led product development and strategic oversight of company-wide initiative developing custom SaaS recruiting platform. Designed centralized recruiting model that resulting in 80% reduction in time-to-hire, and yielded 4,000 additional hires representing $100M in additional revenue while reducing required operational staff by 75%. • Implemented BI tooling and reporting to enable department leads to monitor and track their success.
President
2015 - 2017
As the President of Media Temple, I leveraged my 17+ years of experience in the IT, cloud computing and e-commerce industries to oversee the company’s overall vision, strategy and execution, and ensure it continued its growth trajectory in the U.S. and internationally. • Media Temple represented ~15% of GoDaddy’s profit but was declining amid commoditized marketplace. Brought in to turn division around and improve integration with parent company. • Led rebuilding effort on all departments. Reengineered people and processes for core product line, implementing best-in-class processes with improved SLAs and 15% reduction in costs. • Identified and executed along key integration opportunities with parent company yielding significant cost savings. • Identified new public cloud offering opportunity. Developed strategy and initial product line. Hired separate Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering talent to pursue. Over two year period, new offerings annually grew 100% YOY, representing 15% of company’s revenue. • Extensive efforts in business development and sales partnerships. Lined up key partners and influencers. Reinvigorated stale brand. • Reversed sales decline in core products.
Vice President
2015 - 2017
President of their subsidiary, Media Temple. See above listing. I also directly contributed to the strategy, product development, and execution of GoDaddy's $600M Hosting business with 5% of the US market share.
President
2013 - 2015
Joint venture between Lexis-Nexis and Internet Brands. With a 140+ year history, Martindale-Hubbell is the leading provider of marketing and web hosting services to legal professionals. Our network of sites, including Lawyers.com and Martindale.com, is one of the largest reaching legal properties on the web, servicing both the professional and consumer markets. • Led deal team on acquisition of Martindale Hubbell from Lexis Nexis. Company had $250M revenue and 700+ people. Structured innovative joint-venture to minimize our risk and maximize revenue opportunity. • Reengineered people and processes in every department (Finance, IT, Product, CS, HR, etc), resulting in reducing headcount to 250 (from 700+) people while improving productivity and SLAs. • Led roll-up strategy in vertical hosting provider space for internet giant (750M+ page views/mth and 110M+ uniques) managed the product roadmap across their 9 verticals. • Identified trends, verticals to target, key features to build or buy, and evaluated acquisition opportunities. Managed those companies as we acquired them. • Conceptualized and launched several product initiatives which ultimately became the backbone for entire roll-up strategy. • Increased profitability led to deal economics exceeding 100% annual cash-on-cash return.
VP, Product & Business Development
2012 - 2015
Helping this internet giant (750M+ page views/mth and 110M+ uniques) manage the product roadmap across their 9 verticals. With a heavy emphasis on acquisitions and managing those companies as we acquire them. Acquired and managed portfolio company, Martindale-Hubbell (see above listing).
Subscription eCommerce Adviser
2011 - 2015
BeachMint is start-up backed by Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, and Trinity. BeachMint’s total funding is over $80 million. Senior management contacted me with a very serious operational/revenue issue which their team did not have the capacity or expertise to address. Using Blue Water's engineering team, I was able to build and design an in-house tool to address and resolve this issue within 3 months. Now I'm using deep analytics of customer and subscriber base to advise on strategies to optimize revenue.
CEO
2008 - 2012
Portfolio of e-commerce sites (subscription and stand-alone based) in employment screening and people-location space. Built & marketed sites, generated traffic, grew revenue and attained significant and sustained profitability without major capital investment. Business capitalizes on underserved market niches with a micro-site strategy targeting long-tail buyers using SEO/SEM and sophisticated customer acquisitions strategies. We use an internally developed scalable technology platform that allows us to quickly launch multiple websites, and micro-manage search advertising buys with hundreds of thousands of keyword to a positive ROI. I lead the development of new features/functionality, strategic partnerships, and site optimizations that improve conversion rate and user experience and maximize customer Lifetime Value (LTV). And manage multi-country team with platform architecture, marketing, and web development in the US, and customer service and order fulfillment in India. • Grew revenue to over $2M/yr, handling 2,000 transactions per day. Profitable within 90 days. • Drove optimization/conversion, strategic partnerships, community building, and shopping experience.
Operations Consultant
2009 - 2010
Advised the development of the vision, business case, and execution of global shared services and outsourcing strategy. Worked with internal and external partners including senior staff of IT, HR, R&D, and Finance to objectively identify organization strengths and weaknesses and actively manage operational transition of functions to lower cost labor markets (Austin/Bangalore/Cork/Sophia). Project resulted in dramatic cost savings while acheiving improved operational efficiencies and service levels.
President
2001 - 2008
One of the highest trafficked e-commerce web sites, and a leading provider of employment screening and people location services. I lead the conversion of the business model from one-off transactions to subscription membership, and built a rapidly growing annual subscription base. I was responsible for setting strategy, product road map, business and partner development, and P&L. Grew revenue substantially, and successfully sold the company. During my time there, I was also VP Product and Marketing where I implemented Agile development and increased new products by 5x/yr, and GM of the B2B division.