Darwin Stephenson

Past

• FOUNDER & BOARD MEMBER at Engage3, Inc.
• MARKET VICE PRESIDENT at Iron Mountain
• REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT at divine

• CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER at Weider Publications
• FOUNDER & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER (CEO) at Primal Media, Inc.
• DIRECTOR OF SALES & MARKETING at Apple Computer
• MARKETING MANAGER at Sun Computers

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4 more...

Education

• Whittier College
• University of California, Los Angeles
• Kelly Walsh

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Recommended

14 people have recommended Darwin

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Consumer Services

Darwin Stephenson’s Summary

Darwin Stephenson is a hands-on senior executive with a broad skill set spanning all divisions of the enterprise. His deep expertise in the development and execution of sales and marketing campaigns translates into real revenue for the companies he serves.

For close to twenty years, Stephenson has been helping start-up, middle-market and Fortune 500 companies drive revenue and market expansion.

He is a recognized expert in the field of Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty. He has spoken widely on such diverse topics as Web 2.0 Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Electronic Records Management and Information Management Compliance.

Stephenson holds an undergraduate degree in Marketing from Whittier College's prestigious Scholars Program. He lives in Northern California with his wife and three children.

Darwin Stephenson’s Specialties:

Customer Acquisition, Customer Loyalty, Internet Marketing

Darwin Stephenson’s Experience

• FOUNDER & BOARD MEMBER

  Engage3, Inc.

  (Privately Held; Consumer Services industry)

  April 2007 — August 2009 (2 years 5 months)

  Engage3, Inc. is developing the next generation of Customer Relationship Management tools for retail that extends the value of price optimization into the supply chain by optimizing the diverse needs of the retailer, manufacturer and shopper.
  
  As Founder and COO, my responsibilities include all aspects of bringing our solution to market with particular emphasis on:
  
  INDUSTRY FOCUS: Internet & E-Commerce, Retail, Grocery, Consumer Products, Information Technology
  
  SOLUTION FOCUS: Online Coupon Program, Retail Loyalty Program (Customer Loyalty), Social Networking (Social Media), Reward Programs, Electronic Shopping Lists, One to One Pricing (1:1), and Trade Fund Management (TFM).
  
  TECHNOLOGY RESPONSIBILITY: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Distributed Database Systems, Distributed Systems Architecture, NCR Advanced Marketing Solution (Copient), and Point of Sale (POS) integration.
  
  SALES & MARKETING RESPONSIBILITY: Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Partner & Client Press Strategy, Press Relations, FaceBook Strategy, Twitter Strategy, Blog Strategy (management blogging) and general development as well as management of our Customer Acquisition Strategy.
  
  MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITY: Financial Performance (P&L), Management Team Development, Product Roadmap Development, Solution Definition (vision to requirements), Technology Roadmap, User Experience (UX), User Interaction Design, User Profile / Persona Modeling, Investor Relations, Venture Capital Relations, Product Launch Strategy, Partnering Analysis, Contract Negotiations, Partner Development Agreements, Partnership Marketing Plans and just about everything else that goes with a start-up.

• MARKET VICE PRESIDENT

  Iron Mountain

  (Public Company; IRM; Information Technology and Services industry)

  July 2004 — March 2007 (2 years 9 months)

  Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The company offers comprehensive records management, data protection, and information destruction solutions along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery.
  
  I played two primary roles at Iron Mountain:
  
  1. Consulting and Professional Services - Under my leadership, the Records Management Consulting division developed a repeatable methodology for paper and electronic records management that enabled market growth (recognized industry leader), revenue attainment ($11M) and market dominance (our sales methodology was unbeatable).
  
  2. Northern California Market - Embracing a turn around opportunity, I championed a holistic overhaul of the company's fifth largest market by developing and leading tactical as well as strategic initiatives to grow revenue performance ($70M), instill pride in the workforce (300+ employees across 3 lines of business) and build a cohesive management team.
  
  INDUSTRY FOCUS: Consulting and Professional Services, Information Technology, Records Management, Legal
  
  SOLUTION FOCUS: Traditional Records Management (Consulting Practice and Operational Management), Electronic Records Management (Consulting Practice), Secure Document Destruction (Shredding Operations), and Off Site Data Storage (Back Up Tape Operations).
  
  SALES & MARKETING RESPONSIBILITY: Under my leadership, the Account Management, Customer Service, Enterprise Sales, Regional Sales and Operations (yes, the folks in the records center, vaults and those hard working drivers) all worked together to deliver a comprehensive revenue management team that was unmatched in the industry. In 2007, the Northern California Market was recognized as the model for Total Customer Care.

• REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT

  divine

  (Management Consulting industry)

  2000 — 2004 (4 years )

  divine was the combination of marchFIRST and Whittman-Hart with several software acquisitions. Flip Filipowski's vision was to build a suite of services including strategy, technology, branding, content, software and hosting under one roof.
  
  Three of these divisions rolled up to me in the Western Region and my responsibility was developing SVP / C-Level relationships with our clients in order to bring in our other lines of business. Under my leadership, we developed trusted adviser relationships with key stakeholders by understanding each client's business and introducing key experts from divine into the conversation. All of this while achieving our revenue goals, keeping 100+ employees billable and managing a $36M P&L.
  
  At divine, I developed and managed the Search Engine Marketing Practice by integrating Search Engine Optimization best practices with Pay Per Click strategies for a results driven methodology that was sold by every division of the company. As a result, my team optimized over 1,000 high performance keywords with predictable results across numerous industries and clientele.
  
  INDUSTRY FOCUS: Automotive, Financial Services, and Commercial Real Estate, and Business to Business Software.
  
  SOLUTION FOCUS: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Search Engine (PPCSE), Website Development, Content Management System integration, Branding Services (Brand Identity & Brand Strategy), User Experience (UX, User Experience Testing, Prototyping), Enterprise Customer Service, Information Portals, and ERP Systems Integration (J.D. Edwards, Oracle & SAP).
  
  SALES & MARKETING RESPONSIBILITY: When divine acquired marchFIRST, the Enterprise Sales Executives chartered with selling "everything" didn't know how to sell services (which requires a different strategy than selling products). I lead an initiative where "everyone sells" that brought key leaders from each practice into the sales cycle. Our execution was phenomenally successful.

• CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

  Weider Publications

  (Privately Held; Publishing industry)

  1998 — 2000 (2 years )

  At the height of the dot-com bubble, Weider Publishing Group brought together Weider Global Nutrition's products and their flagship publications to launch a content driven e-commerce business (eNutrition). By tapping the publishing reach of Joe Weider's fitness magazines, our approach was to connect editorial content with relevant supplements for sale.
  
  As Chief Technology Officer, my responsibility was to build and support a high-performance, content driven, e-commerce platform with integrated sales, marketing and business intelligence management tools. In today's market, you can buy many of the underlying technologies (e.g. Order Management Systems) but back then everything was built from scratch.
  
  We partnered with Guidance to leverage the development platform they had built for Foot Locker and gain access to their highly talented employees. As a result, we brought a robust, data driven business to market in record time with fewer development dollars than the competition. Our cost of operations were far less than the competition and we survived longer than most of the dot.com start-ups.
  
  In 2000, we sold eNutrition to NutriPeak.

• FOUNDER & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER (CEO)

  Primal Media, Inc.

  (Computer Software industry)

  1996 — 1998 (2 years )

  Everyone should have a boot strapped start-up in their youth and mine was Primal Media. After writing a book on how to sell multimedia products for the Graphix Zone, several of their developers approached me about starting our own multimedia production business. Ethically I didn't want to steal talent to start my first business and instead went to work for Apple Computer in Poland (see below). However, after returning to the United States, two of the developers were not longer working for the Graphix Zone and were eager to start a business.
  
  In 1996, I partnered with Maria Angeloni and Darren Archer to launch Primal Media. You've heard of garage shops and we were the prototypical entrepreneurs that built our own desks out of doors, sold our possessions to buy our first computer and pretended to be bigger than we were. Good fortune follows hard work and we soon had a contract with Philips Media to produce a multimedia CD-ROM entitled "Core Everson: Body, Mind and Soul."
  
  Alas, the Internet came along and the revenues from the Cory Everson product never materialized and we never recovered.

• DIRECTOR OF SALES & MARKETING

  Apple Computer

  (Public Company; AAPL; Computer Hardware industry)

  1993 — 1996 (3 years )

  In 1993, I was approached by Zygmunt Szczepanski to head up the Sales and Marketing groups of Apple Computer in Warsaw, Poland. I will tell you that we exceeded our revenue targets and achieved superstar marketing success in Poland, but that isn't really what is important about this phase of my career (don't get me wrong, those are both incredible accomplishments).
  
  You will recall that the wall came down in 1989 and upon arriving in 1993 the cultural transformation was at its height in Poland. The cultural norms of the past were hanging on and the people were hungry for change. In business, this meant that the old ways of doing business (e.g. black market trading, bribes, etc.) was beginning to give way to Western business practices (e.g. accounting records, ethical standards, etc.). We were caught in the middle and learned a tremendous amount about the Polish people, international business and ourselves.
  
  For myself, this phase in my life was all about honing my communication skills, experimenting with leadership and having fun on the job (a goal I still strive to achieve). As I didn't speak Polish, my interactions with employees, clients and vendors was always challenging. As a result, I had to develop alliances with both friend and foe in order to achieve success, make our numbers and introduce Apple into this Windows dominated country.
  
  In the end, we were very successful and walked away with many great stories and life long friends.

• MARKETING MANAGER

  Sun Computers

  (Business Supplies and Equipment industry)

  1990 — 1993 (3 years )

Darwin Stephenson’s Education

• Whittier College

  Bachelors of Arts , Marketing & Psychology , 1987 — 1991

  Activities and Societies:

  Whittier Scholars Program, Delta Omega Gamma Fraternity, Varsity Track Team

• University of California, Los Angeles

  Japanese 1989 — 1990

  UCLA Extension Classes in Japanese Language and Business

• Kelly Walsh

  1985 — 1987

Additional Information