Eric King

Current

Managing Director at Arena Group, LLC
Advisory Board Member at Vestmatch Inc.

Past

CEO at ClickSafety.com, Inc.
Entrepreneur in Residence at PRJ Holdings, Inc.
President/Co-Founder - FastFind.com at Bankrate, Inc.

Vice President of Corporate Development at Providian Financial Corporation
Senior Financial Analyst at USI Holdings Corporation
Credit Analyst at Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream

see less...

3 more...

Education

San Francisco State University
Southern Illinois University

Recommended

10 people have recommended Eric

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Financial Services

Eric King’s Summary

Co-founder of boutique investment bank focused on middle market companies at a key inflection point in their life cycle. We provide leadership capital and transaction advisory services to companies with $3MM - $30MM in revenues.

Co-founder of online lead aggregator for mortgage and education markets. Built company to over $6MM first year sales and sold in less than two years with over 3x return on invested equity.

In addition to FastFind, over 10 years corporate finance and M &A experience to include company acquisitions, sale of non-core business units, sale of assets, and investment valuation.

Eric King’s Specialties:

Consumer revolving and term finance
Business valuations
Corporate turnarounds
Acquisition due diligence and deal structuring
All areas of preparing a company for sale or next funding
Strategic partnerships and business development
Financial modeling
Strategic planning

Eric King’s Experience

Managing Director

Arena Group, LLC

(Financial Services industry)

July 2007 — Present (2 years 1 month)

Current and past engagements include:

Served as CEO at ClickSafety.com, the leading provider of online safety training and OSHA certification and lead its successful sale to Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Provided corporate development and marketing leadership to Purple Wave, Inc., a rapidly growing hybrid online/offline auction company.

Provided marketing leadership to Clean Power Finance, a start-up accelerating the adoption of residential solar power.
Advisory Board Member

Vestmatch Inc.

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Financial Services industry)

March 2007 — Present (2 years 5 months)
CEO

ClickSafety.com, Inc.

(Privately Held; E-Learning industry)

February 2008 — November 2008 (10 months)

Returned the company to profitability and successfully lead the sale of the company to Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Entrepreneur in Residence

PRJ Holdings, Inc.

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Financial Services industry)

February 2007 — July 2007 (6 months)

Explored what opportunities exist in the North American payments market to leverage the CMS private label credit platform into either a SaaS model providing third party processing or as the core to a new payments service.

Conducted RFP process to select strategic payments partner to enable CMS to connect to the open loop payments networks, become ISO 8583 compliant, and process general bank cards.

Conducted RFP process for CMS’ Mexican subsidiary, which operates as a third party processor and servicer, to identify and structure a partnership to fund consumer receivables in Mexico.

Made sales presentations to and drafting project proposals for prospective CMS clients.

Worked closely with CMS operational and technical management to draft and execute a new strategic IT plan to migrate CMS from legacy architecture to a Java/SOA environment.
President/Co-Founder - FastFind.com

Bankrate, Inc.

(Public Company; 51-200 employees; RATE; Internet industry)

March 2004 — February 2007 (3 years)

Soup-to-nuts company formation to include:
Initial business plan
Raised $5.5MM in total committed venture capital
Designing and implementing finance and operations groups
Hiring of staff and human resources
Strategic planning
Due diligence for sale
Sale of company in 21 months for $10MM
CFO from inception to sale
Post-sale integration
Mortgage broker licensing
Vice President of Corporate Development

Providian Financial Corporation

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; PVN; Financial Services industry)

October 1999 — February 2004 (4 years 5 months)

Lead on sale of non-core business units
- Sale of GetSmart.com to LendingTree, Inc.
- Sale of Providian's Marketing Services Group to Kessler Financial

Sale of credit card portfolios
- $859MM Providian Bank credit card portfolio
- $2.6B subprime credit card portfolio
- $8.2B prime credit card portfolio

Co-lead on acquisition of the assets of XOLIA.com

Venture capital investment of $10MM in PayPal.com

Manage LP positions of $15MM in total committed capital to two VC funds

Negotiated, closed and implemented co-branded credit card partnerships with OurHouse.com and MortgageIT.com

Credit card portfolio modeling
Acquisition due diligence
Sell-side due diligence
Strategic planning
Senior Financial Analyst

USI Holdings Corporation

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; USIH; Insurance industry)

May 1996 — October 1999 (3 years 6 months)

Financial projections for
- $200MM syndicated debt offering through Credit Lyonnais
- $125MM private placement memorandum
- $150MM high yield debt offering

Financial forecasting and analysis
Financial consolidations
Company-wide training and implementation of Comshare financial consolidation software
Credit Analyst

Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Food Production industry)

May 1995 — May 1996 (1 year 1 month)