About Larry Jones

Laurence Jones, age 59 has over twenty-five years of experience in building, operating and growing world-class public and private companies. Extensive experience in the BPO, marketing services, enterprise software, smart-grid, information and IT services industries.  Jones has a proven track record as the CEO of six companies executing buy-and-build strategies, new business initiatives and leading high-growth and turnaround situations.  He also has extensive experience as Director of thirteen private equity, public and VC-backed companies and Executive Chairman of two others.

Larry was previously Chairman of WebClients, an internet affiliate marketing firm owned by Thoma Cressy. From 1990 to 1993, Larry was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Interelate, Inc., a marketing services firm that built, managed and hosted CRM databases for Global 500 clients. The company was sold to eLoyalty in 2003.

Jones was president and CEO of MessageMedia, Louisville, Colorado, from 1999 until its acquisition by DoubleClick in early 2002. Earlier, as CEO of Neodata Services, Inc. (also Colorado-based), Jones engineered a successful turnaround, grew the company to $325MM in revenues and re-positioned Neodata as a marketing services platform for EDS, which purchased the company in 1997. Previously, Jones was founding CEO of GovPX, a provider of government securities data from 1992 to 1993, Senior Vice President at Automatic Data Processing from 1987 to 1993 and spent 10 years at Wang Laboratories from 1977 to 1987.

Jones serves as a director of Coalfire Systems, Inc. (Private, Baird VC), that provides IT audit, security and compliance solutions for over 1,000 banking, retail and healthcare customers. Recently he also served as a director of Comverge (NASD:COMV) an Atlanta based smart grid services company, providing demand-side energy management solutions to electric utilities, grid operators and energy consumers in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors which was sold to HIG Capital in early 2012. In addition, he serves as director of on the executive committee of the Deming Center entrepreneurial program at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado and has served as Chairman from 2009-2011 and other capacities since 2002. Over the past 10 years, Jones has served as director of numerous other public and private companies including Work Options Group, StarTek, Exabyte, Activant Solutions, Realm Solutions, SARCOM, WebClients, DIMAC and Fulcrum Analytics.

Jones graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a degree in computer sciences in 1975, and earned his MBA from Boston University in 1980.

From 2004 to 2006, Jones was Chief Executive Officer and President Activant Solutions, a $385MM vertical market ERP software company. After serving as a director of Activant for six years, Larry became CEO in 2004 to focus the company on revenue growth, new technologies and acquisitions. Within 18 months, the company completed three acquisitions, raised $305 million in two rounds of public Sr. Notes and repositioned itself as a growing vertical ERP leader. The company was sold to Hellman and Freidman a prominent private equity firm located in San Francisco in May of 2006.

Most recently from 2007 through 2011, Jones was CEO of Denver, Colorado based StarTek, Inc. (Publicly Traded NYSE: SRT). As the turnaround CEO of the $268 million provider of outsourced call center and customer support services for the communications industry he initially revamped the management team, restored double digit revenue growth, and improved margins and earnings.  In 2009 he led the restructuring of the North American call center platform and initiated a global expansion strategy opening offshore operations in the Philippines and Costa Rica.  In 2011, as revenues declined from its largest client and margins dropped due to investments in the global expansion strategy, he exited during a downsizing effort after hiring a strong COO and successor.