Join Host Kevin Fechtmeyer and one of the leading CEO Coaches in the Southwest, Marc Sandroff of Cadre Advisors. Marc is a member of our Deal Team 6 and will discuss when, why and how a Founder should engage a CEO Coach. Later they both will interview Eric Keshin, an owner of Great Harvest Bread. Great Harvest has over 200 franchisees nationally baking some of the best tasting bread in the United States. Find out how he plans to grow his business.

Marc Sandroff

Marc Sandroff has more than 30 years experience as an entrepreneurial executive and private equity investor with a particularly strong track record in health care services and technology. Mr. Sandroff co-founded his first company, a healthcare products distributor, when he was 23 and successfully sold it before he was thirty earning his investors’ a 3X return. He then spent 18 years in the private equity industry, initially in the Private Equity Division of Allstate Insurance, then one of the largest private equity investor in the world. Mr. Sandroff co founded, Essex Ventures, a private equity firm and spent the next 14 years building it to $600 million of capital under management. He was a senior partner of five private equity funds financed by leading institutional investors (including Allstate). In 2004, he formed an entity to provide management services and private equity to growth companies, pioneering the management services approach which combines high level “CEO Coaching” and strategic and operating advisory services with capital investment. During this period, Mr. Sandroff also financed a specialty distribution/information company in which he served as President. In 18 months, this Firm grew from $8 million to a revenue run rate of almost $38 million and was successful sold to Walgreen’s. In 2009, Mr. Sandroff moved to Arizona and continued his management services and investment practice. Mr. Sandroff recently founded Cadre Partners, an Arizona-based Private Equity fund focused on growth investments in companies with $5-15 million in sales.
Mr. Sandroff holds a Bachelor Degree from Washington University in St. Louis in social science and a Masters Degree from the University of Chicago, in Strategic Management and Policy.

Eric Keshin

Before coming to Great Harvest, I spent 30 years working at and running McCann Erickson, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. At McCann, I spent years launching the AT&T brand (back when it was known as the Bell System), taking Gateway to #1 in consumer PCs, rolling out Lowe’s and Kohl’s nationally, and working on Coca-Cola, Wendy’s, Burger King, Applebee’s and TGI Fridays among many other brands. I have worked as the CMO for HP Personal Systems (Computers and Printing), competing against Apple, and splitting off . . . then not splitting off. And I worked at a startup. So what am I doing here?
Well, I have seen many brands and many marketing opportunities in my time. I have been a part of many huge successes, as well as real opportunities squandered for bad reasons out of my control. One thing I do know is that when you do things right, when you are honest and authentic, and you are actually better at what you do than anyone else, then you have every opportunity for success.
That is what I see in Great Harvest. A genuine brand that makes: "Bread. The way it ought to be." (That's why I wrote that line!) The way it was done back in biblical times. It’s not some mythical brand with “bread” slapped in its name just to create the impression that it does things the right way. We do it the right way at every step from start to finish, all the way down to taste testing the wheat we hand select from our farmers in the Golden Triangle in Montana.