Armin Kakas

Revify Analytics

Revify helps mid-market businesses ($10MM - $2B) move from data overload to profitable action. Our RGM-as-a-Service combines accessible, advanced analytics with expert Pricing & Revenue Growth Management advisory, providing a clear roadmap to unlock hidden margin leaks and drive revenue growth without enterprise-level complexity or cost.

Co-Founder

Revology Analytics

Revology Analytics is at the intersection of Advanced Analytics and Revenue Growth Management and specializes in impact and execution. If profitable growth, EBITDA expansion, and higher valuations are your goals, our strategies can help you achieve them.

We help mid-market companies ($10 million to $1 billion in revenues) overcome hurdles and elevate their business with pragmatic solutions focused on three critical areas:

1. Pricing & Revenue Management

2. Sales & Marketing Enablement

3. Commercial Analytics Transformation

Founder | Managing Partner

Pricing Lever

Consulting Partner for boutique Pricing Strategy advisory firm focused on Industrial Manufacturing and Distribution.

Consulting Partner

EBITDA Catalyst

Consulting partner for a specialized Revenue Management consultancy for middle-market and private equity portfolio companies. My advisory work focuses on three primary areas:

1. Margin Analytics & Optimization: Building 90/10 custom solutions for mid-market firms, primarily Manufacturers and Distributors, who want to augment their decision-making capabilities.

2. Promotion Effectiveness & Optimization: From distributors to retailers, provides crucial expertise to maximize ROI in this critical lever of profitability.

3. Sales & Customer Growth Analytics: Building on all-around analytics chops & deep understanding on the human sales execution factor, enables growth with both insights and Sales teams training & playbook development.

Reliancy

Senior Advisor for leading Sales & Marketing Enablement AI/ML advisory firm.

Senior Advisor - Revenue Growth Analytics

American Tire Distributors

I co-founded, built and scaled ATD’s first ever corporate analytics startup, driving incremental profits, valuation and industry profile for parent company ATD. Reporting to subsidiary CEO, I steered the data monetization strategy and execution of customer-facing ML-enabled SaaS solutions, growing the business from 0 to over 2,500 retail locations and manufacturers as customers. Additionally, drove ATD’s analytics transformation by prioritizing and building internal enterprise analytics solutions that augmented organizational decision-making capabilities, shifting the business to a data-driven culture.

A few key accomplishments in this role include:
• Forged key strategic partnerships with 10 of the 15 largest Point-of-Sale (POS) providers in the automotive aftermarket industry. Opened new revenue streams and paved the way for monetization of syndicated, anonymized POS transactional data.
• Led 15-member commercialization team (data translators, business development and sales ops managers) and influenced 50-member technical team to build innovative SaaS solutions that solved key customer pain points in competitive market and pricing insights, inventory management and optimization and profit / sales mix optimization.
• Realized substantial revenue and EBITDA growth for parent company in 3 years after conceptualizing and launching advanced analytics products across supply chain, revenue management and sales. 
• Represented analytics startup at industry conferences and served as trusted advisor and AI-translator to both ATD senior executive team and key clients within tire industry.

Vice President, Advanced Analytics Commercialization: Chief Customer Officer of Analytics Incubator

I was brought on to transition the revenue management function into a data science-driven department. I shifted the department to a Lean framework and expanded pricing capabilities by creating the company’s first in-house machine learning-enabled pricing solution that improved cash flow and liquidity using R, Python and Google Cloud SQL. 

Key accomplishments in this role include:
• Through architecting and deploying clearance price optimization platform, unlocked $300M in liquidity and $15M in gross profits from unproductive inventory despite difficult market.
• Developed and deployed descriptive and diagnostic price and margin analytics dashboards companywide using Tableau.

Director, Advanced Analytics: Head of Pricing and Margin Analytics of $5B Enterprise

Wells Enterprises

Recruited to transform administratively focused pricing team into strategic revenue growth management (RGM) group with analytics and strategy foundation for top 5 manufacturer of frozen desserts. Built RGM function from ground up, delivering volume and profit growth and providing actionable performance insights that optimized decision making. Shapeshifted business strategy and culture by establishing four key capabilities: 1) pay-for-performance mindset for promotions; 2) value-based pricing for private label business; 3) advanced analytics driven pricing architecture; 4) dynamic scenario analyses and optimization.

• Achieved 5% and 3% EBITDA growth in FY16 and FY17 despite relatively flat industry. Employed strategic price increases, restructured rebate programs across all channels, implemented rigorous pricing council reviews, and optimized price pack architecture.
• Brought order to chaotic pricing structure process by selecting team of 8 to create and implement standardized pricing strategy and processes and right size price and product positioning based on perceived price-value maps.
• Drove 13% in total Gross Profit $ in FY16 (+11% in unit volume and +2% in GP$ per unit) for anchor brand via tiered pricing strategy and optimized promotion plans that maximized in-store display and advertising support.
• Orchestrated launch of Tableau server and promotional data warehouse migration in MS Azure. Enabled self-serve descriptive and diagnostic price and margin analytics companywide. 
• Harmonized shipment and sellout data to produce macro- and micro-level promotion effectiveness platform that raised ROI from 80% to 92% in 1.5 years.

Director, Revenue Growth Management: Head of RGM and Advanced Analytics of $2B Consumer Goods Co. 

Best Buy

Accelerated dynamic pricing capabilities as lead of data science team in pricing and merchandising strategy analytics. Masterminded strategy and blueprint for pricing strategy across 1K+ stores. Engineered algorithmic framework to implement dynamic pricing for physical and online stores. Led global team to develop innovative solutions that drove business growth.
•	Designed pricing science roadmap, authored descriptive/predictive analytics capabilities, and directly contributed to the evolution and adoption of human capital/resources.
•	Cut 70% of budget by insourcing strategic planning and implementation function enterprise wide. 
•	Produced 30+bps jump in gross margin after introducing adaptive pricing techniques / capabilities.
•	Won Leadership Award for personal impact based on transformational strategies within pricing function.

Head of Price Analytics & Modeling: Building and Implementing Dynamic Pricing for $50B Retailer

MillerCoors

Collaboratively led a talented, tenured team of analytics professionals responsible for all aspects of revenue management for 500+ distributors and approximately 4k Walmart/Sam’s Club stores.

♦ Drafted an organizational roadmap for retail chain revenue management capabilities. Realized category and margin growth with the use of advanced price analytics.
♦ Successfully delivered unique and specific insights through a combination of integrated data and machine learning methods. Improved the quality and sustainability of newly presented insights.

Manager, Pricing Analytics and Strategy: Head of RGM for $700M Walmart / Sam’s Club Business Unit

GE Capital

♦ June 2011 - June 2012: Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) Leader
♦ June 2008 - June 2011: Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (ECLP) Participant/Graduate
- 3rd ECLP rotation: Marketing Analytics (GE Capital Retail Consumer Finance - now Synchrony Financial)
- 2nd ECLP rotation: Marketing Analytics & Strategy (Vendor Finance - now part of Wells Fargo)
- 1st ECLP rotation: Price Analytics & Strategy (Equipment Finance - now part of Wells Fargo)
- ECLP Internship: Corporate Finance

Commercial and Consumer Finance Analytics and Strategy (various)

Revenue Growth Analytics advisor to executives in charge of growing Net Revenue, Gross Profit, and Sales Productivity | Posts and articles about Revenue Management + Machine Learning insights, methods, and processes.

As the founder of Revology Analytics, I have the privilege of offering mid-market businesses unparalleled expertise in advanced Revenue Growth Analytics & Management, focusing on three core advisory areas: Pricing & Revenue Management, Sales & Marketing Enablement and Commercial Analytics Transformation efforts. 

Beyond my advisory work, I am the creator of the Revology Analytics Insider, a bi-weekly newsletter offering readers unique insights into the world of Revenue Growth Analytics. You can catch the latest issues on LinkedIn and our website, revologyanalytics.com/articles-insights.

To learn more, please visit revologyanalytics.com

Revology Analytics is a Revenue Growth Analytics consultancy for middle-market companies in the Manufacturing, Retail, and Distribution industries.

We are an impact- and execution-oriented advisory firm founded on Outcome-Based Analytics™, with focused specializations in AI/ML-enabled Margin Analytics & Optimization, Sales & Customer Growth Analytics and Promotion Effectiveness & Optimization.

Avid

Building bleeding edge MarTech tools, growth infrastructure, and practice so we can do real work and influence outcomes.

Vice President of Growth Product Management

• Led Analytics and Insights for Avid's D2C Center of Excellence, defining and orchestrating product led growth motions and preparing Avid's enterprise data for AI informed operations.
• Architected and managed a team to deploy a user-centered MarTech stack on Google Cloud Platform to integrate enterprise data and make it accessible and actionable on ad tech and engagement apps. Connected User 360 to CDP like features across applications. Worked with internal talent and external agencies to implement core value in 5 months.
• Partnered with internal AI and ML team to identify opportunities and build business cases.
• Launched a first time user experience team to identify friction, prioritize improvements, and broker capacity and priority across the organization.

Senior Director Growth and Strategic Transformation

• Defined methodologies for market sizing, segmentation, competitive and opportunity analysis and M&A game board. 
• Created and operationalized framework for portfolio analysis: Investment/Divestiture/Maintenance disposition according to market viability, financial metric outcomes, probability of success, and opportunity cost.

Director of Product - Commercial Strategy and Planning

Senior Principal Product Manager

Migrate acquired development team to new systems for agile development (Jira) document control and change management (Agile PLM) and project management (Microsoft Project OWA) during integration. 

Operate as scrum master and project manager.

Program Management

Entrepreneur

Music Tech business and strategy consulting.

Consulting and Entrepreneurship

Apogee Electronics

Recruited by CEO to manage the business.


•  Strategic roadmap development
- Product Lifecycle Management methodology and Program Review
- Customer focused Product Management practices
- Prioritization and execution of strategic and tactical initiatives
- Exploration of technological and competitive landscapes to locate growth opportunities
- Build/Buy/Partner analysis
- Partnership outreach and development
- Financial modeling, forecasting, what-if analysis

•  Operations management
- Revenue plan
- Marketing budget 
- Product portfolio and R&D investment 
- Development cycle and Go to Market planning
- Business review criteria (KPI) and review cadence
- Pricing discipline, strategy, and analysis

• Business Intelligence and Analytics
- Competitive Analysis
- Market sizing and segmentation
- Strategic and tactical marketing planning
- Design and implement regular reporting for sales and marketing performance
- Implement regular reporting for customer support issues
- Increase inter-departmental transparency and accountability

GM and Head of Product

Avid Technology

Promoted to manage a larger $25M+ product portfolio of Avid Audio workstation solutions encompassing product development, partnerships and business development initiatives. 

Define the technology and product roadmap to meet market requirements in support of product line strategy by spearheading the entire life cycle including profitability, pricing strategies, launch, promotions, segmentation, sizing, financial models, pitch decks, client satisfaction, and sales success rate. Manage and mentor product design talent and hold full P&L accountability.

Key Product Management Initiatives
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Deliver executive-level presentations of roadmap definition and commercialization including NPI, marketing, channel sales, and technology partnership.
✓ Spearhead the origination, analysis, and execution of build/buy/partner alternatives to enter new markets and lucrative adjacencies.

Select Accomplishments
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Worked with corporate development and finance to build new partnerships, advancing technological offerings further down the value chain, and increasing thought leadership and brand equity.
✓ Successfully released the first mobile platform application from Avid Audio, facilitating a sophisticated customer data collection, CRM, and highly targeted automated marketing platform.

Managed a $10M product portfolio including NPI, sustaining, and late-stage planning. Oversaw the development and management of the Studio Control Surface product vertical within the Avid product portfolio. 

Select Accomplishments
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Streamlined portfolio to focus investment on growth opportunities and higher margin products, increasing margin contribution by 12%.
✓ Achieved revenue growth of 40% from 2010-2012 and increased partnerships, expanding from 12 to 60 partners.
✓ Successfully developed a cloud platform for user registration data and analytics on SalesForce.com to locate growth opportunities, devise campaigns and promotions, and measure portfolio performance.
✓ Product Owner and Scrum Master for two Agile development teams. Administered Agile backlog for multiple Scrum teams. 
✓ Successfully migrated CRM and automated marketing platform from acquired to acquiring company, resulting in detailed sell-through and customer demographics information.

Key Product Management Initiatives
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Led cross-functional teams in the design, development, and deployment of industry-leading content creation solutions.
✓ Conducted a strategic analysis of Avid’s audio business including in-depth financial models and scenario analyses for SaaS and subscription growth opportunities. Executed key strategic recommendations into new product development.
✓ Devised and executed the strategy for audio mobile application development.
✓ Managed developer outreach and strategic partnership for EUCON Ethernet control protocol SDK.
✓ Governed product portfolio with business and financial planning and contingency modeling.
✓ Sourced product development initiatives from customer visits, online forums, developer relations, and market trends.
✓ Defined strategic direction and KPIs, made recommendations to leadership and executed on approved direction.

Principal Product Manager

Euphonix

Initially hired as part of the quality assurance team accountable for testing a brand new product line, the Artist Series. Promoted to Product Manager to oversee the development and management of the semi-professional product vertical within the Euphonix product portfolio. Held complete end-to-end accountability for $4M of products per year.

Key Product Management Initiatives
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Contributed input and ideas to the industrial design of products and traveled to China to set up the manufacturing line.
✓ Directed current and future initiatives within the vertical and developed new solutions to differentiate Euphonix products from the competition. 
✓ Acted as center point to marketing, sales, R&D, finance and customers on product plans, releases and subsequent improvements.
✓ Innovatively engaged reseller partners to define and execute through-the-line outreach. 
✓ Represented the company at trade shows and dealer educations, as well as conducted interviews with music technology periodicals.  
✓ Created procedures for quality assurance, customer success, and product specialist demonstration and trainings.

Select Accomplishments
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
✓ Launched four award-winning products and increased sales from zero to $4M per year in two years.
✓ Capitalized on technology partnerships to grow the business and challenge the market leader.
✓ Defined customer support, CRM, and automated marketing platform, allowing one person to effectively perform multiple roles.
✓ Product Owner and Scrum Master for over 20 Agile software releases in 24 months.

Product Manager

Left Coast Digital

Interface, menu structure, and motion graphic transitions for DVD.

✓ Used Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, After Effects, Apple Logic, and Avid Pro Tools.
✓ Coordinated needs and resources, insuring quality, and timely delivery of projects within budget and on strategy.

Motion Graphics Designer

FILMLOOK Inc.

After graduating from UCSC film school, I moved to Los Angeles with a backpack full of clothes, a bike, and a resume to get a job in the industry.

By the grace of a few good people I found a seat in an editing suite, and had access to any creative software you can think of.  I spent my time learning everything I could about editing, compositing, sound design and mixing, motion graphics, and image manipulation...and I got to work on a few really cool B movies!

Assistant Editor

Growth and Strategic Transformation @ Avid

Hacker at heart with an experimentation mindset who is passionate about improving user outcomes and business
performance through technology, data, and personalization at scale.


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Armin Kakas

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