A successful board director and former chief executive who has turned around businesses for public, private equity, venture and family-office owners, and who advises boards on governance and process.
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Find the part of a business with a defensible competitive advantage. Exit or deprioritize the rest. Run the focused core to industry-leading economics.
Steven began his career at Bain & Company, where he spent eight years. He then held senior roles at Hewlett Packard, AOL Time Warner and Maple Leaf Foods and led a $1.8 billion North American P&L at Expedia. He has driven the creation of substantial shareholder value as a chief executive, chairman, board director and advisor.
He founded Cavehill Capital in 2015 to advise venture and private equity firms across AI, consumer internet, digital media, marketplaces and travel, and also uses it as a vehicle for angel investing. He holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and lives in Bellevue, Washington.
Across a broader body of work, hundreds of millions of dollars of enterprise value have been created or preserved. These are a few illustrative examples. The first three are turnarounds for a venture-backed company, a family office and a public company. The fourth is under Boards and governance.
The investors needed liquidity within the life of their funds. The value was in subscription pricing, retention and renewal, so the leadership team was rebuilt around them. A recapitalization with a mandate to acquire competitors made strategic buyers pursue ownership.
Sold to a major competitor for about $300M. About 3x enterprise value in under two years.
An unfocused business had just received a low bid. We kept the core line with a defensible advantage, exited two non-strategic businesses and brought a fourth line to industry-comparable profitability, then recapitalized.
More than 5x enterprise value in about two and a half years.
A $250M-revenue division had three years of falling engagement. Focused merchandising, direct marketing, cross-selling and a content-led recovery turned it around.
EBITDA margins from 16% to 35%. Quarterly profit up 162%.
Steven works with venture, private equity, family-office and public-company boards on governance, value-creation strategy and process design. He has served as a director or board observer of several privately held businesses and sits on the board of YPO Seattle.
As executive chairman of an underperforming venture-backed company, he led the board through a candid assessment of its choices, then ran the sale that protected investor capital.
A fund with a fixed term, a family and a public shareholder define success differently. Recapitalizations and sales are designed around the owner's goal, with a keen eye on leadership capacity and company culture.
For a multi-generational business worth over $500M, he sized an unrecognized succession tax exposure and led the legal, tax and accounting team whose restructuring increased enterprise value by 25%, with professional fees under 5% of the value preserved.
Tell me about the business, who owns it and what you need. I reply personally.