Balancing The Cannabis Culture And The Corporate Culture with Tom Regan

There is a level of sophistication in the cannabis industry that most people don’t know of. It is operated by a lot of bright people doing smart work with organic nutrition and data gathering. Tom Regan, President of Mindful, a cannabis company in Colorado, has taken the business from growing and extracting to distributing and retailing. Coming in to the company, his biggest challenge was to balance the cannabis culture and the corporate culture which meant that respect needs to come from both sides. More than just data collection and management, he needed the company to understand the history of cannabis and its social issues, where it came from and where is it headed.

Balancing The Cannabis Culture And The Corporate Culture with Tom Regan

We have a unique treat. We’re here with Tom Regan. He’s the President of Mindful. Tell us a little bit about what you do and the customers you serve.

Thanks, Bob. Thanks for having me. Mindful is our retail and cultivation brand. We are a cannabis company located in Colorado. As President of the company, my job is to make sure the trains run on time and we serve our customers. Part of our business is we have a 40,000 square foot grow here in Denver. We have a 25,000 square foot extraction facility and a retail footprint throughout the Colorado area. On top of that, we have a B2B business where we sell our products to other retailers.

You were kind enough to give me a tour and it reminds me of a surgical suite when you come in here. The place is clean and the data gathering here is incredible. Shed some light on what you did before here.

In my prior career, I was a Director at Cisco Systems for about twelve years. For those of you that don’t know Cisco Systems, it’s not the food company, it’s the computer company. Cisco is about a $50-billion a year company now. My job was to manage the worldwide supply chain, do product integrations when we acquired companies and launch new products. Before that, I worked at a bunch of small high-tech startups in the networking space in the Boston area. A bunch of them got bought by large companies like Cisco and Intel.

You said it was a $1 billion event that you managed at the time?

At Cisco, I was responsible for about $10 billion of Cisco’s revenue from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective.

I met many people here that had significantly advanced degrees in agronomy and horticulture. We had an engineer that was a farmer that is consulting all over. The misconception about the business is profound and I would tell you that this is a sophisticated. What do you reckon one grow room would take to set up?

A 1,500-square foot to 2,000-square foot grow room would cost anywhere from $400,000 to $700,000 to set up.

I was fortunate enough to see them. If you’re a gardener at all, you’re jealous. There are misters and there are fans and there are hydroponic stuff going on and all the RFID chips to manage. Not to belabor the point, but this is a highly sophisticated operation with bright people doing a lot of smart work on nutrition, organic work, and data gathering.

You mentioned our workforce. We have about 90 employees in all of those four businesses. At the grower we’re at, the cultivation facility, we have a woman that has a master’s in horticulture. We have engineers, the whole gamut. If I had to go top of my head, of the 100 people, over 40 have a bachelor’s degree and a little less than fifteen have master’s degrees.

I was unaware of the industry but the level of sophistication, tracking and compliance, you walk into the lobby, it’s gated in, and there’s more permits hanging on the wall there than you can shake a stick at to comply. This is a real life business. It goes from growing to extracting to distributing to retailing. Talk about challenge that you have of the four distinct business models within the company.

As a cannabis company, we have a wide diversity. The genesis for a lot of cannabis companies was to start a grower, a cultivation center, and then have retail. In a lot of businesses early on in Colorado that’s where they still are. As Cannabis 2.0 started to happen in Colorado, businesses started to stand up what they’re doing. They were growing, they had an extraction facility, but they didn’t do the retail and the cultivation side necessarily. What we’ve tried to do with our company is go the wide breadth. We want to be a fully integrated, vertical company that can do anything from growing all the way to products. At our extraction facility we don’t just extract the oil, we then transform that oil using technology and expertise to create products that we sell on the market, whether it’s food, essential oils, bath salts, or smokeable items. To move up that value chain is where we’re headed, but to do that you need to control all aspects of your supply chain.

Cannabis Culture: The genesis for a lot of cannabis companies was to start a grower, a cultivation center and then have retail.

We were talking about this as we were in one of the facilities, “Over there is our intellectual property.” You guys are developing genetically your own intellectual property to add value and create distinction?

That’s right. Coming from a high-tech background, I call it our source code. At the grow, we have the various strains and that’s our intellectual property. Also over at the extraction facility, the processes, protocols, and data and analytics, that’s our intellectual property as well. I learned a lesson in high tech that if you want to do something and you want to be successful at it, you have to measure it and you have to continually go after it. Our next big project is we’re going to try to get ourselves into a lean mindset so that we’re more agile and we’re doing lean manufacturing here. That’s pretty exciting. I don’t know if there’s a cannabis company in the world that’s looking at lean manufacturing and taking data and analytics to bear on the everyday operation.

When we were doing the tour, you showed me a controller box that you had built to spec to data gather.

It’s loaded with programmable logic. We had to write the code that goes with that and the logic. You talk about the grow environment, when you grow anything indoors, we’re not in a greenhouse, it’s indoors, and you do it with hydroponics, your margin of error is very thin. If you don’t have the data and information you need to stay within those parameters, you can lose the whole crop. You can lose everything. Plus, that would be catastrophic.

If we went from one room to the next, the environment was different from room to room.

Based on the grow cycle.

If you’re short of humidity, your grow facility is slow is a great place for humidity.

Different people grow under different protocols. In our environment, some of our rooms, what we’re doing are more humid. Other people go more dry.

In the data collection and data management that’s your world, where you came from, you look at it with a similar mindset. For you as the CEO, what would be useful to talk about is trying to take an established culture to an industry that was a little more Wild West beforehand.

For this industry, there are two camps. There’s a camp where there’s folks that were from the cannabis culture series people. In time there’s been serious like corporate or business types. For some reason, a lot of companies have two camps and they’re known and identified as, “They’re a corporate culture or they’re a cannabis culture.”Coming through the door, I had more of the corporate versus the cannabis. I had zero cannabis but I came to appreciate that cannabis culture is incredibly important if you’re in that industry. It’d be like going into a business Budweiser and saying that you didn’t care about beer and the history of beer and alcohol. The big balancing act for me has been how I merge those two cultures so there’s respect and appreciation for both.

To your point, Bob, we can’t just have a data driven business, but we don’t understand the history of cannabis and where it’s come, where it’s going or the social issues. It’s holistic. You have to take a whole view in this business. A lot people coming in now in what I’ll call Cannabis 3.0 are coming in with money and business experience but discounting the cannabis culture, and that’s a disaster. In the early part of the evolution of this business in Colorado, it was driven by the cannabis culture with no respect for the business side of it, and that was a disaster. The balancing act here is to meld, to take those folks you talked about with the highly advanced degrees in technology and meld them together so that the culture is holistic. It’s been a real challenge.

Just from walking around the place, you’re a highly motivated individual. There was one room that was in transition, so the harvest had happened in that room and there were some tables that were spick and span clean that the pots were on, and there were some that were in the process. I remember you saying, “By the time this was done, there won’t be a spec of anything in this room.”

We need to hold a high standard. The products that we make are being consumed. We hold ourselves to a high standard. Also the reason I said tomorrow is because time is money. If that room is not loaded for the next cycle, that’s time that those plants can’t begin their progression to harvest.

You were talking about turnovers and that you guys, like many other models, you’re looking to turn on inventory and you go, “That sounds familiar.”

Ask any farmer, if you go through a whole harvest and at the end of eighteen weeks you have a problem. It’s a big problem. Back to your point about the data and having people with data and analytical backgrounds, we can’t wait till that eighteen weeks down the road to find out we’ve made a mistake. We need to know as early as possible and correct for it.

Like any other any other manufacturing business with standards.

I would argue that it’s more challenging as farmer with a living process, with a living organism, you need to be even more aware of it.

The best news is you’re not going to get hailed out.

We’re not going to get hailed out. We could have one of our environmental controls lose power or power failure or we could have an issue like that that gets out of our control, like any other business. If you have a power outage on a production line, you better have a backup plan.

I’m a fanboy because it’s cool to see all this technology. You look at the wiring in the place and I feel like this must have kept an electrician busy for a very long time. For your perspective, where do you think the industry is going to go over the next three to five years?

We’re in an interesting political environment right now. At the federal level, you have the attorney general making overtures in a certain way, but then at the state level you have senators like Cory Gardner who wasn’t necessarily a fan of this. Now that he won the election and understands the impact to the state, saying to the attorney general in the United States, “Don’t mess with the state of Colorado. This is a business that we can control. We know what we’re doing and it’s benefiting the residents of the state of Colorado.”

The quantity of people that you have working here, how many new businesses could take and employ 90 to 100 people from varying levels of education this quickly?

It’s unprecedented. The exciting thing about this business, it hasn’t been done before. That’s what attracted me to it. This hasn’t been done before at a larger scale. This is just like any other startup I’ve worked at. It’s just moving faster and it’s tangible. You can see your results every day.

In my background, way back when, my ignorance about the marijuana culture and the marijuana plant was profound so I got a short course, which was fun, to take a look at this stuff growing. What it reminded me is a large tomato greenhouse.

If you go through a greenhouse, it’s very similar to that operation. The greenhouse have natural light and they’re augmented it with artificial light. We only have artificial light. Back to those tolerances, it’s much harder to manage. I came into this business with the same level of understanding is you did as it relates to cannabis. It’s a steep learning curve, but in this industry there’s room. A lot of the folks I worked with at Cisco and managed in California, in Massachusetts, in Texas, are saying to me, “How do I get into this? I want to get into this business.” I’m talking about people with engineering degrees, software designers.

You get what you get from the workforce because you’re asking people to take a jump, a leap of faith.

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I’ve heard that more than once where the presumption is that maybe people would take and not be interested in the business but the challenge. From what I understand, the demand to come into the industry may outstrip supply.

Early on, like any industry, it’s in its early stage. You get what you get from the workforce because you’re asking people to take a jump, a leap of faith. Once there’s momentum behind it, you see those folks that are more of the settlers, not the pioneers, come in and they want to be a part of this. As I talked to the folks that I know from my high-tech background for 25 years in high tech, they’re like, “How do I invest in this? How do I get a job in this? How do I do this?” Unfortunately, my networked there is not Colorado-based, it was based back East California and Texas. California’s starting to sort it out, as is Massachusetts. Texas, we don’t know. My pitch to those folks is, “Move to Colorado.” They’re like, “No, this is going to happen to my state. How do I get it?”

I’ve had a few highly successful people from Cisco and startups that I’ve worked with that have come out here on their own dime and I’ve let them come out here and shadow for a week, they’ve gone back and now they’re driving me crazy, “How do I get a job?” “Move to Colorado.” “I don’t want to do that,” but on their own dime flew out here, shadowed me, took a week off from work, and then now they’ve got the bug because they see the opportunity. You talked about the systems, the analytics, the processes, everything is new. Everything we’re doing is new. I don’t mean to say it hasn’t been done before, but doing it at the rapid pace this business in this industry is growing, it’s new. It hasn’t been done.

The state’s benefitting greatly from employment, tax revenue and job creation. It’s been an extraordinary boom.

It has for the state. To see a representative of the people like Cory Gardner before election saying, “I don’t know about this,” and then same with Governor Hickenlooper, both of them now are strong advocates. As soon as the attorney general started to talk about taking measures at the state level, both of them rushed to Washington and said, “We’ve got this. Leave us alone. We know what we’re doing. Do not interfere.”

If there are folks out there that are interested in the industry, is there a website that they could go to reach out to you and say, “I’m interested in chatting?”

We have a website that is our retail and cultivation website and it’s at BeMindful.Today. You’ll find us there. We have a query page where you can send in a submission. We have another brand, one of our extraction businesses, TR Concentrates, and it’s TRConcentrates.com and you can see what we’re doing there. There are tons of resources if you’re interested in the industry. There’s tons of resources, just type “cannabis” into Google. You’ve interviewed Steve Urban. Steve Urban’s company, Riderflex, has been doing an amazing job for us sourcing highly qualified employees. Steve’s making a dent. Steve is probably part of our middle management team. Our sales VP is an executive that spent his whole career on alcohol, twenty something years in the alcohol business. He’s amazing. He’s drawn our extraction in wholesale business from almost nothing to over $500,000 a month, and that came through Steve. Money well spent. Steve should be charging more.

Part of the podcast, part of the idea here is to try to take and memorialize some of the wisdom that you’ve accumulated over time. To that end, most of us are pretty active readers, and in that bent, what’s the most recent book or influential book that you’ve read lately that’s impacted what you’re doing?

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

The book I’m reading now is Free to Choose by Milton Friedman. It talked a little bit about state rights and federal government. Somebody said, “You should read Free to Choose by Milton Friedman.” He’s a free market economist from the University of Chicago. It’s a fascinating book. I love it. It’s thought provoking.

Looking back, we all have challenges periodically. What failure, or at the time an apparent failure, has served you or your company best or set you up for future achievement?

In this specific example, and it’s a theme throughout my career, it’s cliché but it’s so true, finding the right people and making the decisions around people earlier. Somebody once said to me and I didn’t listen to them, and it took me five years of being a manager when I was new, that when you get a stock portfolio, you spend time on the 80/20 rule. 20% of your stocks give you 80% of your return. The same is true of people. A lot of managers when they get first in management, and I’ve seen VPs do this, they spend 90% of their time on the bottom 10% of their performers. That makes no sense. I’ve made that mistake again and again. I’d encourage your audience to think about that. If you’re spending 80% of your time on the bottom 20% of your performers, you’re not serving the business. Quite frankly, you’re not serving the other 80% of your people that are there and want to be there and they’re working hard, and you’re not serving the 20% that you’re spending the 80%on either.

I know that sounds a little harsh, Bob. I rejected it early on in my career and I paid for it again and again. It took me at least ten years of being a manager to finally say, “There’s some wisdom in this. I should look at it.” It’s Peter’s Principle in reverse though. Peter’s Principle is to gain improvements. You focus on the thing that moves the needle. As people managers, we all want to help someone. When you see people you want to help them, but at some point you’re responsible for business as CEO, manager, president or whatever you are and you need to make those hard decisions around people. You’re investing too much of your time in something that’s not giving a return. I know it sounds harsh, but it’s life.

A lot of the folks that have been in that category that I’ve said, “I don’t think it’s working out. Let’s sit down and talk about why,” have been relieved because they’re in a job that’s not working out for them and they don’t want to let you down or the company down and they’re misplaced, they’re misfit. Some of those folks have repurposed in to a new job and they’ve been amazing. If I had that conversation early on when I saw it, I would have saved those folks, preserved them, or allowed them to go do something that they were more suited to.

We don’t all know what we’re going to do from day one. It might take us a little while. Tom, if you could put an ad on page one of the local paper to share your company’s message or advice, what would it say and why?

I don’t know if I could shape it into an ad but as it relates to Mindful and TR, it’s a company that the people are customer focused. We’re serious people doing serious business, and we’re trying to do serious good in the marketplace. We’re trying to serve our customers and we take that responsibility seriously. It’s not a pithy first page ad.

Walking through the place, Jack Daniels Distillery sticks in my mind. You and I have been there, and you look at the place and you could eat off the floor. Pretty much anywhere in there is stainless steel. You come through this place and it’s the same impression, serious business, highly technical business with highly qualified people that are producing product for consumption and serious about taking care of their customer.

That’s what we’re striving for. As you know, that goal never ends. Another thing that we try to do here is complacency. It’s the enemy. If you get complacent, you’re moving backwards. The goal is I walk through and see every flaw, not every improvement.

For you, what’s the best allocation of either time or initiative that’s helped this company most and why?

It goes back to two things. There’s a saying that I use and it serves me and it serves our managers. Depending on your role, I ask, “Are you working in the business or on the business?” I’m hearing that more and more now, but by that I mean my job is to set a direction, hire the right people, and give them the right resources so they can take us in that direction. Part of my job is setting the vision and the goals around that and the strategy. It’s been a challenge. To do that, you need to have the right people. Once you have the right people, you need to have the right strategy. Because we’re running four different businesses here with all those licenses, it’s easy to get sucked down into the day to day, “We have this problem, we have this crisis, how do we solve it?” It’s been a balancing act of, “How do I restrain that as we build the team up and get a clearer vision for where we want to go?” It’s been a challenge.

Focus on the thing that moves the needle.

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You’re welcome back here anytime. We love showing it off, especially for people that for the first time, it’s mind blowing to see large scale cultivation. It’s a lot of fun within narrow tolerances. Variability is the enemy of consistency and we dance on the margin of those tolerances. We don’t always hold them. There’s a saying, “Never waste a crisis.”I get too many crises, I’m wasting them. We talked about my job at Cisco or at smaller startups, this is the hardest job I’ve ever held. You’d say, “It’s Cisco. $10 billion and you’re running a business that’s doing millions a year.” No. The complexity and the regulatory environment alone is mind-boggling.

Anybody that’s worked with government regulations has an inkling.

Our compliance officer is one of the best in the business. She is probably the only person in the company that can stop everything. She has the authority to stop everything and freeze and do a gut check. Other people have responsibility in their areas where they can stop the line and that goes towards that lean journey that I talked about, but she’s the only person in the company that has the authority that way. It has to be that way. If you’re out of compliance, it’s game over and you’ve put 90 people’s job in jeopardy and you’ve risked the investors. A lot of people are counting on us to do things right. What I say to the team to guide them as a philosophy as it relates to co-regulation and compliance, “If you would be embarrassed to see this on the front page of The Post tomorrow, don’t do it.” These things that are compliant, that if they showed up, they won’t get you shut down or are within the regulations but there’s a reasonable on this test. If it showed up on the front page of the Denver Post, how would you feel about that, even if it meets every legal and regulatory requirement? From a cultural standpoint, I walk around the floor and ask that question.

What’s a good standard?

It’s one we all try to adhere to. I’m sure there are things in my personal life where I wouldn’t be proud that it shows up on the front page of The Post that I’ve done in the past. A lot of people have that. That’s part of being human. As a standard, it’s an important standard.

It’s a whole lot better to set the bar high. That’s what my dad used to say, “If you set the bar low, shoot low boys. They’re riding Shetlands.”

I tell my children, “If you aim for a B, that’s the best grade you’re going to get. A’s out of the question now.”

What would folks say is your most unusual habit or what others may consider out of the ordinary that’s helped you or your company most?

It’s taken some discipline because I used to be a control freak, but one of the things I liked doing is giving someone a challenge or the team a challenge, not giving too much direction, and stepping away. It’s maddening. I’ve been on the other side of it, but one of my biggest jobs here is to develop a team. This is a session plan that if I’m not here, we have a team of people that can step in and do it. We also have growth plans. To do that, you need to develop a capability. A lot of folks that worked for me believe say it’s unusual, but I love throwing out a problem. I make sure that it’s not a problem. I put rules around it like, “Don’t spend eight days on this. If you guys are spending more than a couple hours a day to solve this problem, come see me and we’ll realign it.” I love to set the broader framework, maybe even a strategic problem, and say, “Guys and gals, come back to me with a proposal for how you’d solve this problem.” A lot of people, when they manage, don’t like doing that. They like to be managed. They like a little more direction. I don’t do that all the time. I found that people will look at me and say, “That was unusual that you did that, but I understand why now.”

It’s nice to build a team that functions like as if you were here when you’re not.

If you’re a day to day manager and you’re running a department with people, and people have problems and you have all these metrics and goals and your goal setting, and you’re moving month to month, you can get lost in the clutter of things. For managers to build the capability, you have to have that ability to not just manage the business in what’s your core in your department, but you have to have that ability to step above it, look at it holistically, and recommend solutions. It’s good for career development too.

Another unusual habit, it’s more of a personal and I haven’t done it here, but I’d bring a workout bag. Whenever I had a moment, I’d just go out and run no matter what because I couldn’t schedule it. I haven’t done that here, but people that used to work for me used to have a pool. If I did it later in the day, like at [2:00] PM, I might not take a shower because I was crammed. I’d run back and go to a meeting. They used to have a pool if I take a shower that day. That’s unusual. That’s a personal hygiene thing. It probably wasn’t that pleasant now when I think about it, but that’s definitely an unusual habit. I haven’t done it here because I’m more disciplined with my workout.

Cannabis Culture: If you aim for a B, that’s the best grade you’re going to get. A’s out of the question now.

Over the past three years, what belief or protocol have you established in your company that has most impacted you or your company’s success?

It’s okay to make mistakes, but when you make mistakes, make them on a small scale. You want to try something out, try it out on a super small scale. Let’s take a retail example. You want to carry a product line? Don’t buy $100,000 worth of that product and stock it on the shelves. Buy a small amount of it, put it on the shelves, see what happens. If it starts to sell, get the feedback. Find out why it’s liked or not liked. If it’s liked, find out why. See what time of day people are buying it, then double down on it. AB test, and if that works, triple down on it.

That’s been something that served us well, trying to have a culture of, “It’s okay to think big but plan small experiments. When those experiments are successful, double down on them.”It’s okay. If it fails down at the double down, you can at least point back to that one acts and say, “I was successful here.” Build it and do that quickly too. Fail fast. I know that’s a cliché now but if you’re going to do it, find out, get the details fast and find out why it’s working or not. Refine it and go bigger. It’s served us well.

What advice would you offer a new CEO that’s assuming the role of CEO for the first time?

Listen.

With that being said, you walk in to a new organization and you go, “Listen.” When you walk through the door the first week, how would you structure the process to get listening to occur?

It’s an American thing. You’ve served in leadership capacities since you got out of college through the military. There’s an expectation of leaders to know everything and have all the answers walking through the door. It’s an expectation of the leaders, but it’s also an expectation of the team that you’re leading. That’s a mistake. In any new environment, it’s best to come in and listen to the people that are doing the work, the experts. If you’re coming from another new industry like I did, listen. Part of listening is doing. Go out and do it. Spend a few days in each department.

Spend a few days and do the work, find out what it’s like. If you’ve done that, then you have that base of experience, but still listen. Find out what’s going on. If you slow down and listen, you can learn a hell of a lot more about your business than if you just start directing orders. A lot of people step into a role and they say, “I have to be this visible, out front messiah figure,” and a lot of men and women step into those roles and they have these expectations of themselves, and then they reinforce it with the team. How can you step into a business that you’ve never been in and set a strategy or direction? It doesn’t make sense.

What’s the most common misconception about you or your role as CEO?

A lot of people think as a leader, you have all the answers. You don’t. The second misconception is leadership comes from the top. Some of the best people in this company are leading from the individual contributor role. By that, I mean they’re making decisions every day that impact the bottom line and our customers. Part of that is having the courage for us to create the room for them to do that. A common misconception is that the leadership comes from the top and the leaders know everything. They don’t.

Looking back over the past three years, what would or should you have said no to and why?

In hindsight, it’s easy to say, “I should have said no to this, this and this.”There have been more than a few decisions I’ve made where I should have said no, but frankly I would have learned that lesson later by not saying no later. I don’t think there’s one decision that I would say I would’ve said no to without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I know that’s not your question, but by learning the things I learned by making those mistakes, it’s helped make the team, the company, and myself better. It’s valuable. It’s an investment. You can learn from mistakes.

It’s okay to make mistakes, but when you make mistakes, make them on a small scale.

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For you in the day to day operation, what’s your personal habit or self-talk dialogue that keeps you and the company focused?

When my feet hit the floor in the morning, I try not to think about the fire drill of the day, the emergency of the day, the thing that’s happening, because there are plenty of them. There’s always going to be something that you can go put a fire out. It’s a temptation for all of us, especially now with cell phones and it’s on your night stand or wherever. The thing that served me well is stepping back when I wake up in the morning and taking a look at the month or the quarter or the year and saying, “Where are we?” It’s not easy to do and I don’t do it every day. It’s hard to do because I pick up my phone and as CEO, we have this issue, but it served me well.

If I get sucked into that thing, three hours have gone I’m into that thing, and now the day is running me. For me, the first thing is restraint, having the strength to say, “What are we trying to accomplish this week? Where are we against that? Where are we on the month?”That’s been useful. I’m probably 50% to 60% successful on that. It’s hard to do. Believe me, there’s days where there’s a laziness to it where I’m like, “If I picked this up, my day will be made for me.” I can pick this phone up and look at what’s going on or come in the office and go do that, but it doesn’t serve the company.

For you, is there a quote that you find meaningful or one that you use frequently?

There’s one by Theodore Roosevelt. It goes like this, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the hospitality and the tour and the insight and all the information you share. This has been excellent.

Thank you. I really appreciate what you’ve done here, meeting with people and spending time with our folks and listening to them. It means a lot to me. Thank you.

We’ll have to do it again.

I’d love to. You’re welcome back anytime.

I appreciate it, Tom. Thanks a lot.

About Tom Regan

Tom is President of Mindful Colorado and is responsible for all Operations, including Retail (5 stores) and Wholesale sales, cultivation and extraction operations, and compliance. Tom has spent more than 25 years in product development, supply chain, operations and finance. He has held leadership positions in Fortune 100 global organizations and successful venture-backed start-up companies, including Cisco, Arrowpoint (acquired by Cisco), Altiga (acquired by Cisco) and Shiva (acquired by Intel). He has worked with many small companies helping them grow operations to large scale – both at Cisco and elsewhere. Tom is also a founder of t3 Interactive, a sensor-based software firm, specializing in business communications training. Tom has a BS from Northeastern University and an MBA from Boston College. Tom has lived in North Andover for 23 years, was a member of the North Andover Booster Club Board, and served as commissioner of the youth football program for 5 years.