Robert Rodin

Last updated
Robert Rodin
Rob Rodin.jpg
Bornc. 1954
NationalityAmerican
Education University of Connecticut
Occupationbusiness executive, writer
Known forCEO and president of Marshall Industries

Robert Rodin (born c. 1953) is an American business executive and author who is best known for transforming Marshall Industries into a pioneering business-to-business e-commerce leader [1] while CEO from 1992 to 1999. Some have referred to him as "visionary" [1] for his early advocacy of commerce on the Internet. He is currently the chairman and CEO of RDN Group, a strategic advisory firm, and Vice Chairman of RLH Equity Partners. [2] He holds board positions with Astound Commerce, Imre, Shift7 Digital, Biorasi, Supplyframe [3] and Inspirage. [4] He serves on non profit boards of YPO LA Gold, ALS Therapy Development and Advisor to Cancer Commons.

Contents

Education

Rodin attended Bloomfield High School in Connecticut. In 1972 he and classmates coded a dating program for the senior class chronicled in the Hartford Current as the “Love Computer”. Rodin enrolled in the University of Connecticut studies included biology, physics, calculus, chemistry, statistics and psychology. Special projects included studies in marketing, attention spans, and consumer behavior. In 1977 Rodin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology. He was later inducted into the University of Connecticut School of Business Hall of Fame in 2002. [5]

Business career

After graduation, he started off in the restaurant industry. [6] When the restaurant was closed, he joined Marshall Industries in 1983 as a sales manager. [7] Based in El Monte, California, the firm was a global distributor of electronic components including semiconductors, electrical connectors, and computer peripherals. Marshall's suppliers included Advanced Micro Devices and Toshiba. Marshall Industries customers included IBM, Solectron, and WebTV. [8]

Rodin was promoted to corporate vice president in 1988 and succeeded Gordon S. Marshall as CEO of Marshall Industries in 1992. During Rodin’s tenure as CEO, Marshall Industries reported six consecutive years of record net sales and was one of the first companies to conduct E-commerce on the Internet. [8] It was reported Rodin often ran around headquarters dressed as Batman, telling his employees to ship their faces off. [9]

Profit-sharing

As chief executive, Rodin instituted changes at Marshall—influenced by the management theory and "quality movement" of W. Edwards Deming—that did away with individual incentives for his sales force and instead offered his employees a profit-sharing plan based on the company's overall performance. [6] These changes were based on Deming's basic tenet, which stated you only get what the system will deliver and the company itself is one system. [10] Rodin said of the changes, "We talked to every single person in this company during the conversion. It took great patience, and a lot of sleepless nights. I was scared to death about making changes." [9] Dennis Trombley, a former marketing executive at Marshall, later claimed that Marshall would not have survived without Rodin’s changes. [7]

Rodin supported the new compensation structure because of its transparency and adaptability. He argued that commission-based compensation incentivized employees to make distortions in operations and budgeting to meet sales quotas. Salespeople at the company shipped a disproportionate amount of products in the last three days of each month, often ahead of schedule to meet quotas and win prizes in sales contents. Different divisions of the company hid inventory from one another and disputed over budgeting, which delayed capital investments to improve the firm. [8] Rodin would later describe the divisions by saying, “It was Detroit vs. Chicago instead of Marshall vs. the world." [9] In a 1998 interview for Fortune Rodin noted the inflexibility and inefficiency of commission-based incentive structures: "How do you design an incentive system robust enough to accommodate every change in every customer and every product and every market every day? You can't—you'd be designing it the rest of your life." [8] Soon after the changes to the compensation structure Marshall reported that productivity per person had almost tripled. [11]

E-commerce innovation

Soon after Rodin viewed a demo of the Mosaic web browser in December 1993, [6] Marshall implemented its first digital strategy. Marshall launched its website on July 27, 1994, three months before Netscape released the first commercial browser. Rodin originally dubbed the service E-Trade, until he discovered the online stockbroker was using the same name. [7] The company replaced its printed product catalogs with a website, Marshall on the Internet, and launched an intranet called MarshallNet that allowed customers to track their orders. Kerry Young, Marshall's vice president of IT noted: “It wasn’t easy to develop this stuff, because there weren’t any people around to ask questions of. Nobody had really done it before." [12]

In 1997, PC Week ranked Marshall third in a list of the "most aggressive adopters of innovating products," citing the company's intranet. [13] In 1997 and 1998, Business Marketing named Marshall the top business-to-business marketing website – no other leading distributors made the list of 200 sites. [7] Marshall was also named best business to business website in the Netmarketing Top 200 in 1997 and 1998. [1] [14] And Marshall was later named best business-to-business website two years in a row by Advertising Age. [7]

Marshall issued laptop computers to its entire sales force and installed Lotus Notes across the firm. Rodin also made Marshall the first industrial distributor to provide live customer service 24 hours-a-day, via call centers as well as online chat sessions. [15] Rodin said of Marshall's customer service philosophy, “No one ever asks for sales person: they ask for someone to help them.” By 1998 Marshall’s network of branch locations served more than 60,000 customers and delivered sales and technical support 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week. Sales per person more than doubled during Rodin's tenure, from $360,000 to $740,000. [8]

In 1999, Marshall was acquired by Avnet, Inc., based in Phoenix, Arizona. [16] During his tenure as CEO, Marshall's annual sales increased from $500 million to $2 billion. [17] The management changes that Rodin implemented have been the subject of case studies at Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California. [5] [8]

Advising

From 1999 until 2002, Rodin served as the chairman and CEO of eConnections, which provided business intelligence solutions for supply chain management. There after, he founded RDN Group, a management consulting firm. [18] Rodin has served on the board of directors for Roxio, RosettaNet, and CommerceNet. He has also held advisory board positions with the University of Southern California and the University of Connecticut School of Business. [5]

Writing

In 1999, Rodin released his first book, Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands, published by Simon & Schuster. Free, Perfect, and Now chronicles Rodin's transformation of Marshall Industries from a successful $500 million business into a Web-enabled $2 billion powerhouse. [19]

Personal life

Rodin resides in Pasadena, California with his wife, Debbie. [5]

List of works

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by Dell in 2001. Struggling to keep up in the price wars against Dell, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC, Compaq was acquired for US$25 billion by HP in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it was discontinued. Since 2013, the brand is currently licensed to third parties for use on electronics in Brazil and India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marketing</span> Study and process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to customers

Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emphasize in advertising; operation of advertising campaigns; attendance at trade shows and public events; design of products and packaging attractive to buyers; defining the terms of sale, such as price, discounts, warranty, and return policy; product placement in media or with people believed to influence the buying habits of others; agreements with retailers, wholesale distributors, or resellers; and attempts to create awareness of, loyalty to, and positive feelings about a brand. Marketing is typically done by the seller, typically a retailer or manufacturer. Sometimes tasks are contracted to a dedicated marketing firm or advertising agency. More rarely, a trade association or government agency advertises on behalf of an entire industry or locality, often a specific type of food, food from a specific area, or a city or region as a tourism destination.

Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Amelio</span> American business executive

William J. "Bill" Amelio is an American business executive who was the CEO of Lenovo. He was also the CEO of Avnet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph J. Grano Jr.</span> American businessman

Joseph J. Grano Jr. is an American businessperson.

Avnet, Inc. is a distributor of electronic components headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, named after Charles Avnet, who founded the company in 1921. After its start on Manhattan's Radio Row, the company became incorporated in 1955 and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1961. On May 8, 2018, Avnet changed stock markets to Nasdaq, trading under the same ticker AVT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arrow Electronics</span> American company

Arrow Electronics is an American Fortune 500 company headquartered in Centennial, Colorado. The company specializes in distribution and value added services relating to electronic components and computer products. The company was ranked No. 104 in the 2022 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Cyrk was once one of the largest promotions companies in the world with over 2,000 employees worldwide. The company's stock was listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CYRK. Founded in 1976 by Gregory Shlopak and Paul Butman, Cyrk started as a company that did screen-printing of customized clothing. The company went public in 1993 and the stock price hovered around $40 per share. The Gloucester, Massachusetts-based company had several divisions although its consumer loyalty division was the company's cash flow engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acosta Sales & Marketing</span>

Acosta Sales & Marketing is a full-service sales, marketing and service company in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Acosta is a sales and marketing company for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. Customers include Clorox and Coca-Cola, which have been clients since the 1930s and 1950s, respectively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zappos</span> Online shoe and clothing store

Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an all-stock deal worth around $1.2 billion at the time. Amazon purchased all of the outstanding shares and warrants from Zappos for 10 million shares of Amazon's common stock and provided $40 million in cash and restricted stock for the Zappos employees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Home Depot Pro</span> U.S. wholesale distributor

The Home Depot Pro, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, is one of the largest wholesale distributors and direct marketers of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products for non-industrial businesses in the United States. The Home Depot Pro distributes a broad range of products such as HVAC, janitorial supplies, plumbing supplies, and security supplies.

Enterprise engagement is a sub-discipline of marketing and management that focuses on achieving long-term financial results by strategically fostering the proactive involvement and alignment of customers, distribution partners, salespeople, and all human capital outside and inside of an organization. Enterprise engagement is distinct from the traditional sub-disciplines of financial management, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources in that it seeks to achieve long-term success by integrating these various traditional business disciplines to consistently focus the organization on identifying and meeting target audience needs. Enterprise Engagement is related to brand engagement, a term developed in Great Britain in the 2000s to describe an integrated external and internal marketing approach to achieving long-term success for a brand. Enterprise Engagement applies similar principals to the achievement of an organization's overall financial objectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David A. Steinberg</span>

David A. Steinberg is the founder and chief executive officer of Zeta Global, one of multiple successful companies that he has founded. Zeta Global is a big-data and artificial intelligence driven marketing company that integrates data, technology, and marketing technology, aiming to help brands acquire, grow and retain customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Actua Corporation</span> Defunct venture capital firm

Actua Corporation was a venture capital firm. During the dot com bubble, the company had a market capitalization of over $50 billion. The company was originally known as Internet Capital Group, Inc. and changed its name to Actua Corporation in September 2014. In 2018, the company underwent liquidation.

Marshall Industries NYSE: MI, (1984–1999) was founded in 1954 by Gordon S. Marshall and was among the largest distributors of industrial electronic components, semiconductors and production supplies. The Company also provided its customers with a variety of value added services such as inventory management, kitting, programming of logic devices and testing services. The Company distributed over 250,000 different products manufactured by over 5000 suppliers to more than 250,000 global customers which included a wide range of original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers and value-added resellers. Marshall Industries was sold to Avnet Inc. (NYSE:AVT)

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zach Nelson</span>

Zach Nelson served as president and chief executive officer of NetSuite, Inc. prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corp.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Odell</span>

Stephen Terence Odell is a former automotive executive who spent all of his career with the Ford Motor Company, and its various subsidiaries: Jaguar, Mazda, and Volvo Car Corporation. His last role at Ford Motor Company was Executive Vice President of Global Marketing, Sales and Service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ZS Associates</span>

ZS Associates is a management consulting and professional services firm focusing on consulting, software, and technology, headquartered in Evanston, Illinois that provides services for clients in healthcare, private equity, and technology. The firm was founded in 1983 by two professors at Northwestern University who developed sales force alignment models using the world’s first personal-computer-aided territory mapping system. ZS continues to offer sales force alignment service to this day, in addition to a range of professional services, many of which are supported by advanced analytics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Shaw, Russell (November 1, 1997). "The Best of the Best". BtoB. Advertising Age. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  2. ↑ "Robert Rodin". rlhequity.com. Retrieved October 21, 2022.
  3. ↑ "Rob Rodin, Board Member" . Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  4. ↑ "Inspirage Welcomes Two New Members to Board of Directors" (Press release). August 12, 2015. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Alumni Profile". University of Connecticut School of Business. Archived from the original on June 18, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 Hartman, Curtis (June 30, 1997). "Sales Force". Fast Company. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Thurm, Scott (March 26, 1999). "Vision Test; Caught in the Middle Marshall Tries to Turn the Web into an Ally". The Wall Street Journal .
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Rayport, Jeffrey S.; Olofson, Cathy (May 12, 1999). "Marshall Industries". Harvard Business Publishing . Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  9. 1 2 3 Fierman, Jaclyn. “The Perilous New World of Fair Pay”. Fortune . June 13, 1994.
  10. ↑ Robert, Rodin. "Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to Three Insatiable Customer Demands". EdEdge.com. 1999.
  11. ↑ Colvin, Geofferey. “What Money Makes You Do”. Fortune . August 17, 1998.
  12. ↑ Wilson, Tom. "Wholesale Shift To the Web". Internet Week. July 20, 1998
  13. ↑ "Fast-Track 500". PC Week . 14 (25): 23. June 18, 1997.
  14. ↑ Blankenhorn, Dana. "Marshall Still the Best". Netmarketing". August 1998.
  15. ↑ Jorgensen, Barbara. “Marshall Planning 24-hr. Online Service". Electronic Buyers’ News. July 3, 1995.
  16. ↑ Franse, Karen (July 1, 1999). "Avnet Buys Marshall Industries". CRN Magazine . UBM plc . Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  17. ↑ "Robert Rodin Chairman & CEO, RDN Group". CommerceNet . Retrieved March 21, 2013.
  18. ↑ "Robert Rodin Executive Profile". BusinessWeek.com.
  19. ↑ Rodin, Robert (1999). Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN   068486312X . Retrieved March 20, 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.