Partners & Senior Staff

• Chris Colbert CEO, Simplifier

  @cmcolbert chris@holland-mark.com

  

  I was a Navy brat. I grew up wandering around the world, which most likely caused me to wonder about the world, a lot.  That unrelenting curiosity led me to the marketing business. In 1986 I was one of the two founding partners of the original Holland-Mark (the “Mark,” is my middle name), which became the largest independent marketing agency in New England during the 90s. From its inception to its dotcom bubble bursted conclusion in 2001 Holland-Mark was widely recognized as a marketing and technology innovator, and established a legacy for progressive thinking regarding the challenge of building brands and businesses. It is that legacy (other than my kids) of which I am most proud.

  From 2001 to 2005 I ran One Eighty Ventures, a marketing consultancy focused on turnaround strategy and innovation. In 2005 I decided to “settle down” and became the managing partner of Pile and Company, the preeminent agency consulting firm. My primary responsibility at Pile was to invent new services and capabilities. While there I created the In-house Agency Forum (IHAF), a trade association of sorts to meet the needs of the growing in-house agency community. Today IHAF is a national organization serving over 150 global and national brands. The time at Pile also gave me a bird’s eye view of the changing marketing landscape and the growing disconnect between traditional agencies’ capabilities and the needs and expectations of marketers big and small. That insight prompted me to re-launch Holland-Mark in 2007 as a “hybrid” marketing consultancy that brings together marketing strategy, big idea capacity and creative implementation capability.

  Today Holland-Mark provides strategic and creative counsel to the CEOs of early stage to mid-market businesses. I work closely with many clients while overseeing the overall strategic and organizational direction of the firm itself. I sit on the boards of MITX and Grand Circle Corporation, the Leadership Council of the MGH Cancer Center, the MassArt Corporate Advisory Council, and am Chairman Emeritus of the Advertising Club of Greater Boston. I received a BA in History from Connecticut College and an International MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

• Mike Troiano Principal

  @miketrap mike@holland-mark.com

  

  I grew up in a small town in Rhode Island, the son of Calabrese computer sales guy and a Sicilian hairdresser. I did well enough to make my way into the Economics program at Cornell University, which I failed out of after an otherwise triumphant freshman year. A kindly Dean – realizing part of the problem was my complete lack of interest in Economics – forced me to decide what I really wanted to do as a condition of reinstatement to the school. On the theory I was pretty good at both art and science – though great at neither – I chose advertising. The die was cast.

  Aspiring to Big Things in Big Cities, I landed a gig in New York with ad legend George Lois, before stints at agencies including McCann-Erickson and Foote, Cone & Belding, on brands including AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Taco Bell.  I applied and was accepted to the Harvard Business School in 1992, for reasons which are still unknown to me.

  After B-School I joined WPP Group, reporting to Group chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, who installed me as the founding CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Interactive in 1995.  A year or so later, having built something valuable for someone else (important lesson,) I started Brandscape, a strategic Internet service consultancy headquartered in Manhattan. We had some early success bringing brands like Unilever, HP and EMC to the Web and in late 1998, decided to merge with Primix Solutions, a NASDAQ-traded systems integrator, where I became President.  We grew annual revenues from $5.6 to $30.8 million, doubled gross margins, and added nearly $200 million in shareholder value before the market crash in late 2000. Fun ride, and another lesson.

  I signed on to mobile content pioneer m-Qube at its inception in 2002, acting as the General Manager of Interactive until that company was bought by VeriSign in one of the largest Boston-based venture capital exits in 2006. After that I did some board level VC stuff and an ill-fated project with Robert and Jonathan Kraft, but I was looking for the next big thing when I met Chris and Rob in late 2009.

  I joined Holland-Mark to help create the marketing services firm of the future, believing that Marketing had to break out of the marketing communications box it had been relegated to in the age of mass media. I focus mostly on the startup and digital stuff, while serving on the boards the New England Venture Capital Association, Streetwise Media (a.k.a. BostInnovation) and Kibits. I’m a frequent contributing writer on branding, startups and social marketing, and they say I’m in the top 1% of the most influential people on Twitter. You can connect with me on just about any other social networking site through my About.me page.

• Rob Waldeck President

  @robwaldeck rwaldeck@holland-mark.com

  

  I learned early on in my career that marketing is simply selling on a larger scale: focus on the customer’s needs and wants, deliver distinct value, and engage emotionally. All lessons derived from my first real job going door-to-door selling farm-raised scallops to restaurants throughout New England. That experience also taught me that selling scallops door-to-door is no way to make a living. In 1995 I decided to follow my observations about the lowering cost of desktop publishing technology and start a brand design firm called TPG. Our focus was on working with Fortune 1000 and large regional brands to help them produce high quality graphic materials across a range of media. For twelve years we did just that.

  In 2007 I saw the landscape changing and customer needs evolving to demand a more comprehensive, strategic set of capabilities. A series of conversations with Chris Colbert, CEO of the newly restarted Holland-Mark, led to a decision to merge TPG into his firm. In the fall of 2008 the merger was formally announced and I took on the role of President. In my job I am focused on ensuring that we create client delight. I do that by bringing together the right combination of service philosophy, process definition, and strategic and tactical capabilities. I am responsible for the evolution and management of our global outsourcing network to enable us to be “as good at what we don’t do as at what we do do.” I am or have been active with numerous professional organizations including the American Institute of Graphic Artists and the Future Leaders of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and do a fair amount of volunteer work for nonprofit organizations including the Jewish Family & Children’s Services and the Concord Housing Development Corporation. I graduated from the University of Rochester. Go Yellowjackets!

• Caroline Beaulieu Brand Strategist

  @linabeau caroline@holland-mark.com

  

  How to become a brand strategy expert. Start in Texas. Be a writer. Fail organic chemistry in Georgia. Escape to Europe. Date an Irishman. Be young in Manhattan. Start a blog. End up in Boston. Wear pleated pants. Marry a Californian. Do the startup thing. Get disenchanted. Go client side. Go agency side. Have at least one diagnosable and treatable psychosis.

  Texas taught me how to tell stories. That’s what we do down there. Ride horses, wear hats, and tell stories. Brands are just well crafted stories and Texas is a hell of a brand. It has a solid positioning, motivating One Simple Thing™, proof, stories, and very enthusiastic brand advocates. It’s a brand so well developed that it manages to make a city of Teva-wearing, salamander-saving hippies feel at home in the middle of the gun-toting, Wild Wild West.

  I went to Georgia to become a doctor. That’s 40K my parents will never see again. But it was the start of a period of time dedicated to understanding the nuanced differences between people, contexts, expectations, and preparation. I could go on and on about the parallels between people, cities, countries, and branding, but history has taught me that my obsession makes other people uncomfortable. And that’s led to very small, somewhat sad birthday parties.

  The long and short of it is that my life, and the experiences within it, have taught me far more about brands, people, and marketing than my education ever did. (Full disclosure: I stand uncomfortably close to HBS grads and steal their edumacation.)

  I’ve been a cog at a Big Agency in New York. I’ve been a glorified copy girl in a Big Corporation. I’ve worked with some very shiny, very juicy brands like Virgin and Zipcar. I’ve also worked with matte-finished and intentionally juiceless brands in the health and financial services verticals. I was a little creative, a medium creative, and even a big creative—a director!—and I spent my time using words to tell stories. Now I use entire companies. My job, no matter how juicy or juiceless the brand, is the same. Find the story. Craft the story. Tell the story. Tell it so well that others memorize it, retell it, and add their own chapters.

  I came to Holland-Mark in the spring of 2008 because I met a man named Chris who loved stories so much he restarted an entire company to help others tell their stories. He asked me if I was a good storyteller. I told him I was from Texas.

• Jonathan Lee Creative Director

  @garetjax66 jlee@holland-mark.com

  

  I come from the hinterlands of the South Shore of Massachusetts. From my earliest memories I knew that I would find my way towards the visual arts, in one form or another. After graduating from Northeastern with a degree in design, I began a “journey of symbiotic duality,” honing my skills as a fine artist while also furthering my abilities as a graphic designer and creative director. Over the last fifteen years I have had the honor to work on some of New England’s most venerable brands, including LL Bean, Blue Cross and Sam Adams, while also teaching at the New England School of Art and Design (while earning a third degree black belt to ensure positive feedback to my work…). I joined Holland-Mark in 2011 with a commitment and desire to drive the strategic and aesthetic integrity of everything we do, for every client.

• John Skurchak Design Director

  @skurchak jskurchak@holland-mark.com

  

  I grew up here in New England, a land of cold winters and strong opinions. When I studied architecture and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, I discovered design solves problems; design makes ideas better and clearer; design is where form and meaning come together. Pursuing this idea, I worked in architecture, sculpture, printmaking, theater, and even sign language interpreting, but it was graphic design that won my heart.

  Before I joined Holland-Mark, I ran my own studio for fifteen years, providing branding, packaging, print, video and interactive projects to
  clients ranging from Harvard think tanks to makers of organic candy to green-energy startups.

  Holland-Mark has broadened my reach, giving me the opportunity to work collaboratively with amazing people to deliver excellence to great clients.