Larry Firestone is a proven visionary leader, team builder, partner and business architect with a strategic mindset, who builds excitement and entrepreneurial spirit in the company and culture. With tenures as CEO, CFO and COO in many diverse and challenging environments, Larry has a strong track record of turnaround and positive transformation in companies ranging from start-ups to mature publicly held global companies. Larry understands the complexities and challenges for companies that are undergoing or need to undergo change or integration, be it for growth in the business or the need for restructure.

Inspiration and Empowerment
Larry builds strong teams that willingly take on monumental and outside-the box-challenges. He does this by unleashing the potential of the individuals on the team, and by motivating them to drive their own contagious enthusiasm for the goals they set for themselves and their organizations.

With the philosophy of “People, process and information are the keys to running a solid company” it is Larry’s view that these three elements are under constant change driving for the optimum. These three elements along with the company’s core technology are the areas to invest in and drive change and optimization which will often have a larger positive impact than even introducing a new product. To the extent possible, the people, who are the nucleus of the business, need to have at their fingertips excellent and complete information and solid processes with which to run the business and allow the people to run at full speed.

Driver of Process Excellence

Larry looks at every part of the business as a production operation, and applies the same rules to the rest of the business that one would implement in a well run manufacturing operation, with a focus on quality, delivery, technology and profitability. Documentation provides for repeatable processes and an opportunity to debug elements of the process that rely upon “Tribal Knowledge” or poor quality. Removing steps that provide little or no value almost always leads to faster, more efficient process and an opportunity to improve the cost structure. Outsourcing is another avenue of process improvement, and having the team understand what the company or department should be an expert in, and what can be effectively outsourced is a key to the structure of the business, and strengthening the process.

Strategist and Communicator

The person held most accountable to Larry’s standards of process excellence is Larry himself. Larry is a strategist and a strong believer and producer of a written strategy for each part of the business, his own role included. His belief is that business is not an accident, and therefore, each part of the business should have a transparent understanding of how their department should look when it is running perfectly. Effective strategy also means measuring the difference between this vision and how each department runs today, and assessing the projects, headcount, financials, investments needed to drive the business to an end state that is perfect or as close as one can get.

In summary, Larry is a leader who builds strong teams that drive change, efficiency and cost reductions by installing discipline and process improvement and that eliminate chaos, resulting in business optimization that delivers high quality, on time delivery, leverages the technology in the business, and drives profitability. In the companies Larry has run, the people working at the company have an extreme sense of pride and accomplishment, and create an environment of contagious excitement.