The Redzone Leadership Team

Mark has spent 30 years of design-thinking and practical experimentation with hundreds of factory teams in a quest to find and codify the common traits of best performing teams and small groups.

In 1991, age 26, Mark started his first software company, MVI Technology, collaborating with teamwork experts from Coca Cola, Kimberly Clark, J&J and Gillette, as a reseller of Maintenance Management Software. He quickly saw a problem; the focus of enterprise software was on planners and managers, but excluded frontline workers. This made no sense to Mark; far from improving things, the maintenance teams’ work became harder when the software arrived. To solve the problem he designed self-service touch screens for the tradespeople and hired coders to turn the design into software, and Fortune 500 firms (including Gillette) applied it throughout their plant networks.

He sold MVI to CDC Software (NASDAQ) in 2006 and relocated to Miami, Florida as President & Chief Change Officer. Once there, his team rolled out plant measurement technology for Toyota and Ford plants across the nation, and Mark was invited to serve on the board of an industrial enterprise software trade body. Here he saw what seemed like a dirty industry-wide secret. Productivity wasn’t changing much with these automation products, but yet again, workers were getting more disengaged — and faster.

Mark left CDC to plan a new company. In 2013 started Redzone Production Systems, persuading Richard Tester and Jon Clement to become co-founders of Redzone so they could bring a new vision to life.

With a lifetime spent studying teams and human behavior, Mark had become fascinated by the expert performance work of K. Anders Ericsson (of 10,000-hour rule fame), and the science of Complex Adaptive Systems. The idea for the solution struck him like a lightning bolt — that social media and mobile technology designs could connect teams and carry new frontline worker problem solving recipes. He was certain the productivity and workforce engagement problem would be solved simultaneously, were inseparable and indeed could only be solved together; this certainty has since been borne out, with Redzone increasing productivity and employee engagement at over 1000 plants and for 327,000 workers to date.

In 2019, Mark became Executive Chairman of Redzone in order to focus on design-thinking for long range company and product strategy. Today, he works with data scientists specializing in the science of Complex Adaptive Systems to study the effects of the Redzone Community’s productivity recipes. He has co-published a paper in the Journal of Complexity and runs a Customer Think Tank of intellectually curious business owners and executives to collaborate on new research initiatives.

Believing the obsession with automation to replace workers a fundamentally flawed idea unsupported by evidence, Mark’s obsession remains: to change the management of industrial work by augmenting people with automation technology instead of trying to replace them. He believes in returning dignity to workers, and society at large, and returning profitability to domestic manufacturing. It keeps him busy. It’s exciting stuff.

One over-arching goal unites the whole team: to grow Redzone into one of few software companies to top $1B in revenues as the world leader in frontline manufacturing team engagement and productivity.

As a founding member of Redzone, Richard serves as CEO and is responsible for the continued growth of the Redzone Community, the Redzone teams and the company culture that enables the remarkable productivity results that Redzone is known for.

Richard’s entire career has been dedicated to helping manufacturers unlock the human potential of the frontline workforce, utilizing technologies and behavioral coaching to capitalize on this enormous multi-billion-dollar opportunity. For nearly 20 years, Richard’s focus on this sector has taken him through 1,000+ CPG manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe, partnering with owners and executives in some of the world’s foremost manufacturers. This real-world experience provides Richard with a rich contextual understanding of the market, the technology landscape and solutions required to accelerate Redzone’s position as the leader in the space.

Prior to his promotion to CEO, Richard led the commercial team at Redzone as Chief Revenue Officer, building an innovative go-to-market team from scratch that has resulted in continuous customer growth, almost zero customer churn, off-the-chart customer advocacy and a high-performance culture dedicated to helping customers improve. Richard led the unique, viral go-to-market strategy that grew the company from zero customers in 2013 to the market leader it is today.

Prior to Redzone, in 2004, Richard relocated from the UK to Miami, FL, to launch MVI Technology in the North American market. Leading a successful period of growth and expansion in the market for MVI, Richard was part of the leadership team that sold MVI to CDC Software (NASDAQ). Following a number of years integrating MVI into CDC Software, Richard returned to his entrepreneurial roots, joining Mark and Jon to launch the Redzone business. Richard holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Science from the University of Birmingham, UK, and is the proud father of three young children.

Jon’s 25 year career in manufacturing has always been rooted in teamwork and continuous improvement.  Having graduated with an engineering degree he led frontline teams supplying Toyota and Tier 1 automotive across the UK. This early leadership led to a foundational understanding of how teams can make or break performance in manufacturing settings. As a supplier to Toyota he was immersed in the method and application of the Toyota Production System which set him on a lifelong path of continuous improvement & ultimately the support of frontline workers.

His move into technology came about when he joined MVI Technology and, before long, was asked to join the new North American Leadership Team to launch MVI’s US business. Following a period of rapid growth, and the subsequent sale to CDC Software, he led the integration of MVI Technology products into the CDC suite of solutions; holding the position of VP of Professional Services.  In this role he was part of the acquisition and integration team for Activplant expanding the CDC footprint into automotive and discrete manufacturing.  In 2011, his passion for continuous improvement led him back to consulting where he founded Ignite Solutions LLC. At Ignite he leveraged his manufacturing experience to develop a unique model to deliver rapid ROI continuous improvement consulting services.

Jon then joined Redzone as a founding member; seeing a unique opportunity for him and his team to integrate the CI methods he had pioneered at Ignite with the embryonic Redzone technology to change the industry for the better. Technology cannot solve business problems on its own, it requires the teamwork and collaboration of the frontline, who and when presented with variations or the unexpected, should have the ability to make decisions in real time without leadership intervention. As COO at Redzone, Jon created a technology product that fosters those adaptive teams.  By using social collaboration connected to real time plant data, everyday problems are solved and plant performance accelerates. Leading the software engineering at Redzone, Jon’s engineering teams have built a product that is now used by 100,000’s of frontline workers every day.

Jon is now the CTO at Redzone responsible for the planning and design cycles of all our modules.  Once design is complete his Engineering teams deliver the product and technology roadmaps to support the ever growing customer base.  Most recently the team delivered the latest and one of the most impactful modules, Frontline Learning.

Based in Florida, Jon is a certified engineer with a B.Eng. Manufacturing Engineering and Business Studies degree from The University of Warwick, England.

As Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Redzone, Brian is responsible for overseeing all of the company’s financial functions. He also oversees the human resources and legal departments.

Brian’s career spans more than 20 years of varied experience in financial management, business leadership and corporate strategy. Over the last seven years Brian has worked in the capacity of CFO for software companies which averaged double-digit revenue growth.  Additionally, he spent 9 years at Rackspace, a global leader specializing in public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid hosting.

Brian holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Baylor University, Hankamer School of Business.

Zack is responsible for the entire customer experience at Redzone, including the coaching, implementation and support — but most importantly, the results. His team has a mission to be people-focused above anything else.

Having joined Redzone via Ignite Solutions, Zack was part of the early Redzone team, focusing on building out the coaching organization and providing clear, sustainable, bottom-line results to each Redzone customer. He and his team strive for a culture of excellence by leveraging a customer-first and “white-gloved” approach, whether the task is supporting a technical challenge, coaching operators to win the day, validating software workflows, steering plant leaders to be data-driven, or celebrating shop floor results at a town hall supported by executive leadership.

Prior to Redzone, Zack was Vice President of Operations for Ignite Solutions from 2011-2013, where he embraced a new love for the Food & Beverage industry through developing and deploying CI and lean manufacturing principles. From 2008-2011, Zack expanded his operations leadership skills with the frontline by working with Lockheed Martin in production operations, assembling the C-130 as well as subcomponents for the GMLRS, Arrowhead and Hellfire systems. He is forever grateful for those teams, their patience and collaboration, and the teamwork they shared. Earlier in his career he worked for Porsche Cars North America and Ford Motor Company. Zack holds both a bachelors and masters in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Claudine brings more than 30 years of B2B technology marketing expertise to Redzone. She started her career as an engineer and quickly moved into QA, Documentation, Tech Support and Product Management. She earned her ‘marketing chops’ at Forrester Research and was part of the growth team that took Forrester from $12M to over $120M in revenues over the course of five years and a successful IPO. Claudine continued working with both small and large tech companies as CMO, in technologies as diverse as scanning and document management, GIS, Search, Cloud Services and Media Production and Management. She worked as an executive in residence at PowerTools, a VC firm where she started/evolved three companies that were sold in excess of $100M.

In 2016 Claudine joined ClickSoftware, a leader in field service management, as CMO, and helped the company acquisition by SalesForce for over $1.3BN. Since then she has been consulting with a number of start-ups and large companies including PTC where she developed the go-to-market plan for their Augmented Reality division.

Redzone’s customers and ‘miracle stories’ attracted Claudine to her current role as SVP of Marketing. She intends to build upon a successful marketing team to amplify the phenomenal results Redzone has produced for productivity and engagement of frontline workers, and to forge Redzone’s place as a leader in the connected worker space.

In his position as Senior Vice President, Lawrence leads Redzone’s Medium Enterprise Sales team. With over 20 years in the technology sector, he combines his hands-on experience in manufacturing operations and continuous improvement to support senior leaders of mid-tier food, beverage and CPG manufacturers in achieving their strategic goals of growth, productivity and culture change. Lawrence’s team of subject matter expert sales professionals guide companies through their Redzone evaluation and are dedicated to helping organizations engage and develop their frontline workforce.

Lawrence was a founding member of the Redzone leadership team in 2013, helping the company grow year on year. Prior to Redzone, Lawrence was Program Director at Ignite Solutions, spearheading change management and lean manufacturing initiatives for food and beverage processors. He held various sales and project management roles with CDC Corp from 2006-2011 and started his career as a Consultant at Management Performance Limited, a UK-based boutique Continuous Improvement Consultancy. Lawrence holds a Bachelors degree in Business & Operations Management from Bournemouth University, England.

Ken leads both product management and solutions consulting for Redzone. As SVP of product management, his team delivers enhancements to current products while researching and designing the ‘next big thing’ to drive factory productivity increases. The Redzone solutions consultant team helps factories envision and design their digital production system to meet the operational goals for productivity, compliance, maintenance and culture.  Ken’s leadership brings out the deep understanding his team has for the challenges in the industry and expertly map solutions to the need of every plant in the Redzone community.

Ken joined Redzone in 2016 as a Continuous Improvement Coach, implementing Redzone in food processing facilities across North America. He transitioned to solutions consulting to bring his continuous improvement experience to bear to make frontline teams’ jobs easier and provide them with the knowledge and skills to improve safety, quality, and productivity on every shift.

Ken’s professional career has been dedicated to recognizing the importance of frontline workers across America and how their contributions win the day for manufacturers. During his 20 years prior to Redzone, he held roles in manufacturing operations leadership and lean transformation. He was a content contributor and instructor for Villanova University’s Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Black Belt and Lean Belt certification programs. Ken holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of South Florida and an M.B.A. from the University of Florida.

Lance leads our Enterprise sales team; as well as our EMEA operations team. Lance has a strong background in organizational leadership, refined through his tenure in the United States Marine Corps and within the manufacturing industry with a focus on factory operations.

Lance joined Redzone in its formative years as a Continuous Improvement Coach. He later professionalized and scaled our pre-sales engineering, before leading the Enterprise sales team. Here he ensures our product and coaching model fit hand-in-glove to deliver productivity uplifts and a culture change that are the hallmarks of Redzone.

Lance holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and Accounting from Indiana Wesleyan University and stays active within the military veteran community through several non-profits.

Zaida joined Redzone in 2020 and leads finance and accounting initiatives. She brings over 25 years of experience working at both privately held and publicly traded companies. She has specialized in helping disruptive, technology-based organizations with all aspects of finance and accounting as well as change management and process improvement. Her career has focused on innovative, growth-oriented software companies in various industries (healthcare, education, telecommunications, and transportation).

During her tenure as VP of Accounting & Corporate Controller at Modernizing Medicine, she led the accounting team through the transition from growth-stage to mature operations. While scaling financial operations in a hyper-growth SaaS environment, she was involved in mergers and acquisitions as well as multiple investment funding rounds with various PE firms.

Zaida started her career in Audit Assurance at Deloitte. She is an active, certified public accountant and holds a Master’s of Accounting from the University of Florida.

Eric has overall responsibility for the deployment of the Redzone Production System modules for all Medium-Enterprise customers.

With over 32 years of experience in the Food & Beverage industry, Eric has held a variety of operational leadership roles that have included Engineering, Maintenance, Production and Continuous Improvement responsibilities.  Over that period of time, Eric has been involved with plant startups, led new product launches and overseen major capital projects.  Eric started his career with PepsiCo Foods and spent 18 years at various Quaker Oats and Frito-Lay facilities around the country before taking on site leadership responsibilities with several Food Ingredient companies in the Chicagoland area, which is where he currently resides.  Eric earned his undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from William Woods University.

Mitch leads operations for Large Enterprise customers, responsible for deploying Redzone to Large Enterprise customers, coaching best practices and aligning with existing management operating systems and continuous improvement programs deployed across plant networks.

Mitch joined Redzone in 2016 as a Continuous Improvement Coach, was promoted to Coaching Director in 2017, and then into Large Enterprise in 2018. Since that time, he has worked with those customers to guide how they utilize Redzone to improve communication, empower and leverage their shopfloor teams and align with management across facilities to satisfy corporate standards and meet business objectives.

Prior to joining Redzone, Mitch spent over 15 years working in continuous improvement and operations for organizations ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in the chemical and food & beverage industries, during which time, he received his certification as a Six Sigma Black Belt from the American Society for Quality. Mitch holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Erik leads technical onboarding, application support, and the highest priority – the security of the evolving environments surrounding Redzone. Having delivered hundreds of successful Redzone implementations in an industry-defining 8-week period, customers recognize an immediate ROI through Erik’s onboarding teams.

Erik joined Redzone as a Field Engineer, augmenting the application support and implementation teams with data accuracy and automation expertise. He later moved into a Platform Team Lead role and then Operations Director, reinventing the customer onboarding and training experience the week before a launch. In 2019, Erik advanced the security of Redzone with new partners, tools, teams, and a resulting SOC 2 Type II certification. His obsession and influence towards customer support have cut response times in half, twice.

Prior to Redzone, Erik spent more than a decade in the automation and systems integration industry, focusing on Food and Beverage manufacturers. During this time, Erik developed and delivered a product that removed the complexities of food processing using the ISA-88 standard – an effort that led his company to a prestigious Integrator of the Year award and two SCADA design awards. Erik holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Evansville.

Ron is both a strategic and hands on technology leader with 20+ years of Engineering, DevOps, Operations and Sales experience possessing a B.A in International Business with a minor in Computer Science as well as a Master of International Business from Saint Louis University.

Prior to Redzone, Ron was early-on at several start-ups including IntraISP, a SaaS based billing platform for telecommunications companies, where he held leadership roles in software engineering and cloud operations. At IntraISP, Ron helped engineer and scale their SaaS based platform processing over 85 million in monthly credit card transactions and servicing over 2.5 million customers globally. After being sold to Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a world leader in telecommunications billing platforms, Ron continued serving as Director of Operations. Later, moving to Silicon Valley, Ron worked for Onlive, a cloud-based gaming provider as the Senior Director of Solutions Engineering where he led Sales Engineering assisting in the eventual sale to Sony (NYSE: SONY) in 2015.

Most recently Ron held an executive position at Envestnet (NYSE: ENV), a leader in wealth management, as Vice President of DevOps where he led several international teams responsible for the digital transformation and modernization of Envestnet’s global software and infrastructure delivery platforms. While at Envestnet, Ron’s responsibilities included the modernization of all global networking and cloud infrastructure as well as the creation of Envestnet’s first continuous integration and delivery platform delivering 1000+ automated software and infrastructure deployments daily spanning 9 countries and 20+ datacenters.

Ron joined Redzone’s senior leadership team in 2021 leading Software Engineering. As Vice President of Engineering, Ron brings his passion for customers, technology, and culture to the engineering of the product our customers have grown to know and love. If Ron could be summed up, he is curious and entrepreneurial at heart finding passion in building and iterating teams, technology, and products.

As Vice President of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) at Redzone, Drew is responsible for internal and external reporting, forecasting, and strategic planning focusing on scalable growth.

Drew brings with him close to a decade of expertise in the financial technology sector. Prior to Redzone, Drew’s primary focus was with private equity firms, fund administrators and family offices within the alternative investment solutions space. 

Drew holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Miami, Herbert Business School and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Elon University, Martha & Spencer Love School of Business.

As General Counsel for Redzone, Mario leads the Legal Department and brings over 20 years of experience to the role. He is a versatile attorney with extensive law firm and in-house experience. Mario is an experienced negotiator across a wide variety of contracts and skilled at assessing legal risk while implementing practical business solutions. He has worked extensively in both the software industry and the food and beverage industry.

Mario has an undergraduate degree in Government from Cornell University, after which he worked as an accountant for a global bank while studying for an MBA in Finance and Accounting. He earned his final credits for the MBA while also pursuing a law degree, both at New York University, completing both degrees within one year of each other. Mario is a member of the bar associations of both New York and Texas.

As VP of People for Redzone, Margo leads the Human Resources team and is responsible for driving and maintaining an exceptional employee experience.

Prior to joining Redzone, Margo spent nearly a decade in the aviation industry and also worked for several high-growth tech start-ups across financial and consumer technology. Throughout her career, she has been focused on values-driven cultures and empowering frontline teams.

Margo holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in social-organizational psychology from Columbia University.