Brad Roach - Chief Executive Officer

INTRODUCTION

Global Executive Leader with over 25 years of progressive international experience in optimizing all facets of global supply chain and operations performance including strategic sourcing, logistics and distribution and enterprise sales, operations and inventory planning. Extensive experience facilitating growth with target customers, including Staples, Wal-Mart, Lowes and The Home Depot, via integrated strategic initiatives across all elements of operations and supply chain. He has a consistent track record of effective leadership in launching and engraining business platforms and extensive global supplier development and negotiations experience across multiple industries and applications. Brad has proven effective successful team building and development skills resulting in significant enterprise impact in productivity, expansion of customer relationships, inventory optimizations, logistics network optimizations and productivity. He also has considerable board level experience in developing and deploying strategic and operating plans and complete, contemporary knowledge of best in class processes, technology and business performance concepts.

BACKGROUND

In January of 2013, Brad formed Acceler8 Partners. During his successful and impactful career in leading multiple manufacturing organizations to attain and institute best-in-class and contemporary operational and supply chain performance, he and his team have developed rapid assessment protocols, techniques and tools along with effective implementation strategies, project planning mechanisms and strategic planning processes. These capabilities uniquely qualify Acceler8 to be the most efficient, effective and cost justifiable business partner for small to medium sized manufacturing companies. Acceler8’s unique assessment, prioritization and implementation techniques and processes deliver rapid, significant and sustainable business performance improvement in the areas of cost and inventory optimization, customer and supplier collaboration, global supply chain development and lean/six sigma implementation.

Brad was most recently the Executive Vice President of Supply Chain for Tensar Corporation in Alpharetta, Georgia. This was his second assignment with Arcapita, a private equity holding company, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Tensar is a global leader in the manufacture of geogrids utilized in road-base stabilization and slope re-enforcement. The company markets products in all key global geographies and has manufacturing bases in North America, Western Europe, China and a new manufacturing joint venture in Russia projected to be on line in November 2013. Brad was the global leader of all supply chain functions including global sourcing, logistics and transportation and the companies’ formal sales and operations planning process. In his two year tenure, Brad launched and deployed global sourcing, logistics and sales and operations planning platforms netting over $6M in sourcing and logistics productivity, significant improvements in fulfillment performance and sustained inventory optimizations reducing company working capital investment by 15% globally. Brad participated in the development and execution of a new strategic plan direction which has significantly improved sales penetration in targeted geographies and resulted in Companywide EBITDA improvements of roughly 25% to a projected $60M in 2012 on a global sales base of $265M. Best in class and contemporary tools, processes and execution methodologies have been deployed throughout all critical supply chain functions at Tensar as of December of 2012.

Prior to joining Tensar, Brad has was recruited by Arcapita, a private equity firm with U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, GA., as a key member of a turnaround team which assumed leadership for American Pad and Paper (Ampad) in September of 2005. In 2004, Ampad was losing market share in all key categories and closed the year with over -$20M in EBITDA performance. Key customers including Wal-Mart and Staples had signaled that they intended to eliminate Ampad as a strategic supplier due to its inability to service them at acceptable fulfillment levels. Brad and his teams completely revamped Ampad’s approach to sales, operations and inventory planning. He quickly lead his procurement and logistics teams in aggressive sourcing and supplier engagement initiatives to reverse the significant negative trends in materials, logistics and warehousing costs. He led in creating integrated, cross functional planning teams with all key customers including Wal-Mart and Staples. Over a two year period, Ampad completely reversed the negative performance trend in all phases of the business. Order fill rates improved to 98% plus versus 2004 levels in the 79-82% range. This was accomplished while inventories were reduced by over 40%. Significant initiatives in sourcing and logistics netted over $10M+ in annual operating cost reductions which were sustained throughout the time of the Sale of Ampad to Esselte Corporation in June of 2010. In 2010, Ampad was awarded the Tom Stemberg award from Staples. This is the highest award Staples gives and is awarded to the top performing global supplier in their entire network. Typically, this award was won by fortune 100 companies including HP, 3M and International Paper. At the time of the sale of Ampad to Esselte in June of 2010, Ampad was the category owner for all key office products categories at both Wal-Mart and Staples with a record of market share and store shelf space growth from 2007 to 2010. The company EBITDA performance had improved by over $32M versus the 2004 run rate. Brad’s leadership in completely revamping internal processes along with aggressive cross functional customer engagement played a critical in company operating performance and in securing the top supplier award from Staples. After an agreed transition period post sale, Brad was immediately re-deployed to Tensar to become the Executive Vice President of Supply Chain.

In 2003, Executive leadership team members at Johns Manville Corporation, a Berkshire Hathaway company headquartered in Denver, Co, recruited Brad to JM as the Senior Director of Global Logistics. One of the key strategic challenges facing JM was the lack of available truckload capacity in North America after sweeping DOT hours of service changes were implemented in early 2004. Both van and flatbed truckload capacities had been reduced in North America by double digit percentages due to reductions in legal operating hours between mandatory driver rests. JM was experiencing 20 to 30 percent rate escalations and lost monthly sales due to lack of available trucking capacity. Brad led his team through an evaluation of the overall marketplace and evaluated all possible alternatives to reverse the cost and capacity issues driving significant negative impact in company performance. The team devised and proposed a new approach to truckload sourcing which included collaborating with 4-6 additional shippers. The strategy involved linking multiple transportation management systems, building closed loops between shipper origins keeping truckload capacity captured within the multi-shipper network. The Collaborative logistics platform was constructed and deployed over a five month period netting JM significant improvements in available truckload capacity along with completely reversing the trend of freight cost inflation. In his tenure at JM, Brad also led an overall organizational re-structure of the global logistics team to better align logistics leaders with business units and to engrain logistics expertise and direction into all critical planning processes for each global business unit of JM. Over $6M in total logistics productivity improvement was realized during Brad’s tenure as head of global logistics.

In 2000, Brad was recruited to American Standard Companies in Piscataway, NJ to head Global Materials Sourcing for American Standard’s Global Bath and Kitchen business units. In this role, Brad was responsible for leading an extensive global materials sourcing team across all key global geographies. Brad managed a $100M global spend across 50+ manufacturing facilities in North and South America, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe and Northern Africa. In his role as Director of Global Sourcing, Brad constructed the global commodity team structure and sourcing platform for American Standard. He led in establishing critical global strategic supply partnerships. In 2001, a strategic partnership was initiated with Grupo Minerali, an Italian Minerals mining and processing supplier. Over 9 months, American Standard and GM developed a long term strategic plan to secure reserves and build two minerals processing facilities in Mexico to service American Standard’s three large pottery manufacturing facilities in the country. Key minerals raw material costs including Feldspar and Silica were the most expensive landed cost mined materials globally based on output from the newly created global category commodity teams. Brad led in jointly developing the entire forward strategic and operating plan structure for the new processing plants in Mexico. Minerali invested over $20M in the new processing facilities and reserve positions in exchange for a long term strategic supply contract with American Standard. This partnership created a new supply source in a monopoly situation in Mexico netting $3M in cost reductions and strengthening a critical global supply relationship with Grupo Minerali. The total two year annualized productivity impact in Global Sourcing exceeded $7.5M at American Standard. All strategic sourcing processes, including a continuous productivity identification and implementation model were fully implemented during Brad’s tenure at American Standard. During Brad’s second role at American standard, he led all supply chain functions for American Standards’ Americas bath and kitchen business. In this role, he led in the deployment of an optimized sales and operations planning process netting significant improvements in working capital and fulfillment performance. His work with strategic customers including Lowes, the Home Depot and Ferguson netted $3M non-value added supply chain cost take out via packaging optimizations, better order cycle management and load planning optimizations in partnership with American Standards in house 3PL provider.

In 1994, Brad was recruited to AlliedSignal in Morristown, NJ as the manager of rail logistics for the engineered materials sector ($4B in annual revenue). Brad was responsible for all rail logistics activity including fleet management and operations as well as all rail contract negotiations. Larry Bossidy, former #2 to Jack Welch at GE, was AlliedSignal’s CEO. Brad was trained in all six sigma and total quality management processes consistent with the programs which were developed at GE. Key successful initiatives included double digit improvements in fleet utilization via deployment of a fleet planning and management process based on optimizing rail car fleet turn and maintenance planning/scheduling performance as well as multiple successful strategic contract negotiations with major class one railroads. In 1996, Brad was named Manager of global raw materials sourcing for three of AlliedSignal’s’ business units. Here he developed strong skill sets and capabilities in global sourcing, supplier development and relationship management, total cost of ownership methodology and opportunity identification methodologies prioritization techniques and implementation practices. In his third leadership role at AlliedSignal, Brad was responsible for constructing a North American supply chain to supply a new $40M joint venture facility in Augusta, Georgia with post industrial and post-consumer nylon type 6 fiber. The network was built and finalized six months ahead of scheduled and at a 10% below landed cost structure for nylon feed streams.

Brad started his career in 1989 with the Dow Chemical Company in Freeport, TX. Brad was recruited after graduating from the University of Tennessee to be part of Dow’s Distribution development program. In his first career assignment, he led in developing and launching an aggressive program to significantly increase utilization of intermodal transportation from 50 different manufacturing complexes within the Dow mega manufacturing facility. At an early age Brad took the initiative to bring in new 3PL partners to ensure that the critical initiative was successful netting over $2M in reduced transportation costs in the first year. Brad progressed to rail fleet administration and developed skill sets in all phases of rail fleet management including operations, maintenance and sourcing. Brad was named supervisor of the rail fleet administration group and was the youngest first time supervisor in the history of this program.