Please refer to the menu above — “OUR COMPANY”, sub-menu “OUR FOUNDER” to find the following:
Jim Stewart is the founder and Executive Director of SHARPER COUNSEL LLC. He has three decades of high tech industry experience and brings a wealth of management expertise to bear on the improvement of high potential businesses.
Jim’s role as COO for Loud Technologies was to oversee supply chain activities, bring new products to market, and facilitate company growth and profitability. Jim helped Loud weather the recession of 2009/2010 through helping reduce cost structures by 30% and helping improve cash availability by tens of millions of dollars. As a result of a contract manufacturer bankruptcy, he led a team to rebuild the supply chain for 150 models of music products, simultaneously launching them into eight different suppliers around the world. This activity, along with a distribution re-design to provide late-point differentiation for the most popular products, made his time at Loud challenging, interesting and substantially rewarding.
The majority of Jim’s career was spent at Hewlett-Packard, where his last role was as Vice President / General Manager of a “several hundred million dollar” printing business unit. This role had end-to-end responsibilities spanning from market identification / business development to technology / product development, to global marketing / sales. As a result of Jim’s leadership in this division, sales doubled and profits quadrupled and in the words of the HP CEO at the time “this business model must be replicated…”
Jim’s contributions to SHARPER COUNSEL clients are focused at executives and business unit leaders and he is particularly strong in high tech business development, organization assessment, and technology commercialization. His various positions have brought a tremendous amount of international exposure, especially developing significant expertise around doing business in China and intellectual property protection. Formally trained as an engineer, Jim has held positions in product development, operations, and general management.