Company Management

Jeff Freeman, Founder and CEO

Jeff brings 25 years of experience selling to retailers and their suppliers to the position of founder and CEO of SoundTag.

In the early eighties, Freeman founded Freeman-Hays, a custom design P.O.P. manufacturing company. His company quickly became a highly respected and successful concern whose clients consisted of some of the world's best known brand names and the diverse retail chains they inhabited. Freeman ran Freeman-Hays with great success for 10 years. During this period, he recognized a shift in the market place and a need for product diversity to accommodate the growing trends in retail merchandising and the display industry in general. The consequence of chain store dominance over their suppliers opened up new opportunities and he capitalized on them. He adapted to the market place by replacing his manufacturing operation with several offshore companies that he began representing.

The explosion of expanding chains building ever larger stores created a problem in need of a solution. As a display supplier Jeff personally felt the pain resulting from the log jam of shipments arriving at stores every day and the difficulty it caused in getting urgently needed product onto the sales floor. Always the entrepreneur he saw an opportunity which led to his development of the SoundTag System.

Jeff earned a BA from the University of Miami in 1969.

Tom Dwan, Chief Operating Officer (COO)

He is a senior manager with over 30 years of general management experience in the areas of operations, program management and product development of technology-based products, ranging from computerized test equipment to short-range radio frequency communication devices. Dwan's demonstrated ability to consistently meet technical, schedule and financial performance objectives will be of particular importance to the SoundTag venture.

Tom earned a BSEE degree in 1966 from Norwich University, a MSEE degree in 1968 from Cornell University and a MBA degree in 1973 from Harvard Business School. His prior work experience includes positions at larger well-known firms, such as RCA and GE in defense electronics, along with start-up ventures similar to SoundTag, utilizing wireless communications and enterprise software.

Richard J. Valentine, Chief Marketing/Sales Consultant

An entrepreneur known for his ability to identify new ideas that fill highly profitable niches, Valentine is head of The MBA Group of Companies. The MBA Group, which Valentine founded in 1969, has owned, operated, built and sold businesses in such diverse industries as health insurance, retail automotive services, advanced technology, corporate investigative services, real estate, oil and gas, commercial aviation, and kart racing.

Valentine and The MBA Group were quick to recognize the potential of the quick-lube concept and built the New England Jiffy Lube area franchise into a 30-store, $35 million business before selling the Master Area Development franchise to Pennzoil at an unprecedented 18 times earnings ratio. Other successes in The MBA Group history include: United Plans, a third-party administrator of health insurance plans which The MBA Group developed into an industry model with leading technology and marketing before selling to a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet; the start-up LCF Associates, a white-collar crime investigations firm, which utilized leading-edge computer research tools before the widespread use of the Internet and counted virtually all Fortune 100 companies among its clients when it was sold to SPX Corporation; and a partnership with software developer ArrayWorks, which has developed a software architecture to automate virtually any business process.

Valentine's most recent ventures include F1 Air, an aviation firm offering private jet air travel from offices in Massachusetts and New Jersey; F1 Boston, a 106,000 square foot conference, dining & racing center in Braintree, Massachusetts; F1 Outdoors, an event & kart racing facility in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, known as the "gold standard" of outdoor, purpose-built kart racing tracks in North America; and RJV Enterprises, exclusively importers and distributors of European race karts & engines. Valentine's talent for identifying "rising star" products and companies has been proven again and again. He was among the very first to invest in many breakthrough products, including Lo-Jack Car Security Systems and Mosquito Magnet Biting Insect Traps.

Valentine, who holds a BA from Suffolk University, will be spearheading the SoundTag marketing effort, providing the company with the marketing vision and expertise that he counts as the foundation of his success. He will also be providing sales support to Jeff Freeman, bringing the full force of his contacts and experience to building SoundTag.

Patrick Gallagher, Chief Financial Adviser

Gallagher is Chief Operating Officer of The MBA Group of Companies, and Executive Vice President of Massachusetts Business Association, the original foundation of The MBA Group. He has been instrumental in building the Association into the leading voice for small business in Massachusetts, representing more than 40,000 companies across the state and providing health insurance to a large percentage of the state's small businesses. Mass Business Association is now a member of the National Financial Partners companies. Gallagher's financial acumen was also a key in building Lube 495, the MBA Group's Jiffy Lube area franchise, United Plans, LCF Associates, and other members of The MBA Group of Companies.

Gallagher joined MBA in 1984 after spending 17 years as a banker. He is on the Board of Directors of The Federal Savings Bank and Beacon Fiduciary Advisors, Inc., a private money-management firm.

His depth of experience in building companies from start-up through rapid-growth to sale, maximizing ROI in every case, will be fundamental to SoundTag's financial development and business growth.