Success Stories

In the late 1990s, Rob Bresnahan (Executive MBA '02) served as senior vice president at Crossmark Performance Group (CPG). In that position, he developed new business models and enabling technologies for CPG's parent company, Crossmark, and its consumer goods retailer and manufacturing customers.

"While I was working at Crossmark," Bresnahan commented, "I evaluated my skill sets and capabilities. I felt that I was a strong leader with sound knowledge and solid skills in the areas of problem solving, technology, and sales. But I wanted to build new capabilities in the areas of marketing, accounting, and finance."

After evaluating a number of Executive MBA (EMBA) programs, Bresnahan selected the Cox School because of its strong brand and program emphases in the disciplines he was looking to enhance.

"Early on in the Cox EMBA Program," Bresnahan recollected, "my class went to the Brinker Ranch to participate in a variety of team-building activities. Interacting with my classmates and observing their behavior throughout the day really helped me get my head out of my work and into the program."

Bresnahan also benefited from the expertise of several of Cox's professors.

"I had always looked at marketing as a gift that some people had and others did not," he said. "But in Bill Dillon's class, I learned how to formalize a systematic, measurable approach to marketing that I've been able to apply at Controlling Factor to develop our marketing materials, competitive positioning, and product specifications. In addition, while I'd always had difficulty absorbing accounting principles in depth, I found Michael van Breda's style and approach very compelling and easy to understand."

Today, as founder, chief executive officer, and senior vice president of sales at Controlling Factor – an enterprise software provider whose solutions are currently used by 65 Fortune 500 companies – Bresnahan is responsible for providing strategic direction, managing day-to-day operations, and ensuring a good market fit for the company's products. He draws upon the skills and experiences he acquired through the Cox EMBA Program to perform these roles.

"The Cox faculty encouraged me to apply what I had learned in class each week to solve problems or complete projects at work. Since graduating from the program, I have continued to apply much of what I learned on a daily basis. The lessons I learned in John Slocum's organizational behavior class have been particularly useful to me as we build our organization around the human dynamics of a multi-cultural, multi-generational team."

As Bresnahan guides Controlling Factor through its early stages of growth, he sees unlimited opportunities for the company's customer-fulfillment solutions.

"Almost 50 percent of companies today require their customers and suppliers to place orders through multiple systems," Bresnahan commented. "Coordinating these often-disjointed systems to effectively serve those trading partners can drain a company's resources and ultimately reduce customer satisfaction. Controlling Factor's solutions enable large companies to continuously adapt their customer-fulfillment processes to meet trading partners' diverse needs while leveraging their existing investments in data, systems, and business logic. To put it simply, we help companies do business their trading partners' way, without changing theirs."