Due Diligence Partners
Gregory Pearl
Mr. Pearl is the President and Managing Consultant of Alteris LLC. Mr. Pearl has over twenty years experience in valuations, finance, strategy and M&A. He has been involved in dozens of transactions both in the United States and Europe. His experience has included all facets of the transaction process: from valuations to due diligence to negotiations to integration.
He has conducted valuations ranging from small companies to those with sales in the hundreds of millions to billions. He is also skilled in capital investment analyses and joint venture/strategic alliances.
Prior to establishing Alteris LLC in 1999, Mr. Pearl was Manager of the CommPro division for Shure Incorporated. Previous to Shure, Mr. Pearl was CFO/Director at Appliance Control Technology (ACT), a venture capital backed electronics startup. ACT grew significantly with operations in North America and Europe. ACT was an Illinois Entrepreneur of the Year. Mr. Pearl also worked in strategy and business development at Kraft. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Arthur Andersen Consulting.
Mr. Pearl has been an investor and advisor to several early stage companies, including TouchSensor Technologies, a successful man-machine interface technology company. TouchSensor was recently profiled in the Chicago Sun Times as one of the fastest growing companies in Chicago.
Mr. Pearl is a business instructor at Elmhurst College (Elmhurst, IL) and a regular public speaker on business and valuation topics. He is past President and a board member of the Chicago nonprofit business-mentoring corporation, The Big Idea Forum. His valuation materials are used in the business school at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He has also been published in textbooks used in MBA programs worldwide.
Mr. Pearl is an Accredited Valuation Analyst (AVA) and member of the National Association of Certified Valuation Analysts (NACVA). He has B.S. Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana, an MBA in Finance from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an M.S. Advertising/Integrated Marketing from Northwestern University.
Tom Gunn
Mr. Gunn has over 25 years of experience in the consulting and manufacturing industries. He specializes in assisting companies with the development of manufacturing strategies, leading edge business processes, and performance improvement programs to increase their competitive advantage in global markets and significantly move them toward world class business performance. His work often focuses on helping companies improve the management of their supply chain through real-time planning, improving supply chain management business processes, and the use of electronic commerce and Internet-based technologies in cross-enterprise collaborative value network management.
A leading manufacturing visionary and futurist dealing with the implication of technology in all forms -- especially information technology -- Tom is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and internal executive education programs sponsored by many companies. He has delivered over 300 executive education speeches in North America and Europe.
William Holmes
Bill Holmes specializes in business planning and product marketing for high technology and esoteric markets. He has over 20 years of worldwide experience in the leadership of marketing, sales and business development teams, consistently delivering positive impact on revenue, branding and company valuation. Bill’s ‘Go-To-Market’ experience includes the launching of 15 products in over 20 countries. He is a skillful and resourceful negotiator who has concluded alliances and partnerships with many leading players in the IT world. He established and directed the European subsidiary of a Californian software infrastructure company and managed the business development and marketing for a very successful $41M NASDAQ IPO. He has a wealth of experience directing Press and Analyst relationships and is an accomplished international speaker.
Christopher Howe
Mr. Howe has fifteen years professional experience in business leadership and consulting. His primary focus is on the use of technology in the business, ensuring that the best service is provided at the least cost. He also is experienced in organizational and process development and enterprise change. Mr. Howe received a B.A. in Economics with honors from Harvard University, and a Masters in Management from Oxford University.
John Lertzman
John has 20 years of senior level-executive experience in operations, technology, accounting and strategy. As an associate partner at Perlinski & Company, John brings a wealth of experience from Big 5 consulting, Fortune 1000 companies and various start-up enterprises.
Mr. Lertzman’s talents were recognized when he was recruited as one of four founding employees of Futurestep, the Internet recruiting subsidiary of Korn-Ferry International. He built the team and the foundation for the technology infrastructure that supported 500 employees in offices in 26 countries with an internet presence in 8 languages. After initial start up, John moved into an operations role, as Vice President of Operations and Strategy.
John was the founder and Managing Partner of his own firm, Lertzman Associates. He built a team of professionals that provided financial, management and information technology consulting services to a broad range of companies in North America and across Europe. These services included process engineering, technology assessment and due diligence, software selection and development, market and acquisition analysis, strategy and turnaround consulting. His projects included a series of ventures that ran for several years following the reunification of East and West Germany. This involved the development of financial models to forecast profitability of projects and investment opportunities in former state-owned companies in the German Democratic Republic.
John spent five years at Price Waterhouse Consulting Services, serving Fortune 1000 companies and state governments after having spent two years at KPMG in an audit and tax role.
Steven Swann
Steve has twenty nine years in IT and Business experience with more than ten years of in-depth experience in portfolio and project leadership with a variety of IT, Telecom and Software Development teams, encompassing a wide variety of projects such as Data Center Facilities, Software Product Development, Enterprise level Data Warehousing, Digital Media/Imaging, Broadcast Network Operations, Satellite Facilities and Corporate Web Portals.