KIRK SIEFKAS

Mr. Siefkas is a highly successful business leader with 25 years of experience building successful businesses and helping clients improve corporate performance. He has established himself as an innovative thinker who can identify growth and operational improvement opportunities and then successfully translate them into action. He has a unique combination of consulting and industry experience that provides a valuable organizational perspective that lends insight into how to affect lasting change inside today’s complex organizations. Additionally, Mr. Siefkas has a multidisciplinary background in IT management, line business management and business strategy that provides a wide and critical experience base from which to craft high-impact business improvement programs.

Mr. Siefkas has developed a strong belief that there are many latent or unrealized opportunities in businesses today to improve performance - performance that will ultimately increase shareholder or owner value. At the most fundamental level, the opportunities fall into three areas:

(1) Growth opportunities that leverage a company’s unique assets including brand, data, channels and relationships, to add new services, products and/or enter new markets,

(2) Operational improvements that use process-centric design principles and employ best practice IT capabilities to support an efficient operation,

(3) The effective management of IT including strategic alignment, platform management, organization and large program management and delivery.

How the work is done is as critical for creating lasting impact as the content of the work itself. Mr. Siefkas has a point of view that the most effective results are achieved through the use of small senior consulting teams working collaboratively with clients in an environment of trust and shared responsibility. Also, that change should be created in the most positive manner possible for the client being sensitive to culture, people and the organization.

PROFESSIONAL HIGHLIGHTS

Prior to joining Trexin as a partner Mr. Siefkas was a corporate VP and officer at Deere & Company where he held the positions of CIO and President of John Deere FoodOrigins. At Deere, Mr. Siefkas worked through a business transformation that first focused on cost reduction and improving earnings followed by new venture development and the pursuit of long-term growth opportunities. The latter was his focus for the last several years culminating in the formation of a new division, John Deere Agri Services, Inc. with a charter to identify, incubate and launch new service businesses for Deere.

Before joining Deere & Company, Mr. Siefkas was a founding partner of Diamond Management & Technology Consulting. He spent seven years building Diamond into a thought leading, world class, consulting company. Mr. Siefkas participated in numerous projects with some of Diamond’s most important clients that covered a wide range of disciplines from an SAP implementation to business strategy. He also contributed significantly to the development of the digital strategy practice that provided thought leading strategic insights for clients.

Prior to founding Diamond Technology Partners, Mr. Siefkas was vice president of consumer products at Technology Solutions Company, a manager with Arthur Young’s Midwest management consulting practice, and systems manager at Electronic Data Systems. During his tenure with these professional services firms he designed and developed systems, managed increasingly large and complex systems development and integration projects and performed IT strategy work.

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

BS (1980) and MBA (1981) degrees from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Graduated with honors and was later inducted into the College of Business and Administration’s (COBA) hall of fame in 2001. As a graduate student had a concentration in organizational behavior and organizational design.