Richard Stewart

Dick Stewart is a senior executive with more than forty years of operational experience that has been used to service organizations ranging from start-up companies, to real estate, to not-for-profit entities,  to large multinationals attempting to manage the challenges of rapid growth, the need to restructure, re-enervate and/or reinvent, or “repot”, themselves strategically. This experience spans a broad spectrum of industries, including financial, real estate, technology, manufacturing, and service, and is buttressed by extensive public and private board experience.

His early career experience was accelerated via senior financial/marketing/operational management consulting roles in a variety of industry and public sectors.  At Citicorp, he played a key role in back office operational change management. As a member of the senior corporate staff, he helped orchestrate Citicorp's worldwide corporate financial control activities and the holding company’s successful attempts to become a nationwide banking entity.

Recruited to Wall Street by Kidder Peabody, he was the most senior executive ever brought from outside the firm and was subsequently the youngest person ever to be elevated to the firm's management committee. He was instrumental in developing and implementing the strategic plan which updated the old-line investment-bank into new areas of business and made it one of the most profitable firms on the Street prior to its acquisition by General Electric.

Joining Merrill Lynch, he led the worldwide transformation of the firm's finance function and related information systems, turning Merrill into the industry leader in strategic and operational business information. In addition, he helped significantly strengthen corporate governance, led corporate restructurings, and installed resource allocation processes which prioritized the use of corporate resources to support core products and businesses.

Recruited by the chairman of American Express to help turn around of Shearson Lehman Brothers, he applied his expertise in strategy, restructuring, cost reduction, divesture, market development, and corporate governance. Immediately, the Boston company was sold to Mellon Bank to strengthen Shearson's capital structure and credit ratings.  He then led the restructuring, revitalization and salvage of over $2B in limited partnerships and corporate merchant banking investments, most of which involved real estate.  Shearson’s costs were significantly reduced as a result. Under Mr. Stewart's leadership,  American Express developed plans enter spin out Shearson Lehman into public arena via a rights offering. When American Express elected instead to sell the firm's retail/asset management businesses to Smith Barney, Mr. Stewart performed oversight on the transition and helped position Lehman for its exit from the “Blue Box” and into the public arena.

Since retiring as vice chairman of Lehman in the mid-1990s, he has privately invested, consulted and led businesses such as: start-up internet companies, real estate ventures (www.heritagenrevpia.com), video-on-demand, fiber optics, and a "fabless" chip company.  Mr. Stewart has also worked with  Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (telecommunications CLECs), Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) and a diversified multinational industrial manufacturer where technical R&D and new market development were addressed, including choreographing a program for a captive government contractor to leverage core competencies into a successful consumer market launch.

Utilizing the considerable restructuring and turnaround experience he acquired at Merrill Lynch and then Lehman, he was instrumental in salvaging one of the Caribbean's top luxury resorts, Jumby Bay, saving a leading private New Jersey high school from insolvency, and assisting the Small Business Administration in evaluating and restructuring a number of its troubled SBIC portfolio funds/companies.

Mr. Stewart has conducted entrepreneurial lectures at Babson College and Wentworth Institute of Technology and was a lead Director of NASA's Center for Technology Commercialization, as well as a number of other public and private organizations.

Mr. Stewart has an MBA in Finance and a BBA in Marketing and Finance from the University of Michigan and is a Certified Public Accountant, a member of the AICPA and the New York State Society of CPAs.

Chris Dalia

Chris Dalia has thirty years of experience in international banking, investment banking and management consulting (US, East Asia, South America and Europe). 

Chris founded two banks domestically in the United States, took one of them public, and has been heavily involved in growing companies, capital raises, and investment consultation for decades. With experience in IP exploitation, new media companies, and developing economy analysis and investment, Chris offers a wealth of relevant experience to relevant to Avos Holdings.

He is a former member of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. His BA and MA are in Asia Studies.

Charles Kickham

Charlie Kickham brings 17 years of experience in finance and venture development to Avos Holdings, delivering large-company fiscal and operational analytical skills to assessing and developing capital sources and deals internationally. 

Charles' core financial strength blends operational efficiency with a mandate to always improve on existing structures and best practices. Such strengths were evident at TD Waterhouse where Charlie, originally brought on board to help turn around global treasury operations, rose to provide leadership for one of its most profitable and critical business units, directing strategic/operational planning, forecasting, budgeting, firm funding, cash management, and risk management initiatives, with ultimate responsibility over the firm's cash maximization. Charles employs such tactics in all businesses in which he is involved. 

Charles holds MBA degrees from both New York University's Stern School of Business and the London School of Economics and is a mentor both at NYU's Berkley School of Entrepreneurial Studies, and with entrepreneurial programs involving inner-city New York City high school students.

Paul Ward

Paul Ward has been an internationally active management consultant and executive trainer for more than fifteen years, focusing primarily on the interdisciplinary management practice of customer experience management (CEM). His expertise is in business model design, branding, positioning, customer strategy development, CRM, and customer analytics, all within a global context. 

Paul's analytical experience build investor value by helping in the selection and development of investment opportunities which exploit his skills in financial, risk assessment, and operational, segmentation, and marketing activities, with direct input into pricing models, international market development, and asset valuation improvement. He is the author of a peer-reviewed journal article that articulates risk-adjusted return on capital into a market-perceived value and global risk framework, which aids multinational entities in making business cases for project investment and international expansion.

His activities with Avos focus on our risk-managed fund platform, including asset analysis, cloud-based fund and portfolio management tools, strategic sector analysis, active management strategies for venture funds, and mergers and acquisitions. His PIPE passthrough model for facilitating portfolio company exits is an example of using innovations in corporate finance to shift portfolio risk to public markets, increasing investor liquidity and giving public companies a low-basis investment for high returns and strong equity positions in new private companies.

His management consulting clients include American Express, Apple, 3M Colombia, AB Sampo Bank, Andersen Consulting, Argos Cement, Michelin, Symantec, the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the Carnegie Institute for Science, Young & Rubicam, Levick Strategic Communications, Emerging Markets Communications, the governments of Canada and UAE, Chemonics International, the US Department of Commerce, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineers, the American Law Institute, the World Bank, the IMF, and Bill Clinton’s Global Fairness Initiative.  

Paul has his global executive MBA from the TRIUM Global MBA program (#2 globally ranked by Financial Times), a joint venture of The London School of Economics and Political Science, NYU Stern School of Business and HEC in Paris. He serves on the Board of Advisors of soundtrckr, a mobile music platform for the iPhone, Windows phone, Droid, and a full range of Nokia handsets. He also is on the board of Enterprise Assurance Solutions, a cloud-based platform for integrating technology, process, and people into a road map for a company's new "business as usual."

Paul is a member of the Academy for International Business. He has taught at American University's Kogod School of Business, and University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business in its executive MBA program. He successfully completed coursework at the Investment Banking Institute, which focused on practical aspects of valuation, M&A (including synergy breakeven analysis), financial statement analysis, and managing client projections using cost of capital and careful review of historicals to create a salable pitch book.