Jeff Lyons

Jeff Lyons

 

Bio
E. Jeffrey (Jeff) Lyons is a seasoned, market-driven entrepreneur focused on launching, financing, and profitably growing early-stage digital business and information services companies. For over twenty years, he has consistently created significant shareholder value with cofounders, team members, investor partners and clients.

Over the last ten years, Jeff has been an execution-focused leadership team member (President, Executive Vice President) and active Board director in VC and private equity-backed emerging growth businesses.

His functional areas of expertise include developing and executing market-driven strategic growth plans, entrepreneurial finance (including raising angel and venture capital and private equity), leading corporate and business development, managing strategic partnerships and M&A, and scaling business operations.

Jeff is currently a Board Director and principal shareholder of BigTime Software, Inc. and served as President from 2010 through mid-2012. BigTime Software offers web-based time, billing, and practice management solutions for growing professional services firms. He was instrumental in executing a multi-year agreement licensing BigTime technology to Intuit, Inc. in 2010 and leading the Company’s oversubscribed $2.7 million Series A venture capital financing in 2011.

Since 2006, he has been an Operating Director of City Capital Advisors, L.L.C., a Chicago-based investment and merchant banking firm.

In 2003, Jeff co-founded PRIMIS Marketing Group, a private equity-backed marketing services firm, and served as Executive Vice President responsible for corporate strategy and M&A. PRIMIS deployed $40 million in capital, completed four acquisitions in 2½ years and was successfully sold (50+% IRR) to a $1.5 billion private equity firm in 2006.

His operating background includes experience as a senior executive for business development, M&A, and corporate strategy in emerging, growth-oriented businesses. Prior to co-founding PRIMIS, he was a founder of two management consulting firms after ten years of corporate experience in Big Four management consulting and commercial banking.

Jeff is a strategic advisor and mentor to early-stage technology entrepreneurs. He is currently an advisor/mentor to three digital start-up teams. He serves on the NUvention: Web Advisory Board, as a mentor for the Impact Engine social venture accelerator and in the Kellogg Entrepreneur-In-Residence program at Northwestern University. In 2010 he was a New Venture Lab class mentor at the Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2008 and 2009, he was an MBA student team judge in the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Jeff has been a lecturer in Kellogg’s Entrepreneurial Finance course and the Illinois Institute of Technology’s course in Venture Capital and Enterprise Finance.

Jeff holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management with concentrations in finance, accounting, and marketing (1983) and a BBA degree from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business (1980), and has continued his professional development in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education through executive education programs at Babson College, Stanford University and USC.

 

 

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