ISDI Student Spotlight ft. Peter Ruh
In this weekly series, we’ll be highlighting the student journeys and accomplishments of our future leaders in digital business.
This week we feature Peter — sales, marketing, and mergers & acquisitions veteran whose career in big technology has lead him to some amazing career experiences and accolades. Read on to find out some more about Peter!
- Tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to make ISDI a part of your journey?
I have 35+ years of business experience across small, large, and startup companies. I’ve held many different roles, from marketing, to business development, to mergers and acquisitions, and they’ve all been with west coast companies although I originally grew up on the east coast.
I’ve worked primarily in high tech software/hardware firms, mostly all B2B companies selling to enterprises. Cisco was a big part of my working life, I worked with them for 16 years after they acquired the start up was involved with in early 90s.
I was in a career transition and deciding my next moves when one of the co-founders of ISDI who I’ve been friends with for several years told me about his new endeavor. I thought the curriculum and the caliber of people involved was intriguing.
Now that I’m in the program, it’s exceeded all my expectations. When I tell people that we are being taught by some of the top practitioners of Google, Facebook, the 49ers, and Box, they’re astounded — I mean it’s a whole different level of education. One example is we got to spend an entire week with the CMO of Facebook, Gary Briggs and his team. He is now retired and when I tell people we got to spend some time with him on some of his last formal working days they say: “What? No way!” It’s truly a unique opportunity and learning environment.
2. We know ISDI has a full spectrum of digital thinkers, which one are you: Digital Immigrant (new to technology), Digital Native (one with technology), or somewhere in between?
Somewhere in between I’ve held Director and VP roles in Strategic/Marketing Alliance work — and although I ran a pretty significant budget and knew high-level how to use some digital tools, I always had a team that was social media or digital marketing savvy to work with new technologies more hands-on.
I never understood the nuts and bolts and how to leverage the digital asset at hand so I thought to myself: “You know, I need to get totally up to speed on the latest stuff” and that’s why ISDI was perfect timing for me and has totally filled that previous knowledge gap.
3. If your friends and family had to use 3 words to describe you what would they be?
Funny, Optimistic, Insightful
4. What is your proudest work accomplishment? Life accomplishment?
Work: The work I did that was most challenging and rewarding was building a practice around mergers and acquisitions for Cisco Systems from 1995–2000, who at the time was acquiring 30 companies a year. My work included bringing the start up companies, people and talent into Cisco and making sure we were doing it the right way. Every single company we brought in was unique in terms of how fast we integrated, how fast we pulled their salespeople in, how fast we integrated the product then put our Cisco label on it — the works.
We’d be given scenarios saying: ‘Okay we’re acquiring a company with 80 employees and they’re coming to a company with 5000 employees, how do you make that work? How do make make sure that company keeps its acceleration and how are we going to integrate it into the global Cisco sales machine as least disruptively as possible?’ All that stuff was a 5–7 year amazing work experience.
Life: Life is about family, kids, friends, and dogs so having them happy and healthy is great life accomplishment.
My biggest ‘movement’ in my life was moving west. When I was 30 years old I was working in NYC for a west coast based start up that offered me job at their HQ in Santa Clara. I came out and trained and said: “Man, this is awesome!” They had indoor/outdoor pools and all kinds of perks. Even though it was a big transition for me I grabbed that opportunity to move west and haven’t looked back.
5. What is a surprising fact not many people know about you or something you wish more people knew about you?
I don’t really look at myself as someone who is so unique and different, but one thing is I’m a big tennis player. I was a tennis pro in my teens and its always big part of my life.
I’ve also climbed all the tallest mountains in western hemisphere — Shasta, Mt. Whitney, and Mt. Rainer which is the tallest at 14,950 ft. The Mt. Rainer trip I did with a bunch of friends who all made it to summit after a 2 day climb and that was really epic.
6. If you had to write a book about something, and you knew it would be an all time best seller (as in this message would be seen by millions of people) what would it be and why?
I’d write a book about everything I’ve learned in the world of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). M&A is supposed to be a big growth engine for companies — especially for companies like Cisco where they were large enough they could buy a company to help accelerate them into a specific market category and stay relevant in that space.
But to tell you the truth most companies do M&A totally wrong. Either a company would buy the right company but can’t properly integrate or they cannot figure out the combining of culture — and you end up totally smothering and killing the asset.
But when I was at Cisco, we would have chairmans of the board, board members, and executives come to our team and say: ‘How do you guys [at Cisco] get this right?’ There’s actually a Harvard Business and Stanford Business study, and a New York Times article highlighting our successful M&A strategies. I participated in all these studies on how to integrate and assess a culture /product fit and how to accelerate a small company coming into a big company. They’ve been some of my proudest work moments.
7. If you decided to start a business tomorrow what would it be and why?
A cannabis company. My son is starting a cannabis company based around topicals — specifically Hemp CBD cream that is anti inflammatory and you can legally ship across state lines.
I am helping my son and his partner write their business plan and it’s been a lot of fun because cannabis is the wild wild west right now. It is the next multi billion industry so it’s going to be very exciting to see what happens as the industry matures.
8. What is a piece of advice you’d give to the younger version of yourself?
After I got my MBA I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I stayed true to myself. I’m a people person so I got into sales and marketing and I’ve primarily been mostly in that space my entire working career.
I’d say just do what feels good — do what you wanna do. When I started out I was going to go to the foreign service school at Georgetown because I wanted to be in the diplomatic core — I thought that meant I could live in Paris in a beautiful house and be a diplomat. Then I found out that money was pretty low and I’d probably be working in Africa for 5 years and that just wasn’t me. So I pivoted off that and said why I don’t take a sales job — I followed my gut and what would make me want to go to work every single day and I’d recommend the same for everyone.
9. What is a product, service, company, book, or activity you WOM (word of mouth) advertise all the time to family and friends?
My 3 favorite brands and the ones I trust most: BMW, American Airlines, and Hyatt Hotels.
I think about these 3 brands that I use all the time and I have trusted for 30 years. They have amazing loyalty programs and I keep going back because of the amazing experience, customization, and treatment I receive with each of these companies. It’s a very long and trusted working relationship.
10. Give us a digital tip or trick you’ve learned at ISDI!
Just how sophisticated digital advertising has become and how few companies truly understand it, the granularity of targeted advertising is unbelievable. There’s an amazing 60 minutes episode that goes behind the scenes of the Facebook ad manager for Trump ad campaign.
It shows how specific you can get: I want to get 37 people in Omaha, Nebraska, send them this 7 ads with these A/B/C/D/E versions and whatever ad responds best, they programmatically jam that out the next day. It’s really quite astounding how impactful it can be.
Thanks for joining us on our Student Spotlight Series! For more ISDI blog posts written by our amazing students and our esteemed academic board, check them out at our ISDI Blog here.
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