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Rod has over 30 years experience in the electronics industry, with both domestic and international experience in commercial and government business. Prior to joining Capital Alliance, he was with Texas Instruments and has considerable experience in strategic planning, business development, contract negotiations, product design & development, program management, operations, and business turnarounds. His earliest efforts involved design and development of air traffic control radar systems for the FAA, and later moved into foreign sales and military versions of those systems. A wealth of experience was gained over the years negotiating government agency, military and international contracts and technical agreements. He then served as deputy program manager on a $400M USAF radar program for a fighter aircraft where he led the proposal and negotiations effort on the production contract. He also managed the development of one of the subsystems and proposed the foreign military sale, as well as negotiated the contract including offsets agreement. Rod then moved into the machine tool business where he managed development and building of large complex machine tools and successfully led the turnaround of the business group. He held profit and loss responsibility for the business turned it from a money losing operation to one with 50% gross margins in three years. The highlight was the management of the program that developed and built large machine tools for the alignment and assembly of a jumbo jet. The system included laser measurements, positional alignment, control systems interfaces and data collection and included significant software development as well as hardware design and systems interface. All the equipment was successfully built, installed and checked out on schedule and exceeded the customer’s expectations. Rod then joined the management team of a startup venture to exploit digital light processing for projection displays and electro-photographic color printing applications. He drove the design for manufacturability and design for assembly and successfully integrated suppliers into the design team and managed the DTC model that resulted in a 30% cost reduction in the first design turn. As operations manager, he managed the production preparation initiative, including tooling, subsystem suppliers, and factory planning. Commercialization of this technology led to DLP portable projectors, theater projection systems and televisions. Rod’s most recent efforts involved building the subcontractor network for semiconductor manufacturing in the Pacific Rim countries and negotiating technical and service agreements. He has been involved with wafer fabrication, as well as assembly and testing of completed devices and developing offshore supply chain networks for the complete manufacturing operation. Rod holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arkansas and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. | 