| Jerry Schmidt is currently an owner and Senior Managing Partner at Matteson Partners. He devotes the majority of his time to the strategic direction of the company and in particular to its new RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) company ExactSource, a wholly owned subsidiary of Matteson Partners. Mr. Schmidt also works with select Matteson Partners clients on Organizational Effectiveness and Business Value Creation. Over the past 22 years of Private equity and Venture investing as Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Cordova Ventures, Mr. Schmidt has developed a proprietary “Value Creation Matrix” to assist small to mid size companies create substantial shareholder value. Jerryʼs passion and business success over the past 40 years from Fortune 500 to venture and private equity has been his ability to identify, build and develop superior talent driven organizations. He brings these talents to client companies to help them with their organizational structure, capital structure and business process in order to grow both through organic as well as acquisition growth .
Mr. Schmidtʼs business career began in 1966 with Jostens Inc., a formerly publicly traded New York Stock Exchange Company on the Standard and Poorʼs 500 based in Minneapolis involved in the sale and manufacturing of motivation and recognition products to educational institutions and companies. Most of Mr. Schmidtʼs 18 year career at Jostens was spent building highly effective sales and marketing teams in three different divisions. Mr. Schmidt served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Printing Division, and Vice President and General Manager of the Scholastic Division. Just prior to retiring, Mr. Schmidt worked with Peter Ueberroth to secure the right for Jostens to produce the gold, silver, and bronze medals for the 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles and become the “official supplier of customized recognition awards for the 1984 games.”
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After retiring from Jostens in 1984, he and Lewis Manderson, founder of Creative Outdoor Displays, formed Cordova Capital, the predecessor to Cordova Ventures. As cofounder and managing partner of Cordova Ventures, he was instrumental in building Cordova into a premier venture company with seven related funds. The vision and mission of Cordova is to manage a range of venture funds that provide both capital and value added human capital resources for growing companies. Under his leadership over the last 22 years, Cordova has acted as lead or co-lead investor on 139 negotiated private equity investments; 103 of those in venture growth and buyout investments, and 36 real estate investments. The company has achieved top quartile performance as measured against its peers.
Throughout his career at Cordova, Jerry has held numerous Board of Directors positions at over two dozen privately held as well as publicly traded companies in the financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications industries, and currently serves on the board of four privately held companies. He has been a national and international featured speaker for corporations, universities, and business organizations on the topic “How Venture Capital Works...Separating Myth from Reality.”
Civic activities have included the East Cobb Rotary Club of which he is past president, the National Chairman of the Council of Growing Companies, a national nonprofit business organization for CEOʼs and growing companies.
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