Founder
Matt Kittredge
Matt is a mid-career entrepreneur and Managing Director of Level Hands. He started his first business while in his teens, and has over ten years of operational experience with Coca-Cola in China and with Sprint in the U.S. He eventually realized that working at big companies is great for learning management skills, but often poor for leadership opportunities - what he sought was a leadership role within a smaller business.
He recently sold a successful construction business that he started and ran for ten years, an experience that gave him first-hand knowledge of what it takes to complete a successful transaction. The small business leadership skills that Matt learned managing his own business are transferable to a large variety of businesses. Matt received a B.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Virginia, where he was captain of the rowing team. He was his section's Honor Code representative at Harvard Business School.
Matt lives in Portland, OR with his wife and three daughters. He enjoys fly fishing and backcountry backpacking. His spoken Mandarin is pretty good, but his Chinese cooking skills are even better.
Advisors
Jim Sharpe
Jim is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School, concentrating in the area of running small businesses and entrepreneurship. He has taught running small and medium size enterprises, entrepreneurship, launching new ventures and turnarounds.
As an investor, he has ownership positions in more than two dozen entrepreneurial companies. His interests are in the areas of business acquisitions, manufacturing, B2B niche marketing, pricing, leadership, family balance, large/small company differences, ethics, exit strategies and employee empowerment.
In 2008, Jim sold his company, Extrusion Technology, to a private equity firm. He had purchased the aluminum extrusion fabricator in 1987 after an 11 month unfunded search and grew it from $4M to $32M, developing a value-added products niche in the Datacomm/Telecom electronics markets and a supplemental factory in Xiamen, China. After taking on substantial debt, Jim transformed the second generation, family-owned business. His focus on quality led to early qualification for ISO-9000 in 1992 and his emphasis on lead time reduction and lean manufacturing resulted in a Bronze Shingo award in 2008.
Jim has a BS degree from Babson College and after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1976, joined General Electric and moved on to Product General Manager positions within the GE materials businesses. After 5 years, he left GE to run 3 turn-around situations which prepared him to strike off on his own in 1987.