ND Business Briefings: October 2020 alumni news and updates

MBA alum’s startup acquired by transportation management firm

Cory Bailey (MBA ’18)

It was fitting, perhaps, that Cory Bailey (MBA ’18) was on the road when the deal closed.

SecurSpace, the transportation tech company he founded four years ago in the midst of his first semester of grad school at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, was acquired this month by Envase Technologies, a cloud-based transportation management system.

“Mendoza played such a large role in my involvement in SecurSpace,” said Bailey, who quickly found himself applying what he was learning in his MBA courses in real-time to the startup. “The fact that we were able to make a success of it in the end, from my perspective, validates the education as well as the networking.”

SecurSpace is an online marketplace for on-demand, short-term shipping container storage, almost like an AirBnB for intermodal trucking companies and storage yards. It connects those looking for parking and storage options to businesses with excess capacity in their lots.

It was a Notre Dame network connection that accelerated SecurSpace’s growth in 2018, the year Bailey, who serves as the firm’s president, graduated. He reached out to an alumnus, Tom Grojean Sr., who had recently retired from the transportation industry to talk with him about his project. Grojean connected Bailey with his son Tom Grojean Jr., a 1985 Mendoza graduate who was chairman of Hirschbach Motor Lines. Their conversation eventually led Grojean Jr. to invest half a million dollars in SecurSpace and serve on its board of directors.

“The whole thing sort of hinges on that moment,” Bailey recalled of that investment, which allowed them to expand faster than they originally planned.

Bailey will continue to develop the sales and marketing side of things for SecurSpace. He sees the acquisition by Envase as opening up even more opportunities. “There are incredible synergies between what Envase is working on and what we do.”

In other Mendoza College of Business alumni news: 

New positions

• Pete Welsh (BBA ’88) was named head of retirement services for Millennium Trust Co. in Oak Brook, Illinois.
• Sean S. Sullivan (BBA ’89) has been appointed executive vice president and chief financial officer of SiriusXM.
• Laura Rygielski Preston (BBA ’91) was named president of Trex Commercial Products Inc. Previously, she served as vice president and general manager at Trane Inc., a subsidiary of Ingersoll Rand.
• Marisa Gregg (BBA ’95) was named the vice president for communications and marketing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. She has served as interim vice president since September.
• Christina Perry (BBA ’03) joined Forge Biologics, a viral vector gene therapy manufacturing and development company, as vice president of finance and operations. Previously, she was CFO of Drive Capital. 
• Judd P. McNally (MBA ’03) has joined Lake City Bank as vice president, credit administration officer.  
• Peter M. Rogers (BBA ’04) was promoted to chief financial officer at Echo Global Logistics Inc. He previously served as senior vice president of finance at the firm. 
• Tim Scallen (BBA ’09) was named managing partner of BSC Capital Partners.
• Lorenzo Sanchez (BBA ’12) was named as a new principal and an owner of Rowling & Associates.
• Eamon Ladewski (MNA ’13) was promoted to principal at the management consulting firm, Proxima Group.
• Morgan Delp (MNA ’20), a member of the first class to graduate from Mendoza’s new one-year MNA program, accepted a job as dean of academics at Central Catholic High School, Toledo, Ohio, where she previously attended and taught.

Board of Directors

• Clare Stack Richer (BBA ’80) was appointed to the board of directors of Principal Financial Group. In 2017, she retired as chief financial officer for Putnam Investments after spending nine years with the private investment manager.
• Jennifer M. Pollino (BBA ’86) was elected to the board of directors for Hubbell Inc. She runs the consulting and executive coaching firm JMPollino LLC, which she founded after her retirement as an executive of Goodrich Corporation in 2012.
• James L. Wainscott (MBA ’87) was appointed to the board of directors for CSX Corp. He is the retired chairman, president and chief executive officer of AK Steel Holding Corp.
• Jamere Jackson (BBA ’90) was elected to the board of directors of Hibbett Sports. He is executive vice president and chief financial officer of Hertz Global Holdings.
• Ruben Alvidrez Ortega (MBA ’94) was appointed to the board of directors of Telson Mining Corp. Since 1994, he has worked in several roles with Citigroup, an international bank with approximately 33,000 employees in Mexico, working with corporate clients in the U.S. and Mexico.
• Richard A. Murphy (MBA ‘98) was appointed executive chairman of Enservco Corp.  and will serve as a principal executive officer of the company for the foreseeable future. He was appointed to the board of directors in January 2016. He is a managing member of Cross River Capital Management LLC.

Honors

• Christina Bottis (EMBA ’17) and Lainey Johnson (EMBA ’16) were recognized in Crain’s Chicago 2020 Notable Executives in Marketing list. Bottis is the chief marketing officer at Coyote Logistics, and Johnson is head of paid media, Americas marketing, for EY.
• Richard Pentz (MBA ’19), a senior director of institutional sales and relationship management at Principal Global Investors in Indianapolis, was named Man of the Year by the national Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Despite the pandemic, he raised $518,906, breaking the state’s fundraising record.   

Send your alumni updates to mendozabusiness@nd.edu.