Tom Gorman, founder and President of Entrepreneurial Design, Inc.
He is a life-long entrepreneur, and the company’s products are his brain-child. They are 30-years in the making. The impetus to commercialize them resulted from being a first-time independent consultant after leaving his last entrepreneurial project.
Prior to consulting, he was VP of Operations & IT of Leverage Point Media (LPM), a subsidiary of Menasha, which launched Labeldollars, an in-store coupon program distributed through deli weigh-scales, chain-wide across the entire 1,600 store Safeway supermarket chain in a 6-week rollout. It has been resold and is now part of the RedPlum coupon program at Valassis. Before LPM he was co-founder of Labeldollars, which successfully launched with a 10-store pilot in Portland Oregon and was sold to LPM.
His first entrepreneurial effort was in college when he co-founded First Collegiate National Bank with his father and other businessmen. It was sold as an idea. After college, he rode his bicycle around the US and moved to Colorado, where he was an early employee of a reverse vending recycling equipment company, Canpactor. It was sold to investors. He then was co-founder and VP of Marketing of Roman Labs, a medical equipment company. It produced portable oxygen concentrators and nebulizers, which under his leadership rolled out to a national network of home care dealers and exported to a half-dozen foreign countries. It was sold to Lifecare.
After that, he co-founded and was President of a television production company, Your First Choice, that produced a self-syndicated TV shows about Medicare patient choice that was aired in 32 markets in the South and Southwest, and was sold to his co-founders; during this time he entered the University of Colorado’s Executive MBA program.
While in the XMBA program, he was hired as Director of Business Development for PAC Enterprises, an international turn-key aluminum can manufacturing plant engineering firm. While not a principal of the company, the challenges of international deal-making and project-based financing made the job very entrepreneurial. During his tenure at PAC, the company built plants in China, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and it was Colorado Exporter of the year in 1996. And after that, he was CFO of In Store Media, which was a public company developing in-lane coupon clearing for supermarkets, and then was CFO of a publicly-traded incubator, Arete Industries, where he managed the commercial development of software for developmentally disabled learning and robotic projects. After that, he was a co-founder of LableDollars.
He recently spent six years ('03-'09) on the board of directors of Cathedral Shelter of Chicago, one of the oldest homeless shelters in America. He holds a BA degree in Economics from DePauw University and an XMBA from the University of Colorado.
"The path to entrepreneurial success, which I have learned both through study and trial and error, is to try to reduce the risks of achieving your goals by first learning what those risks are, and then managing them. Limiting losses is one strategy, but sometimes it requires that you take risks -- sometimes great risks -- in order to succeed."
Tom Gorman
'Wrting a plan and getting people and resources together are part of the entrepreneurial process, but I have found that the distinctive part is improvising solutions -- getting it done -- in the face of impossible deadlines and overwhelming resistence, where your mind and spirit hovers between overbearing self-confidence and debilitating self-doubt."
Tom Gorman
Entrepreneurial Design, Inc.
