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About The AdviCoach Network

Every one of our coaches has many years of business management experience and skills. I combine my personal experience with AdviCoach’s proven processes and tools to create a customized approach specifically tailored to help you meet your business goals. You are the lynchpin of everything I do, with your needs and goals shaping my work. I specialize in helping you to fulfill your professional and personal goals. I understand these goals are often entwined.

  • Daniel J. Gisser, MBA, PhD

    Coach

    Your business success is what drives me. Leaders of small businesses often struggle getting the help they want and need. Sometimes they fear that they are making it all up as they go. Sometimes they need to refine their technology, marketing, organization, and internal systems just to make everything run more smoothly. Sometimes they need to step back and evaluate how to transform their business to succeed in the new environment. Sometimes they just need someone impartial to help them think through their problems honestly, set goals, and hold them accountable.

    I help leaders of small businesses, and of small businesses within large organizations, find their way through these issues. I am an experienced business coach skilled in strategic planning, marketing and sales, entrepreneurship, organizational development, and technology management. I have worked with companies and non-profit institutions very large and very small, and bring this broad perspective to all my work.

    I hold an MBA and PhD in polymer chemistry. I have always worked on the management sides of highly technical businesses, in fields including electrical and electronics engineering, chemistry, advanced and alternative energy, environmental technology, medical technology, photography, printing, and intellectual property management. Most of my current work is with small science, engineering, and manufacturing centered companies. I understand the special challenges of bringing technology to market, and have demonstrated the ability to learn enough about any technology to gain credibility with the entire team, so that they can put more focus on improving their business.

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    Complete Bio

    Daniel J. Gisser (Dan) started his AdviCoach business in 2016. It was as a natural outgrowth a 20 year, career coaching and advising entrepreneurs in companies very large and very small. He has extensive expertise in marketing, strategic planning, corporate sustainability, organizational development, and guiding innovation, technology management and entrepreneurship.  He has the rare combination of great big-picture thinking with insightful, data-driven analysis, and has a special talent for making this all understandable.  As a result, he’s a great bridge builder connecting business people from diverse roles.

    Most of Dan’s work at AdviCoach is with small engineering and technology companies, in technical fields including optics, chemistry, ceramics, health care IT, and others. He has served as an I-Corps Executive Mentor for several new businesses, helping them identify customers, and their wants and needs, so that the companies can establish product-market fit.

    Dan also serves the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an SBIR/STTR Proposal Reviewer.

    Dan was Director of Corporate Marketing and Sales at Eaton from 2006-15. Eaton is a Fortune 100 global, diversified manufacturer of highly engineered industrial equipment. At Eaton Dan coached numerous entrepreneurial product line and business unit teams, and mentored several rising managers. He designed and delivered training programs in marketing, sales, pricing, and other topics. Dan was routinely evaluated as one of Eaton’s best facilitators, for both in-person and virtual training. In addition, Dan managed Eaton’s library of marketing, sales, growth, and voice-of-customer tools and best practices used across the corporation. AdviCoach’s library of Rapid Impact Strategies is a similar, great toolset that has been scaled and optimized for small businesses.

    From 1996 to 2006 Dan held various product management, strategic marketing, and business intelligence roles at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York.  He managed multimillion dollar product lines of patent licenses and specialty organic chemicals. He was a founding member and manager of a high-tech electronics business unit which was later sold to LG Electronics for >$100 million, and helped start several other new technology-centric businesses. Today you are likely to find those technologies in the screens of your smartphones, smartwatches, computers, TVs and movie theaters.

    Dan has been on the Board of Adoption Network Cleveland since 2012 and became Board Secretary in 2016. He Chairs the Program Committee, co-led the Strategic Planning Committee in 2013-15 and Grow Our Footprint committee that was chartered by that new strategic plan.  In 2015-16 he coached a team of mid-career professionals from the Cleveland Leadership Center that is working on a project for the Grow Our Footprint committee.

    Dan joined the Board of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in 2014 and serves on the Membership Committee and Strategic Planning Committee.

    Dan’s academic background crosses typical boundaries: He has an MBA (marketing, strategy, and entrepreneurship) from the University of Rochester, PhD (polymer chemistry) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and BA (chemistry) from Dartmouth College. He grew up in greater Cleveland and graduated from Cleveland Heights High School.

    Areas of Expertise
    • Business development
    • Strategic planning
    • Marketing and sales management
    • Financial analysis
    • Product and service development
    • Technology management
    • Continuous quality improvement
    • Operations management
    • I-Corps
    • SBIR / STTR
    Professional Training

    MBA, University of Rochester

    PhD (Chemistry), University of Wisconsin-Madison,

    BA, Dartmouth College

     

    I-Corps@Ohio Technology Commercialization Program

    Certified Value Builder