Bill Aho

baho@sagepointconsulting.com

Bill Aho is a General Partner and co-founder of SagePoint Consulting. He specializes in BrandPoint, Growth, and TouchPoint Strategies with a special emphasis on Competitive Defense Planning. 

Bill currently is also serving as the CEO of ClearPlay for a client who needed his services as an operational leader.  As CEO he has lead the company from a fledgling startup to a successful company with national distribution of it's revolutionary media filtering product in a fiercely competitive consumer electronics industry.  Along that path, Bill defended the company from a well-heeled legal challenge from Hollywood, got Congress to pass a law explicitly legalizing the ClearPlay technology, and fought off many competitive challenges to remain the last man standing in the industry with broad patent protection for their technologies.  For being such a nice guy, Bill is a fierce competitor in the marketplace.

Before starting SagePoint, Bill served as CEO of Ysource Inc., a company that developed ASP tools for the secondary school market and social networking systems for teenagers. This company was a forerunner of the highly successful Facebook and MySpace phenomena. 

Bill also served as Senior Vice President of strategic planning for Darden Restaurants. At Darden, he played a critical role in the turnaround of Red Lobster and worked on a wide variety of concept areas, including marketing strategy, positioning, pricing, menu development and management structure. Prior to Darden, he spent nine years at PepsiCo, taking leadership roles in virtually all areas of Pizza Hut marketing, including tenure as the vice president of international marketing, overseeing the efforts of 63 countries and over $1 billion in annual sales. He then moved to general management and spent three years in the field, leading a division team and running a $350 million business.

He began his career after business school in brand management at Procter & Gamble. He is currently writing a book entitled "Defending the Castle" that guides companies that are defending or preparing to defend their business against competitive entries and vicious onslaughts from outside forces.  

Positions Held:

• CEO

• SVP Strategic Planning
• Brand Manager

Functional Experience:

• General Management

• Marketing
• Sales
• Operations
• Business Development

Industry Experience:

• Packaged Goods

• Technology

• Education

• Retail

• Consumer Electronics

• Food & Beverage

• Restaurants

• Internet

Brands Built:

• Cheer
• Dow Chemical
• Pizza Hut
• Red Lobster
• Olive Garden
• Bonita Software
• Telesuites
• ClearPlay
• Ysource
• Mrs. Field's