Aldy Keene, Rob Marlotte and Johann Bittner co-founded GrowthOptics in 2023. Building upon a foundation of decades of practitioner experience and customer analytics consulting, they are applying their deep experience with actionable tools that enable a ML & AI-driven platform supporting B2B leaders in understanding and executing against their strongest growth opportunities.
Aldy and Rob met in 2010 at AmeriPride Services, a national Uniform Services company. Aldy’s firm, LRC, managed the customer research and analysis program and Rob worked in growth and strategy for the company. They ultimately worked together to build and deploy an early version of at-risk customer modeling that was ultimately used to prioritize customer service recovery efforts and guide targeted pricing efforts. These models also identified customers who were strong upsell candidates.
The outcomes of these initiatives contributed materially to the achievement of the company’s profitable growth strategy, including a several hundred basis point improvement in customer retention and a centralized targeted pricing strategy that utilized these models with over 75,000 customers.
Aldy is an expert at using multiple forms of customer feedback to diagnose growth opportunities and at-risk situations in the aggregate and at the customer level. Following PhD studies in Economics at the University of Chicago, he expertly profiled groups of customers into these two categories and identified the root causes, but at most could extrapolate this to customer segments in earlier eras at LRC. Now with a plethora of data that describes customers, company metrics that measures their experiences, and a proprietary benchmarking data set, highly accurate at-risk and growth indicators can be extrapolated effectively to the customer level. Aldy’s passion is bringing these capabilities to small to medium sized firms to fundamentally change the way they approach their customer relationships.
Johann Bittner started working with Aldy at LRC in 2018 and developed sophisticated analytical and data visualization techniques. Since then, he worked for a leading consulting firm supporting Global Private Equity across Commercial Excellence and Generative AI. There, he learned the critical role of direct customer feedback in shaping value creation plans. Johann also saw a glaring gap in solutions that could bridge these insights with actionable strategies. Current technology either focuses on managing pipeline and sales contribution (CRM) or is overly focused on triggering action, resulting in difficult to interpret insights (CDP, Marketing Automation).
With GrowthOptics, Johann envisioned operators and their sponsors shifting their focus from analyzing siloed data sets to creating outstanding products, services, and strategies supported by an AI-driven platform that enhances decision-making in customer retention, growth, and operational excellence.
Following his partnership with Aldy at AmeriPride, Rob held senior executive roles at Aramark after it acquired AmeriPride, ultimately serving as SVP of Strategy and Marketing. His areas of focus have been formulation of data driven strategies to enhance top-line growth, developing new capabilities, and addressing operational underperformance. He also led functional areas critical to achieving strategic outcomes, including marketing, pricing, project management, and operations. A key area of focus was developing data driven customer programs to improve customer retention, cross sell, and price.
Rob's experience with enterprise data projects spans from executive steering committee oversight to leading teams who built and deployed models to implementation.
With GrowthOptics, Rob saw an opportunity to deploy a tool that allowed organizations of virtually any size to become much more customer intimate on an accelerated timeline. One of his observations was that internal customer data are not always easily accessible and an area of focus for him has been how to supplement internal customer data with approaches that allow for deep customer insights using proprietary voice of customer approaches.
Together, Johann, Aldy and Rob bring rich experiences in building and executing against customer insights and have a proven track record of success as both consultants and practitioners. Their strengths are highly complementary and build on a unique dataset containing over 27 years of anonymized benchmarking data that allows them to offer rich insights to virtually any B2B organization.
For additional information or to schedule a demo: info@growthoptics.com.