Team
Kevin Schrandt – Founder / Director, Account Management
Kevin is co-founder of Verticalwerks LLC, a business consultation firm located in Portland, OR focused on helping small to medium-sized enterprises grow sales, products and its overall market penetration. Kevin possesses more than twenty years of professional experience in company management and operations, with specialization in marketing and new product / business development.
Throughout his career, Kevin has led creative and cross-functional teams in the successful execution of said activities, and has participated in Six Sigma and CI (continuous improvement) projects that generated annual savings.
In other interests, Kevin donated his time to the Kuja Sni Research Group, a non-profit organization that promoted rain forest preservation. Acting as its Media Coordinator, Kevin formed a production company that produced audio and video projects in which to disseminate the group’s message on healthy interaction with diverse ecosystems.
Steve Thornton – Founder / Director, Creative and Technology
As co-founder of Verticalwerks, Steve helps small, large and mid-sized businesses understand how to leverage Internet technologies, search and online advertising, Web site design and application development, CRM and e-Commerce integration and more to build lasting business value.
While in college in the 1980s Steve bought an Atari 800XL and then a Commodore64, teaching himself programming languages such as BASIC, FORTRAN and, eventually, a bit of Assembly language. As he tells the story, “It wasn’t until about 1993 when I first saw Mosaic and the WWW that I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up! The integration of computer coding, visual communication and new media marketing was a perfect fit.” Steve found that he could combine his interests in business, computer programming, photography and writing, learning to apply his new media skills to bring businesses online.
It was immediately obvious to Steve that the Internet and Web browsers would forever change everything. He soon began to learn Internet technologies and began developing Websites for small and medium-size companies. Steve found himself employed by several “dotcom” startups in San Francisco, which, in the late 1990s he says, “seemed like being at the center of the universe.”
Soon Steve was recruiting and managing ever-larger teams of designers, developers, business analysts and other creative and technology professionals for employers including LookSmart, Kight-Ridder and others. His enthusiasm for emerging technology and business leadership led to increasing management responsibilities information technology management and software product development roles, eventually promoting him to the role of Chief Information Officer, working for a $100 million marketing and print media services company with locations across the western US.
After moving with his family from the Bay Area to Portland, Oregon Steve decided to go back to his entrepreneurial roots and founded a portfolio of online marketing and e-commerce businesses and providing Internet technology consulting services to client companies.
