About
Mele Group is a business development consultancy founded in 2014, with the sole purpose of helping business owners reach their full potential and achieve remarkable business results.
If you are looking for a proven professional who can guide you to gain clarity on your business vision and strategy, grow sales and profits, build high performance employees, teams and leaders, and continuously improve your operations, you’ve come to the right place.
Thomas was born an engineer and lived his whole life with an engineer’s spirit. You may know engineers; you can tell them because they are people that believe there is a solution to every problem and that they can always take something and make it better. Thomas received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. He then spent 25 years in the Semiconductor Industry at two
Fortune 500 companies in many diverse and challenging roles from engineer, engineering manager, factory manager, R&D lab director, chief marketing officer, business general manager, to head of new business development.
Thomas is a systems thinker, a person who sees a business as a system consisting of leaders, strategy, customers, information, people, and processes that all work together to make an enterprise either succeed or fail. Throughout his career, Thomas built a reputation and a track record of success as a man that can take ownership for a complex business challenge, identify the critical few issues that must be addressed, then develop and execute action plans to meet his objectives on time and to budget. The majority of the challenges Thomas took on while working in the corporate world were ones that no one else would take because they were too risky or too hard.
Here are just a few examples:
In 1998, Motorola realized that they had under invested in a technology key to their wireless future. An East German institute was identified that had a unique technology that they were willing to license. To get it, Motorola had to set up a lab and a team in their facility. Thomas moved to Berlin, built a team from scratch, got the job done and Motorola gained a competitive advantage in the $500M wireless market.
In 2003, Applied Materials had a small, struggling product group with less than $20M in sales with a unique product but little market acceptance. Thomas took over the product group as a general manager, developed a clear product value proposition, and established strong customer relationships. The results were amazing; in 4 years, his team achieved over 85% market share and grew revenues to $210M with profits over $100M.
In 2009, when the global economy crashed, the CEO of Applied Materials asked Thomas to lead a global effort to completely redesign how the company developed products, managed its product portfolio and tracked its product development costs. Thomas took on the challenge, built a team, designed the new processes, did a global launch, and transformed how the company developed its products and managed its portfolio.
In 2014, Thomas' vision was to take all the best-known methods he learned and used over the years and simplify them to be useful to private business owners. When a client hires Thomas, they essentially get a non-equity partner to work side-by-side with them to identify and put in place the critical operational capabilities they need for their business to reach its full potential so they can realize the income they want and build an operation that can thrive without them. If a client's needs are outside Mele Group's internal capabilities, Thomas leverages a large network of vetted, professional service providers that are aligned to the Group's core values and level of customer service.
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Thomas welcomes you to review the recommendations from his colleagues over the past 25 years recorded on LinkedIn (click here to go to Thomas' profile). If you can find a business development consultant with a stronger track record of success, value system and set of business tools, that is willing to help you—you should hire them.
Our Core Values
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Work in every client's business as if it were our own
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Continuously learn, always improve
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Be positive, enthusiastic and encouraging at all times
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