Suzy Teele may be a recent entrepreneur, but she’s booked plenty of experience with fast-growth companies.
Now, she’s putting her expertise to work at Aceda LLC, the company she and her husband, Ted, launched in 1999 to provide interim executives for business planning and development, sales, marketing, research and development, and fund-raising services, mostly for technology companies. Ted Teele took a job as CEO with one of Aceda’s clients last July, and Suzy has taken on the CEO job at the business she and her husband founded.
Since 1999, Aceda has helped eight technology start-ups get off the ground and helped 24 companies nationwide define and implement the right strategy, increase revenue and profitability, and achieve market dominance.
Teele started her career as a management trainee at Mellon Bank. She left Mellon in 1989 to join Legent Corp., a company that had become one of the largest software firms in the country by the time it was acquired by Computer Associates in 1995.
At Legent, Teele headed a $200 million, 225-employee division that developed, supported and marketed 35 software products worldwide. By the time she left in 1995, Teele had risen to become vice president of human resources for the 3,000-employee company.
Her next stop was at ServiceWare Inc., the Oakmont company that provides customer relationship management software. There, she took on the job of senior vice president of marketing in 1996. During her three-year tenure at ServiceWare, now publicly traded, the company twice made the Inc 500.
Even with the demands of running a growing company, Teele has found time to contribute to the region’s development. She is a mentor for the University of Pittsburgh’s Entrepreneurial Fellows Center, a member of the Pittsburgh Champions and a participant in the Image Gap Committee, an effort to define a branding strategy for the Pittsburgh region. How to reach: Aceda LLC, www.aceda.com
