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Craig McAndrews
Professor - Sales Strategist - Executive Coach
Professional Background
Craig McAndrews is an accomplished professional with a wealth of experience in sales leadership, executive roles, and higher education. His unique combination of skills enables him to assist organizations in navigating through the prevalent leadership gap—reported by 77% of companies. Craig specializes in executive coaching and sales consulting, where he employs both analytical understanding and a practical approach to facilitate significant change within organizations. His impressive career trajectory demonstrates a strong commitment to continuous learning and development, from leading sales at a burgeoning retail franchise to serving at a C-level capacity in notable companies.
Retail Entrepreneurship
Craig’s entrepreneurial journey commenced with the co-founding of a retail franchise in Arizona, where he played a crucial role in the company’s expansion. Under his leadership, the franchise grew from inception to 22 locations in just four years. Craig was instrumental in refining the business processes and spearheaded the sales strategy, showcasing his ability to develop effective hiring practices that motivated team members. Ultimately, the successful venture culminated in selling the business to its parent company, marking a significant milestone in Craig’s entrepreneurial endeavors.
Retail Consulting Success
In his quest to enhance the retail landscape, Craig further ventured into consulting by co-founding a retail consulting firm that achieved over $1 million in annual revenue. This firm specialized in both quantitative and qualitative research focusing on consumer behavior and sales training. Craig's dedication to improving clients' profitability and closing rates helped establish the firm as a trusted partner within the retail sector.
Corporate Leadership and Value Growth
Craig's dynamic leadership has also been reflected in his numerous C-level roles within both private and public companies in the consumer products arena. As a senior leader at companies such as Mattress Firm, he effectively led sales initiatives for regional teams while consistently exceeding earnings goals. His profound insights into mergers and acquisitions were beneficial when the company experienced exponential growth—from 700 stores to 3,500. Craig's contributions during this transformative period included integrating various organizations successfully and enhancing overall shareholder value.
Academic Contributions
Currently, Craig is dedicated to education and academia as a Professor at the Bauer College of Business’s Sales Excellence Institute at the University of Houston. There, he not only teaches students the art and science of professional selling but also actively engages in research, specializing in the digital transformation of selling organizations. His dual perspective as both scholar and educator keeps him abreast of the latest trends influencing sales and sales leadership. This enables him to guide organizations in developing their strategies, ensuring they stay ahead in an increasingly digital marketplace.
Education and Achievements
Craig earned his Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing from Stephen F. Austin State University. This educational foundation provided him the necessary tools and skills to excel in his diverse career paths and leadership roles.
Notable University Affiliations
- Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston: Currently serving as a Professor in the Sales Excellence Institute.
- CMAC Advisory Group: Craig previously held the title of President, further showcasing his leadership capabilities.
Executive Roles and Board Memberships
Craig has held an impressive array of executive roles primarily at Mattress Firm, including:
- Chief Strategy Officer
- Chief Merchandising Officer
- Chief Learning Officer
- Executive Vice President of Merchandising
- Vice President of Merchandising
- East Region Sales Manager
Moreover, his leadership extended beyond Mattress Firm to other organizations:
- Former President of The Retail Institute, where he contributed to shaping industry practices.
- Director and Co-founder at Innovative Retail Group, focusing on retail strategies.
- Board member for KSBJ Educational Foundation, specializing in special events and ticket services.
Achievements
Craig’s career is characterized by notable achievements that have left a significant impact on sales practices and organizational growth.
- Retail Franchise Growth: Through innovative sales strategies and hiring practices, Craig successfully expanded a retail franchise into 22 locations in just four years.
- Consulting Financial Success: The retail consulting firm co-founded by Craig generated over $1 million in revenue, demonstrating his proficiency in developing successful business models.
- Leadership in Growth: As a senior leader at Mattress Firm, Craig was directly involved in growth strategies that expanded the company’s footprint from 700 to over 3,500 locations, significantly enhancing shareholder value.
- Professor and Researcher: Craig’s role as a professor affirms his commitment to the education sector, inspiring future sales professionals and ensuring they are equipped for the evolving marketplace.
In summary, Craig McAndrews’ multifaceted career encapsulates a wealth of experience in sales leadership, consulting, and academia. His key strengths lie in strategic planning, P&L management, sales process development, and leading transformations in digital selling. His passion for continuous growth and his dedication to facilitating others' success illustrate the profound impact he continues to make in the field of sales and leadership development. Outside his professional life, Craig cherishes time spent with his family and looks forward to planning their next adventures together.
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.