About the Author - Dave KoesterAs President & CEO of a full-service consultancy firm, Dave Koester has over 30 years of sales, marketing and business development experience within the service sector, energy and facility management, foodservice and food processing industries. In addition, Dave has also spent over the last twelve years of his professional career enhancing and refining the art of strategic partnering and business alliance development. Prior to starting The Koester Group, LLC in 1997, Dave held numerous middle and senior management positions with several leading Fortune 500 companies such as, Ecolab, S.C. Johnson, DiverseyLever, FirstEnergy Corp., Orkin and Procter & Gamble,… just to name a few. Then, in the fall of 2000, Dave joined forces with two other top industry professionals who shared his vision, as they combined their collective skills and experience to create The Linkage Group, LLC. In 2008 and 2009, Dave served as the Director of Sales & Marketing for Victory Industrial Products LLC, taking the company from a regional concern with one manufacturing facility to a national player with three manufacturing locations and in 2010 served as the Director of Corporate Business Development for Premier MSS - a Voith Industrial Services Company before returning once again to his consulting practice.Over the course of the last twelve years, Dave has focused his consulting efforts almost exclusively on the facility management, energy/utility sectors and related value-added services. In working with the senior management teams of IES, EMCOR, Encompass and FirstEnergy Corp., Dave designed and engineered several major new initiatives for these companies that allowed them to differentiate their total offering, thereby offering an expanded portfolio of products and services to their growing customer base. The programs developed included: Triangle Partnering - which blends the capabilities of three different partners, Total Customer Solutions - which focused on Performance Contracting, Asset Management and Financing; Facility Management Solutions - which added the facility management and building services piece to the offering, and the FirstEnergy Facility Management Alliance - which combined the offerings of 10 industry leading service companies, via strategic partnering, to allow FirstEnergy to offer total consolidation on all products and related services to selected customers.In addition, Dave also has extensive experience as a sales trainer and public speaker, conducting many seminars on consultative sales techniques, negotiation skills, team building, solution selling and change management. Utilizing his extensive background and industry knowledge in the Integrated Pest Management field, Dave has also been called upon to be the keynote speaker at several national sales meetings and networking conferences within that industry. He has been a member of IFMA (International Facility Management Association), the IFMA Consultants Council and is currently a member of SAMA (Strategic Account Management Association) and the IAOP (International Association of Outsourcing Professionals).Dave attended Thomas More College and Xavier University in the Cincinnati, Ohio area, majoring in Natural Science (Biology / Chemistry) and also selected courses in Engineering at the University of Kentucky. He also received AIB Certification in Food Plant Sanitation and HACCP Program Development. Dave, his wife Carol, and their family reside in Cincinnati, Ohio.