Our team brings skills in value proposition, B2B and B2C brand marketing, communications and distribution

Dan Davison
Katie and Brian O'Dell
Will Horton

Dan Davison

Dan Davison has brought new products and services to market in the software, aerospace, industrial and professional service industries, and through corporate venturing. Mr. Davison achieved early contracts as founding business development manager for the $700 M aircraft support business at McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing). As founding sales & marketing manager of the McDonnell Douglas out-licensing team, Mr. Davison achieved the team’s first licensing deals.

Later, working in the formative stages with Boeing spin-out Avchem, the company won an unprecedented $50 M chemical service contract, achieving transformative growth. Dan has been actively engaged with several Boeing Ventures start-ups defining and testing their value propositions and working hands-on with teams to achieve early sales.

In the 1990’s at a time when the defense industry was consolidating into a few large players, Mr. Davison founded and managed competitive intelligence for McDonnell Douglas’ Military aircraft operations. Over a decade of industry change, Mr. Davison championed organizational change, leading teams in competitive intelligence, quality & process improvement, reengineering initiatives.

Currently his firm BentonsEdge employs its Value-Story Selling™ methodology to help start-up organizations define and test their value proposition and get early sales.

Mr. Davison holds an MBA from Saint Louis University and a BA in quantitative methods from the University of Connecticut. He has received executive training in entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.

Katie and Brian O'Dell

Katie and brother Brian O'Dell have produced success for clients in sales and marketing for consumer packaged goods companies for more than 10 years. Katie’s sales portfolio focused primarily on large grocery retailers in the Chicago market such as Dominick’s, Omni and Certified. While in marketing, Katie has brought large and small brands to market for consumer-packaged goods companies, and brokered distribution deals with large retailers such as Wal-Mart, Petco, PetsMart, Kroger, Safeway.

Katie built a stellar reputation among packaged-goods marketers when employed as a Brand Marketer at Nestlé Purina. There she launched the Busy Bones™, secondnature™ brands, Tidy Cats disposable litter box, crystals™ and crystals™ blends. She re-branded Yesterday’s News cat litter product, which included the highest-scoring TV spot in Nestlé Purina’s history to date, the Tidy Cats Party.

Now, as a contractor Katie has envisioned and now manages the interactive web presence for several Nestlé Purina brands, including the Nestlé Purina Treats portfolio and secondnature™ dog litter.

Brian lives and works in Bentonville, AR, near the Wal-Mart world headquarters, where he has become known among Wal-Mart buyers for bringing innovative consumer products to light. Brian is a former Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employee, with track records in operations, retail category and portfolio development

He also maintains relationships with former employers Winn-Dixie and Nestlé Purina.

Brian and Katie continue to cultivate new relationships with buyers in retail, mass market and grocery distribution.

Will Horton

Will Horton is a skilled communication designer who has worked with BentonsEdge since 2003. Mr. Horton is dedicated to using his artistic discipline to produce tangible business value – his particular skill is the ability to rapidly take in raw information and build a streamlined audience-focused story.

As lead developer of BentonsEdge visual products such as Value-Stories and Current State diagrams, Mr. Horton engages our clients in the discipline of information mapping. He elicits their market-critical stories, and translates them into visual products and stories. These visual products are geared toward process improvement and increased sales effectiveness.

Mr. Horton led a product development team for four years, and engaged Fortune 500 clients and startup companies across multiple disciplines: Network technology, eBusiness consulting, Supply chain management, Commercial real estate, Business process improvement, Customer relationship management, and Large scale construction, to name just a few.