Access C level talent with big brand experience
- at prices that won’t break the budget.
The founders of BizNav™ Partners are a pair of platinum orphans who met back in the mid-nineties while serving on the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. Mike Zucker as VP of Consumer Direct Merchandising & Marketing, for the renowned travel products company, Samsonite. Michael De Boer as EVP with BVK, the large independent ad agency. The two hit it off and working with other major brands (MasterCard, Sony, CocaCola, etc.) the partnership produced a number of very successful programs that provided funding and access to the arts for at-risk children.
Zucker and De Boer continued working together on various Samsonite projects, including an award winning retail store concept and a number of highly successful partnership programs with Hilton, Preferred Hotels and Resorts and Sandals. Later, they worked together on launching Samsonite’s Black Label stores, the concept that served to elevate the Samsonite brand to a high end luxury/fashion position in the early 2000’s.
De Boer has worked with a number top-shelf clients in Travel, Active Lifestyle, CPG, Entertainment, Financial Services and Healthcare. These included; United Airlines, Air Jamaica, Miller Brewing, Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation, The Olympic Committee, The Outdoor Industry Association, John Paul Mitchell, Discover Financial, CitiBank, United Healthcare, American Family Insurance, A&E Network and ConAgra.
Mike and Michael lean on their years of client and agency expertise to help their customers grow and prosper. They have experience working in the C-Suite and in the trenches, through good times and bad. Their combined talents provide clients with a team that can develop and implement strategies and programs to guide them on a path to success. This is a “sum of the parts” relationship, where the customer benefits from the synergistic value of experience, friendship, humor, trust and collaboration.
Mike Zucker, Partner
Mike started building businesses at an early age, from delivering newspapers, to selling lawn care service, to pushing a variety of products door to door, He eventually graduated to bigger things, becoming entertainment director at Boston University, putting on major concerts, coffee houses, and a variety of fundraising events.
He moved on to retail merchandising, where he worked his way up the ladder at May Company in the men’s business before moving on to other companies in both the wholesale and retail business. His most recent stop was at Samsonite, where he held a number of retail, ecommerce, product marketing, and business development positions, both in the U.S. and globally.
Mike is an accomplished internal entrepreneur who has created, built, optimized, led teams, and grown value. He has a proven record of success spanning a multitude of functional roles across a wide variety of disciplines, including:
Retail/Wholesale Merchandising and Marketing
Business Process Management
Data Analysis and Reporting
New Business Development
Change Management
Brand/Product Development and Marketing
Mike was most recently an Executive Team leader for a $1.3B US business comprised of key stakeholders and C level leaders. He has extensive experience building businesses across multiple channels of distribution for wholesale, retail, and ecommerce SBU’s. He’s a strategic and intuitive thinker with a proven ability to solve problems utilizing innovative approaches and efficient execution. Mike is team oriented and excels at both internal/external cross-functional collaboration.
Michael De Boer, Partner
Michael has been called an entrepreneur since he was 14 and built up his guitar teaching practice to 50 students a week. In college he was President of Student Activities, booking dozens of major concerts and organizing the largest college spring break group in the country. This feat took him to NYC, working on Madison Avenue with the nation’s leading youth marketing agency. He learned the ropes of the travel business and then naturally gravitated to marketing.
Over the years he served in senior leadership positions with several medium to large agencies. Being entrepreneurial Michael had two successful exits with his own start-up agencies. He has also had Board positions with a number of non-profits and start-ups.
Michael has always been at the forefront of marketing and technology. He has experience and expertise in the strategic development/implementation of successful campaigns that featured: events, sponsorships, partnerships, promotions, PR, media of all kinds and more recently, data, marketing automation, performance marketing, purpose driven marketing, voice, virtual assistants, emotional recognition and AI.
But, above all, Michael knows that without business development and revenue a company won’t survive and thrive. To that end he is a creative pragmatist who always pushes the envelope to uncover new opportunities to drive growth, share, margins and profitability. In addition, he is a firm believer that the fastest way to the aha moment can be the haha moment.