CEO Kirk Knauff of Kaleris joins Danny to share all about the major influences in his life and his career in supply chain.
Danny:
Well, welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Kirk Knauff who is the CEO of Kaleris in Alpharetta, Georgia. Kirk, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Kirk:
Thanks for having me, Danny. Glad to be here.

Danny:
Well, I'm looking forward to this. We were talking about this before a little bit, hey, this is kind of exciting. You guys are in Alpharetta, Georgia; we're in Alpharetta, Georgia. We're just a couple miles apart, so this is exciting. So for those who are not familiar with Kaleris, could you just give us a 30,000-foot view? Who are you guys? What do you guys do?

Kirk:
So we're a supply chain execution software company. As you said, based here in Alpharetta, happy to be here. We're really enjoying this budding Atlanta tech scene that we're a part of. Relatively new company that's the combination of three legacy businesses that we've acquired and put together to build this supply chain execution platform. About 200 folks work for Kaleris headquartered here in Alpharetta. We also have offices in Dallas and Oakland, California and two big development facilities in Sri Lanka and India. So that's our footprint as well.

Danny:
Excellent. Well, that sounds great. So we're going to dive into a little bit more of what you guys do, some of the challenges that you guys are solving here in just a little bit. But before we do that, this is the time in the episode where we want to get to know Kirk. We want to get to know you a little bit better, so I'd love to know your story, your background. How did you get into this space? Take me back.

Kirk:
Okay. Well, always been in the supply chain execution space or supply chain space, really. I started with a large railroad here in North America in Jacksonville, Florida, straight out of undergrad, on the sales and marketing side. My first job in the industry was an inside sales job, actually, calling former railroad customers and asking them why they weren't using the railroad anymore. So that was kind of a baptism by fire. And from there, stayed on with them for about five years, and from there I got to know the founder of a small software business here in Atlanta. Moved up to Atlanta to start my career on the software side back in, around 2000. And I guess the rest is history from there. We grew that business over time. We sold it into a private equity company in 2007.

Danny:
Good timing, yeah.

Kirk:
Yeah. Actually a funny story about that, when we were talking to our private equity sponsors—who are great, by the way—while we were selling the business, we had never had a year-over-year decrease in carloads because a lot of our software still does, it's involved with rail carriers. We had never had a year-over-year decrease, and the first year after they acquired us was our first year ever, which was 2008, where we saw a decline in year-over-year carload growth. So they kind of gave us a hard time about that, but they understood market dynamics. Anyways, then we acquired four companies between 2007 and 2011 to add to the platform, the supply chain software platform, and sold that business to GE Transportation in 2012. I stayed on at GE Transportation for about seven years, six and a half years, running that software business for GE. So yeah, that's a quick overview of my background, all software and transportation-related.

Danny:
Yeah,