Terri Soutor

BIO

Terri is a talented C-suite leader and strategist skilled at building and growing SaaS companies. She values and purposely invests in building mission-driven cultures to create employee engagement, better serve customers with empathy, and deliver superior business performance. She is known to be a curious, charismatic leader with an authentic, servant leadership style that places vision and mission, people and relationships, data and performance at the nucleus of driving early stage companies to achieve fast-paced growth. Her most recent CEO experience was guiding FastBridge Learning through a phenomenal period of growth from 2015-2019. The company was ranked as the No. 2 fastest-growing private company in the Twin Cities in 2018 by the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal, and a 2019 Top Workplace by the Star Tribune. Terri attributes the success to intentionally building a mission-driven culture, empowering employee achievement by joining purpose with data and metrics, and maintaining focus to deliver extraordinary business results and customer value. During her tenure she developed the go-to-market strategy for a low-cost and highly productive sales and marketing model that drove a 4-year 56% CAGR and 95% ARR. She guided the product and development teams to innovate with quality while scaling the assessment platform to meet accelerating educator demand and usage. She successfully grew the bootstrapped company without debt, scaling operations using cash generated from sales growth. Finally, Terri led the company through a successful exit and sale to Illuminate Education and remains on board as President leading a thriving integration. Terri’s business acumen, leadership and accomplishments have been publicly recognized. She made the list of CEOs in The Real Power 50 by Minnesota Business and was a recipient of a Titan of Technology award from Minneapolis / St.Paul Business Journal. Terri is dedicated to a mission of improving teaching and learning in our schools through effective, evidence-based innovations in education. Beyond leading EdTech businesses, she has served as a Junior Achievement board member for over 5 years, providing guidance to enhance the organization's online learning opportunities and programs. Follow Terri to learn more about how developing a healthy company culture can create superior customer experiences and drive company performance and financial results. Specialties: strategy development, go-to-market and product strategy, SaaS operations, financial management, sales channel development, education policy.