Ron A. Spaulding

Ron Spaulding has spent thirty years selling things nobody was sure they wanted.

He started at Priority Records, the independent company that turned hip hop from a genre the industry would not stock into a commercial business. Over eight years he ran marketing, strategy, and revenue for its owned and distributed catalog, and helped grow it from $20 million to $300 million. It set the pattern for everything after. Find the demand before the market has priced it, then build the machinery to meet it.
Warner Music Group recruited him next. He was selected by the Chairman of Elektra Entertainment Group to lead commercial revenue, then promoted from Vice President to Senior Vice President at the $1.2 billion Warner/Elektra/Atlantic Corporation, brought in to redefine its distribution network after AOL’s purchase of Time Warner. He then did something less common. He conceived an entirely new division, won approval to build it inside one of the largest music companies in the country, and ran it as its principal executive. The Independent Label Group reached $40 million and turned a profit in year one, with 300 direct and indirect reports.

At Universal Music Group he spent seven years across the company’s independent and frontline businesses. He took over Fontana, UMG’s global independent arm, as a $49 million business losing money, with EBITDA at negative $700,000, and directed its strategy, sales, marketing, business affairs, branding, and finance worldwide. Promoted from Executive Vice President and General Manager to President, he left it at $100 million with $6.5 million in EBITDA, having doubled revenue while the market declined by double digits, then carried the company through its acquisition by Ingrooves. He was next selected to the team integrating UMG’s $1.9 billion acquisition of EMI and revitalizing its labels, among them Capitol Records, Blue Note, Harvest, Virgin, and Motown, with oversight of more than $350 million in commercial revenue.

In 2014 he founded Spaulding Enterprises, LLC, and now takes the revenue seat inside other people’s companies rather than advising from outside it, as an operating partner embedded with a founder or portfolio company, as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer, or as an interim executive. He works with founder-led businesses where the founder is still the best salesperson in the building, with post-raise companies whose sales motion was not built to carry new targets, and with investors who want an operator inside a portfolio company rather than another adviser.

Most of his career was in music. The work never really was. It was complicated channels, large commercial organizations, and relationships that outlast any single deal. That work travels to technology as readily as it once moved records.

Spaulding holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Philosophy from Monmouth College, where he graduated with honors, led the Pre-Law Society and the Politics Club, and wrestled at the NCAA varsity level. He rides motorcycles and plays a great deal of golf.