Vespo Associates

Martin J. Vespo
Marty has spent the past 32 years in the education arena. He began his career as a counselor and program director in higher education and for the past 27 years has worked in educational publishing focusing on developing and marketing textbooks, supplemental products, library reference books and trade titles.He has been responsible for sales, marketing and general management at Readers Digest, Grolier, Houghton Mifflin, and divisions of Hachette, the Washington Post and Warner Brothers as an employee and consultant.

Throughout his career he has succeeded in building businesses and delivering significant financial performance in a diverse range of business settings. He has launched several successful new ventures including a media-based supplemental education company for private investors and businesses in the for-profit education field for Kaplan and Houghton Mifflin.

As President of Grolier Education Corporation, he led a successful corporate turnaround making that unit the most profitable part of a $100 million publishing group and expanding its business interests to include the US, Canada and Western Europe.

In the past decade, he has helped pioneer innovative public-private partnerships involving government, business and educational institutions generating substantial revenue and profitability. As President of Vespo Associates, Marty and his team of success-driven associates apply their experience to plan and implement aggressive strategies that deliver the financial results clients in all levels of the education industry expect and deserve.

Peggy Lanier
For over 30 years, Peggy has made a career of helping companies bring products and services to the education market. She has worked both with very small start-ups and with established education organizations and publishers including IBM, McGraw-Hill, and Kaplan to identify market opportunities, match products to needs, and create high-performing marketing and sales programs to communicate and sell.

Peggy is known for her ability to quickly capture the nuances of education products and services and to translate this information into effective sales and marketing campaigns, collateral, ads, tradeshow signage/design and websites, all while staying within a budget. Her expertise and extensive knowledge of the education marketplace and, specifically, her ability to create innovative programs that drive a good ROI has helped her become one of the most sought-after sales and marketing consultants in education today.

For the past seven years, Peggy has been the principal in LanierThinking, Inc., working with a variety of publishing, Internet and other education companies.

She resides in Oklahoma with her golden retrievers, Winston and Cooper, and can frequently be found buzzing around the back-roads of beautiful Oklahoma on her vintage motorcycle.

Kay Grastie, Ph. D.
Kay has 34 years experience in post-secondary and K-l2 educational endeavors including chief academic officer, dean, teacher, grants writer and development leader and project based consultant. She has national experience at the college, district, school, and private sector levels and utilizes her extensive K-12 and higher educational expertise to activate practical, yet provocative efforts for school, teacher and curriculum excellence.

Kay's special focus is enriching learning opportunities and relevance through partnerships with post-secondary institutions, business, industry and the community and the creation of curriculum linkages toward college preparation and workforce development. She has an established track record in grants and development for colleges, school districts, and charter schools often securing significant project funding. In 2003, her work on a ‘Tech Prep Demonstration’ project in South Carolina earned the top monetary award nationally.

Bonnie Williams
Bonnie has been involved in the education arena for over 30 years, first as an elementary school teacher and Reading Specialist. She has held various sales positions with Reader's Digest, Apple Computer, Scholastic and The Learning Company. As Director of Sales at Educational Resources, she started the outside sales team.

In 1993, Bonnie started her own business working with companies such as Macmillan/McGraw Hill, Pearson, ProQuest Learning and Knowledge Adventure to develop sales and marketing strategies and to increase the educational technology revenue.

Bonnie's expertise in the education market has enabled her to build relationships with the top school districts throughout the country, particularly in urban areas.

Barry Fetterolf
Barry has worked in educational publishing for over 30 years. He has been Editor in Chief and Vice President at Random House, a Publisher at McGraw-Hill Companies and Vice President and Publisher at Saunders College Publishing, a division of Harcourt Brace Publishing Company. He has been a principle in V-Campus a technology start-up which created the first virtual campus and course administration and delivery platform.

His experience includes editorial, development and marketing of products and services associated with the higher education marketplace.

Presently, he is the Publisher of Lahaska Press, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Publishers.

Kate Nunn
Kate Nunn is a senior publishing executive with fifteen years experience building and managing publishing programs. She is an innovator and strategic thinker able to turn exciting concepts into books. She combines a deep knowledge of the K-12 market and a solid understanding of educational trends to develop products that respond to the curriculum without losing their general interest appeal.

As editor-in-chief of Children’s Press/Franklin Watts, Scholastic Library Publishing, she rejuvenated these major library imprints and developed titles that sold successfully in multiple markets, including continuity channels, classrooms, libraries, retail outlets and book clubs. Her experience at Benchmark Books, the library imprint of Marshall Cavendish, and at Millbrook Press, where she was responsible for the "business" side of publishing, including finance, design, manufacturing and distribution, makes Kate uniquely able to create programs that are successful and educationally sound.

Her passion is to create materials that matter to students, educators and parents.