Aaron Gaddie

About Aaron Gaddie

I have loved strategy ever since I was young, although I didn’t know it as “strategy” then. I was fascinated with discovering the best way to approach any situation. Capture the flag with my friends? I knew where all of the other team’s members were located, their strengths and weaknesses, how fast they all were, because I put in the time to research and learn from past experiences. Planning family trips? I pored over Mapquest and found the best routes to see all of the sights. I learned about the cities we were going to before we ever left the driveway. Baseball? My favorite sport. I knew more about the other teams’ tendencies than they did, which meant I always knew where to position myself in the field for each batter. But what were these strategies without a team? If I shaded a hitter to the left or right and didn’t share that information with my team, not only would they be less likely to field a ball from that hitter, but there would be a major breakdown in the team’s positioning, leaving too large a gap between myself and the next fielder.While I was in college, I started my career as a tour guide at Hillerich & Bradsby, better known as Louisville Slugger, because I loved baseball. But that experience opened up a whole new world of business to me. I was able to work my way up from being a tour guide to a museum intern to a customer service rep to an associate brand manager. Brand management is where the idea of strategy in business started to click for me, and I knew I wanted to delve deeper. I decided to pursue my MBA at Vanderbilt to gain the best training I could.Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to work in market strategy and business intelligence globally. Combining these two concepts is where I truly excel: distilling business intelligence findings to create actionable strategies. And just like when I was young, I pride myself on my ability to build cross-functional teams and engage all of the members in the strategic process.

Experience

1. Senior Global Business Analyst

   Bruker BioSpin

   Oct 2020 — Present · Boston, MA, US

   Built five-year strategy plan, including a custom analytics framework, for the Commercial Excellence and Operations Team to drive optimization of business strategies and processes. Connected disparate data sources including SAP and Salesforce and developed visualizations and reports to promote data-supported decisions.Launched Strategic Analytics Network to foster collaboration among previously siloed departments. Led team of eight analytics professionals in driving the standardization of metrics and cataloging of existing reports within the organization.

Education

• University of Louisville

  BS, Sport Administration

  2006 — 2010

• Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management

  Master of Business Administration, Marketing, Finance, and Strategy

  2012 — 2014