CEO level in Digital Media, Entertainment, Home and Financial Services. Venture capital and Exits. Turnarounds.
Suzanne Horton, President and CEO, Horton Associates, is a nationally recognized leader in the digital media, mobile, the home industry, and the female digital space with national press coverage and numerous television appearances on ABC, CBS, and KTLA news. In recent years she has worked with both Fortune 500 companies and startup/growth firms in the television network, wireless, real estate, and financial services industries. She has served as CEO of startup firms and as a General Manager for multiPmillion dollar corporate divisions. Very notably, she led a national team of 220+ and spearheaded a public and successful rapid crisis turnaround tripling operating income in 9 months as the General Manager of Homebuilder.com, a $30+ million division of Move.com (150 million users annually) and is the nation’s leading website for aggregating new home listings that works with all the major volume builders in the US. While at Homebuilder.com, she also partnered with the National Association of Homebuilders on a campaign that provided websites to more than 000 builders nationwide. She was an honored guest speaker at the Royal Institute of British Architecture in London, England as the American expert on how the Internet has impacted the US residential home building industry.
Prior to joining Homebuilder.com, Ms. Horton was an early founder in the venture capital arm at American Express and devised the global strategy for executing and managing key digital media deals for a $32 million investment portfolio investing in firms such as Citysearch, Ticketmaster.com and Mapquest; she also managed the prioritization for the global implementation of $350 million in technology initiatives and won the Chairman’s Award for Quality. She was an original member of Jitterbug, the leading boomer/senior cell phone that has grown to 9 figure revenue and developed a $20+ million revenue deal and an online marketing/sales strategy that ultimately landed the startup firm its initial venture capital funding. She also developed Jitterbug’s strategic relationship with AARP. She received national acclaim as CEO and her “Chief Jane” public persona at BeJane.com, a leading website in the $80B female home improvement space that inspires women to tackle home projects and then take that energy to be an inspiration in the world. She executed a crisis turnaround on the distressed startup, raised new funding, created a new strategy and design for the site, brought in top global brand sponsors and new content and sold the website to Builder Homesite, Inc., the consortium of the leading 35 top residential homebuilders in the US. Most recently she was tapped on the shoulder to lead the digital media and marketing strategy for a rare $10 Billion startup funded by Blackstone in which they aggregated 50,000 single family homes nationwide and created a rental portfolio called Invitation Homes. She is known for helping startups raise capital, create business development partnership strategies, and work on M&A exit strategy to the right partner.
Suzanne is also a humanitarian powerhouse who has teamed up visibly on television with Habitat for Humanity to bring more visibility to the need for affordable housing. She also served as an advisor to her friend, Fran Drescher, to support her Cancer Schmancer Movement that lobbies for improvements in female health legislation on Capitol Hill. As the granddaughter of a popular NY Senator she recently worked with NY firemen to drive awareness to gather supplies for those hit by Hurricane Sandy and helped lead a toy drive to raise holiday toys for more than 1000 children made homeless by Sandy and generated a generous donation from LEGO toward this goal. Ms. Horton is a graduate of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University where she earned her MBA and studied international business abroad at the London Business School.