NetPlus Alliance announced Monday that the leader of its business development department plans to retire later this year.
Paul Byrnes will step down as senior vice president of business development in June. He spent 12 years at the buying group, which came after 11 years at wholesaler ORS Nasco.
NetPlus officials said in the announcement that Byrnes “personally shepherded an astounding 260 distributor members into the group” during his tenure.
“Paul has been one of those people who has brought his own ‘secret sauce’ to NetPlus from his experiences in our industry and the results have been tremendous,” NetPlus President and CEO Jennifer Murphy said in a statement.
“We all love something about our job, and the piece for me that is so powerful is the belief that I’ve helped so many of our members become better, more profitable businesses,” Byrnes said. “It makes me so happy that I was able to do that. I don’t have anything against big corporate stores, but it’s so important that we have these thriving family businesses.”
The buying group announced that Director of Business Development Zach Brado would succeed Byrnes in a role as senior vice president of growth and development.
“I’ve gained so much from Paul that you could never learn in a business book,” Brado said. “As I’ve led our supplier relationships for the past several years, Paul’s guidance taught me to keep the best interests [of] our distributors at the forefront of mind.”
NetPlus also promoted Kate Borth to vice president of finance and Jennifer McMillan to vice president of human resources, operations and marketing.
