Our Team is Leading the Modernization of Local Store Marketing
We built a culture of innovation, passion, tenacity and vision to accelerate our clients into the future of artificial Intelligence.
Michael Koch
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Michael is an originating pioneer of the Artificial Intelligence, Global Digital Production, and SaaS industries. He is a visionary and incorporates the latest technological advancements while developing high-performance tech platforms and teams that are able to scale quickly, effectively, and globally.
Previously, Michael served as Founder & CEO of four privately held technology companies that he built and exited over the course of over a decade. His teams have delivered in over 79 countries worldwide and built a leading enterprise platform for top QSRs and over 14,500 McDonald’s locations.
Michael was named the 2022 Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Machine Learning by the Business Intelligence Group. He has also been recognized as one of the Most Influential Solutions Provider Executives by Nation’s Restaurant News.
Kathy Hartman
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer
Kathy is a world-renowned Local Store Marketing (LSM) expert and builder of technology solutions supporting sales-building and local marketing efforts. She has led LSM for McDonald’s on both the agency and corporate level supporting over 44,000 locations worldwide with her trading area expertise.
In addition, she has worked with start-ups, multi-unit organizations, and local businesses—all of whom depended upon LSM to drive their sales and customer counts.
Training thousands of local marketers throughout her career; her passion and knowledge of LSM is unsurpassed. She has been recognized by the multi-unit restaurant industry with the Top Women in Restaurant Technology Award.
Kevin Newell
Executive Advisor
Kevin is the former Global Chief Brand Officer of McDonald’s Corporation and previously served as President of McDonald’s West Zone. His extensive career in marketing and brand building brings a unique perspective to driving business across all levels…worldwide to local neighborhoods.
Kevin’s deep knowledge of the multi-layer marketing initiatives that a retail organization requires and his experience in building global brands directly relates to aiding in the acceleration of HubKonnect. He understands how to amplify global and national strategies at the local level and the need to equip operators to make local marketing decisions to drive community connections.
The Brain
Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer
HubKonnect’s Intelligent Brain creates data-driven custom local marketing plans for our franchise clients. It loves object recognition, machine learning, deep neural networks and is an expert in both structured and unstructured data. Over it’s career, it has been 99.9% correct, yet it’s charming personality has an uncanny ability to not make any mere human feel intellectually inferior (though they are).
“The Brain” loves virtual travel and has literally been to every local trading area known to man. Brainstorming ideas is it’s favorite pastime, and it is known for it’s modern and innovative plans. A true renaissance brain of the 21st century, as it refers to: “The First Century of the 3rd Millenium.”