Dave Goldberg is a senior operating executive with over 30 years of experience leading geographically distributed service businesses in the education, hospitality, and franchise industries.  Mr. Goldberg’s specialties include formulating strategy, growing stagnant brands, improving the customer experience, enhancing operations, and launching new concepts. 

Mr. Goldberg currently sits on the Board of Directors of a number of private-equity backed organizations.

From 2014 through 2021, Mr. Goldberg served as President and CEO and a member of the Board of Directors at Cadence Education LLC, the 4th largest private provider of early childhood education in the U.S. In this role, Mr. Goldberg delivered a combined 7.3x return to shareholders over a 5½ year period through the successful completion of two transactions – the first a sale of the company from Audax Private Equity to Morgan Stanley Capital Partners in September 2016 and the second a sale of the company from Morgan Stanley Capital Partners to Apax Partners in March 2020.   

Among his notable accomplishments in this role are creating a strong customer-focused culture improving company Net Promoter Score from 47 to a world-class 74, delivering 220 straight weeks of YOY same-school revenue growth, driving 15% CAGR revenue growth, enhancing EBITDA margins by 150 bps, and acquiring 152 schools in 46 transactions.  Mr. Goldberg also successfully navigated the company through the pandemic, including closing and re-opening almost all schools, furloughing and returning staff, implementing stringent new health protocols, maintaining a strong cash position, and returning the company to pre-Covid levels of performance. 

Key efforts to create these results included focusing on a culture of customer-focus, kindness, and collaboration; creating a durable Brand Promise; building a strong management team, talent base, and organizational structure; identifying and focusing on critical KPIs; rebranding the company and schools; executing on numerous operational improvement and technology initiatives; and rebuilding the acquisition function to become the industry’s premier acquirer. 

During this time, Mr. Goldberg also served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Early Care and Education Consortium, the leading industry advocacy organization, and was a key member of the small CEO group that restructured the industry advocacy group to be a leading voice for childcare in the U.S. and successfully lobbied for significant pandemic relief funds and enhanced childcare funding.  

Mr. Goldberg has led and participated on management teams that completed successful sales among private equity companies (Cadence Education), created public company organic growth (Choice Hotels) took a private company public (2U), and took a public company private (Sunrise Senior Living).  

Prior to Cadence Education, Mr. Goldberg held a series of positions of increasing responsibility with leading hospitality, education, and franchise brands.