Mr. Kendall is a proven leader of startup and turnaround companies operating in new, rapidly evolving market spaces. Mr. Kendall has a demonstrated ability to attract high quality investment capital and seasoned management talent. He has a wide range of industry experience and professional skills including: consumer marketing, strategic analysis, technology-based product development, M&A, private and public market equity financing, and international business operations. Mr. Kendall is presently the owner and chairman of High Country Passage, an educational tour operator specializing in custom designed world wide tours and cruises for non-profit organizations.
His clients include the Smithsonian Institution, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the California Academy of Sciences, the National Geographic Society, and the alumni associations of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Cornell’s Adult University. Prior to this venture, Mr. Kendall was the Founder and CEO of Affinity Expeditions – a startup marketing services firm, focused on the affinity travel marketplace.
Clients included university alumni associations, museums and other membership groups with educational travel programs. Marketing services provided to clients included: database modeling, mailing list management, web site development, e-mail communication management, and campaign planning & execution. Clients included: The University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, The University of Southern California, The University of Colorado at Boulder, The Smithsonian Institution and Stanford University. Mr. Kendall is the founder and retains a significant stake in Amrest Holdings, a master franchisee with licenses to develop and operate Starbucks, Pizza Hut, KFC and Burger King restaurants as well as two proprietary restaurant brands in the Republic of Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and 3 other Central European countries. Currently, Amrest operates more than 300 restaurants in these countries, with annual sales in excess of US$500 million. AmRest is a publicly traded company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (Stock Symbol: EAT), with a market capitalization in excess of US$300 million.
The Company has been recognized as one of YUM Restaurants’ premier franchisees. It operates restaurants which regularly score in the highest percentile against more than 30,000 restaurants worldwide for customer satisfaction, product quality and cleanliness. Mr. Kendall, the son of Pepsi’s former President and CEO, Don Kendall, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Stanford University. He started his career at McKinsey & Co. He resides in Connecticut with his wife and three children.
