Rose Kirk is a member of the Board of Directors of Casella Waste Systems (NASDAQ: CWST) where she serves on the Compensation and Human Capital Committee and the Nominating and ESG Committee. She is a seasoned C-level executive with more than 35 years experience leading sales, marketing, customer service, go-to-market strategies, and responsible innovation functions. Having worked in the telecommunications industry during five transformational technology and industry changes, Rose is effective at leading teams through M&A impacts, managing third party re-sellers, overseeing rapid restructuring, and driving growth within evolving and challenging competitive environments.
During a career that began as an award-winning journalist and concluded as a C-level executive at Verizon– which has a market cap of $170B, generates revenue of $35B, and serves more than 115M customers– Rose served as Vice President of Enterprise and Government sales with accountability for generating $500M in revenue from global customers. She also served as Vice President-Sales and Customer Care for the medium business segment. By leveraging new customer segmentation and revising account penetration plans, in this role she transformed the third-party resellers channel to deliver $185M in revenue. Rose also managed a 1K-person unionized team and collaborated effectively with union leadership to improve back office operations and in the process transformed the customer care model, introduced new productivity measures, and implemented new teaming processes. Prior to her senior leader roles in profit-and-loss functions, Rose served as a senior director with the former GTE telecommunications company’s CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) where she created the value proposition, marketing strategy, and go-to-market plans for the unit’s bundled product solution. The CLEC served as a regulation-free telecom entity positioning GTE against new telecom entrants.
As Verizon’s CSR Officer, Rose used her extensive portfolio of experiences to transition Verizon from philanthropy to responsible
innovation. In this regard, she delivered revenue-generating solutions by using societal insights to identify unmet customer needs and to create new business products. One such product was bundled with digital solutions targeting the small business segment and created new go-to-market models and revenue opportunities for the enterprise business unit. Further, Rose created new professional services solutions for the education sector that targeted consumers in key urban areas, rural America, and within indigenous American populations.
In addition to her public board service, Rose serves on the board of BSR, a global business consulting firm; the global board of World Childhood; and previously served as the strategic plan chair and a member of the Finance Committee on the board of a private, K-12 college-preparatory school, Gill St. Bernard’s, which generates $28M in revenue. Also, she served as board chair, executive committee chair, and a member of the Governance Committee for the global firm Dress for Success Worldwide which has a revenue of $15M.
Rose is an executive producer of and is featured in the documentary Without a Net: The Digital Divide in America. A supporter of the arts, she is a member of the Texas Women for the Arts|Texas Cultural Trust and is engaged with a number of national professional organizations. Rose has been featured in major news outlets including Good Morning America, Fortune, Forbes, and Austin Woman. Most recently, Rose was featured in a BBC documentary on bridging the digital divide in classrooms. She has also served as a key panelist and speaker for Global Citizen, Aspen Ideas, Social Innovation Summit, Concordia, The NationSwell Summit, and more. She holds a B.S. from Arkansas State University and is completing her Master’s Degree in International Affairs (thesis remains) at Washington University.