Michael O’Hara
CMC Spring Valley Alumnus (class of 1976)
Michael O’Hara, who graduated from the Spring Valley campus, started his prestigious career at an early age. At 26 years old, he was promoted to vice president of a multi-million-dollar retail company.
Since that promotion, the serial C-level executive and change agent has established a career that has spanned companies with revenues ranging from start-up to $7 billion. O’Hara has spent more than half of his 25-year career focusing on venture capital/private equity backed technology, software, SEO, lead-generation, media, e-commerce and financing and his international experience includes work on four continents in sales, technology, mergers and acquisitions, and partner development.
O’Hara, who could not attend the ceremony, wrote to the CMC Foundation that the most important skill he learned from the college was in graphic arts technology, including hands-on printing, darkroom work, stripping and typesetting.
Those skills came in handy during his first job, when he was tasked with transforming a national retailer’s old-school graphics art department into one of the first camera-ready advertising departments within its industry.
“Without this . . . certificate, I might not have started that department or come up with in-house printing facilities. This knowledge and what to do with it launched my career. Because of this success, by age 26, I was promoted to vice president of the company,” he wrote.
O’Hara is now acting CEO of an e-commerce start-up and reverse auction website, Yumani.com. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.
“Working with people, coaching, motivating and getting things done through others, is the key to success in business and life and also the key to personal fulfillment. CMC gave me that fundamental start that I needed to launch not only a reasonably successful career, but more importantly, what I hope will be looked at many years from now, as being a good father and contributing member of my local community,” he wrote.
