Career Progression Stories: Darren Cox

We caught up with Darren Cox, Director of Business Development at CORA Group, to talk about his career progression, His role at Jonas, Our ABCs, and more!

Thank you, Darren, for sharing your story with us. Looking for a successful career like Darren’s? Learn how you can join the family at Jonas Software by clicking the button below

Career Progession Stories Interview Transcript

Hello, my name is Darren Cox, I work for the CORA group, which is a division under Jonas Software inside Constellation Software. I’ve been working at Jonas now for just over eight years and my job is to source and acquire software companies in the vertical market space.

My background before I joined Jonas – I started my career in a large IT company. I worked there for about 13 years in a corporate environment. I then got into executive recruiting and hired some people for this company called Jonas I heard a lot about for some senior leadership roles. Jonas came and approached me and headhunted me out of my recruiting firm to run a sales team that called Shortcuts, which they just acquired out of Australia and was run by Jeff McKee.

My career progression since I joined Jonas has been pretty accelerated. I came in as a very junior person on the business development team for M&A. I then progressed into a senior associate to manager to director of an M&A team, which is growing vastly at this stage.

A typical day in mergers and acquisitions is very interesting. From dealing with our current accounts that we have in our funnel, which is ever growing, no two days look the same! We are always working on new and exciting projects. I have a great team around me and we’re always coming up with new initiatives and ideas and working through them on a day-to-day basis. It’s a very exciting day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed.  

What I enjoy most about the role is that It’s such a changing role every single day. From working with bankers, brokers, and networking – I have a very extensive network with LinkedIn and tools like that. Just dealing and learning from the people around me. I didn’t have any financial background before I came into my role at Jonas and now It’s one of the things that I’ve learned a lot and I’m studying a lot more. It’s just exciting closing and buying software companies.

My experience with the differentiators across CSI and the ABCs have definitely played a huge role in my career. For instance, I’ve been working with a lot of the other groups inside CSI. Working with those groups individually on a day-to-day basis has really accelerated my own career as well as I see how other groups do things. When they say it decentralized, they really mean it, which was something I was really shocked about. Being such a large organization that we are today, I felt like the corporate world would have kind of taken that over, but it hasn’t. All these companies run completely independent, really practicing what they preach.

What gets me the most excited about the future of Jonas is just watching it continue to grow as we have. When I first started just over eight years ago with Jonas, I think we were at about 500 or 600 companies and our stock price at the time was less than $1000. And everybody told me it was going to be crazy when it was hitting $1000. Now it’s at an all time high again, it seems like that all the time nowadays, but just sitting there and watching it every single week, month, year grow the way it has been, it’s been an incredible story. It seems like it’s just getting warmed up to be honest!

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