Teaching and research interests
For the past 25 years, Professor Rorke has been a manager, investor and business professor. After beginning his career in the restructuring area of Chase Bank, he sought out more active management roles. As an operator, he has been CEO for a number of emerging growth companies, special situations and turnarounds. Rorke spent four years as president of Danskin, increasing sales 65 percent and recording a dramatic bottom-line turnaround. As CEO of Kaplan Educational Centers, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, he led the revitalization of the company, reversing declines in EBIT and revenue during a successful two-year turnaround assignment.
As an investor/ manager, he was successful in acquiring and turning around a $36M Atlanta-based promotion and incentive company. More recently, he acquired an enterprise software company, built a new management team, enhanced the product line and sold it to Cisco.
Rorke is the managing partner of Morning Street Partners, a private equity fund focused on secondary direct investments. He is on the advisory board of Corporate Revitalization Partners (crpllc.net), a 50-person consulting firm specializing in strategy, operations and financial restructuring.
He is chairman of Navagate, an enterprise software company focused on the financial services and life insurance markets, serving such clients as New York Life, Banker’s Life, HSBC and Thrivent. He is also chairman of Navaya Computer Sciences, providing software development resources to enterprise software companies.
