Adelheid Kuehnle
President & CEO/Co-Founder

Mark Ritchie has 20 years of distinguished private and public sector business and economic development experience. Prior to KAS, he was a Managing Director at Enterprise Honolulu (EH), a private sector Oahu economic development agency.  Prior to this, Mark was a VP at Scottish Development International (SDI) in California where he account managed many of the most important existing foreign investors in Scotland including Sun Microsystems, Intel, Micron, Agilent, Atmel and National Semiconductor. Mr. Ritchie was a Strategic Relations Manager and a Product Manager at SGI (SiIicon Graphics), the high performance computing company. He also spent a number of years at the Canadian Trade Offices in San Francisco and San Jose, assisting Canadian technology companies seeking partnerships and venture capital in Silicon Valley. Mr. Ritchie holds a Bachelor's degree with high honors in political economy from U.C. Berkeley and a Master’s degree in International Business and Economics from the Fletcher School, Tufts/Harvard Universities.

Mr. Johnson has over 30 years of experience in the design, construction and operation of industrial facilities.  His vast experience in manufacturing ranges from aeronautics (Pratt & Whitney), renewable fuels (American Renewable Fuels), construction (Suitt, Obayashi, Takenaka, and Taisei), farm product wholesalers (Perdue Agribusiness), research and testing (Ethyl Corporation) and pharmaceuticals (Fujisawa and Sevier Labs).

Most recently, Martin shared his wealth of knowledge and experience through his consulting business, MLJ Process Engineering.  Martin’s client base has included Phycal, Whiting-Turner, Continental Cement, and Dominion Power.  Throughout his career, Martin has been intimately involved in all facets of the design, development and management of production facilities which has included business development, proposal/bid processes, budget development and management, contract negotiation, quality standards development, process development/production scalability and resource utilization. 

Martin is widely traveled with considerable time spent in Japan, China, Europe, and North and South America.  He is culturally well versed, applying his cross cultural and intercultural knowledge and communication skills to ensure the success of his operations/production projects.

Martin not only possesses a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware, he also holds two Masters Degrees, one in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and another in Mechanical Engineering from the University of South Carolina.  As well, Martin has been a Registered Professional Engineer (Structural) in North Carolina. 

  
Fred Rickert
Chief Financial Officer

Fred Rickert has extensive corporate financial leadership across multiple industries, notably as CFO for the Port of Oakland, where he secured $1.5 billion of municipal bond debt for a $3 billion capital expansion program. Also he participated in a $100 million real estate development strategy at the Port. At NYSE-listed Maui Land & Pineapple Co. Inc., Fred was CFO/VP Treasurer, where he implemented Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and led the team for Business Process Reengineering. At PLM International, Fred as VP Accounting, implemented a company-wide quality program and established an Internal Audit Department and company-wide internal controls.