LaVERDAD CEO looking for next generation of sharp marketers
The Cincinnati Enquirer | By: Josh Pichler
On Leadership
Mike Robinson is looking for the next generation of international marketers right here in this region.
By year’s end, Robinson, the chief executive officer of LaVERDAD Marketing, plans to launch a development program for college-aged students with diverse backgrounds interested in social media, and have them work on projects with LaVERDAD’s clients, which include Toyota North America, Procter & Gamble, Kroger and Cintas.
Robinson is searching for space downtown to house the program and hopes to partner with local universities to help provide credibility to the institution and provide accreditation for the program.
“It’s almost like creating a not-for-profit in that all of the retained earnings would go right back into the program,” Robinson says of his dream, which he’ll call the Verdad Institute on Social and Linguistic Competency.
Robinson, 50, is still in the prime of his executive life. But the institute reflects his growing interest in passing the leadership lessons he learned in the military and business world – hard work, encouraging diverse points of view, rejecting failure as an option – to the next generation.
Robinson says there’s a strong business case for the institute with social media’s rise as a powerful and effective marketing tool. LaVERDAD helps its clients reach diverse consumer groups in the United States and overseas, which is easier said than done, says Alfonso Cornejo, owner of AC & Consulting Associates and president of the Hispanic Chamber USA.
“(Some companies) think that by doing a very small sign in Spanish, people are going to be jumping into their brand, and it’s not that easy,” he says. “When immigrants come to this country, you bring the things that make you what you are: your values, your culture, the way you think.
“It is inevitable that you transition toward U.S. values and U.S. ways of doing things very, very fast. Mike has some high value added services to companies because he can see how a brand or a service will be perceived by (those immigrants).”
But the project is also a chance for Robinson to create opportunities for young students by helping them develop skills that can lead to unexpected career paths.
That’s been the story of his life. It started with a high school guidance counselor who told him to forget about college and pursue trade school or a military career instead.
“He told me – I’ll never forget it – ‘You shouldn’t think about college. You’re not college material.’ ”
Army paved way for opportunity
The irony is that at age 17, Robinson took his counselor’s advice and joined the Army – which eventually led to a bachelor’s degree in geography and planning from Arizona State University, a master’s in business and information management from Webster University and an executive education at Dartmouth College’s The Tuck School of Business.
Robinson’s family knows how to work and serve. Six of his uncles were in the service. Three served in Vietnam, where one was killed and another lost his leg and eye. Robinson’s father was born in the United States, but grew up in both Mexico and the U.S. Robinson grew up understanding the importance of having a job, and worked in the family’s restaurant. But good grades weren’t the priority.
“It wasn’t that I was incapable, I just didn’t have the discipline,” says Robinson, who grew up in Phoenix. “When I was going to school, there wasn’t one time when somebody checked my homework at home. They didn’t know how to. In those days, what was important was getting a job. We were bricklayers, carpenters, we were working with our hands.”
The military changed Robinson’s life, a pattern that has continued.
He was identified as a high-performing young soldier, and put into a commission program to become an officer. The Army sent him to Arizona State. When he graduated in 1983, his assignment was Beirut.
But twin bombings, which killed 299 American and French serviceman, led to a change in Robinson’s orders, and he went to Germany instead. Three years later, Robinson was asleep in the officers’ quarters when a Berlin discotheque was bombed, killing three people. Forty of his servicemen were at the club. Robinson said he spent that night going to area hospitals until he had accounted for them.
“It was unbelievable. I’m 23-24 years old, there are people literally laying in the hallways bleeding,” he says. “I realized how much of a life-changing moment that was. I went back to my room the next day to be with my wife, and I literally broke down and cried like a baby. I saw so much destruction of human beings. I decided at that moment that I want to do something about it.”
In military, learned about new cultures
Robinson joined the Special Forces and became a Green Beret. The next 10 years took him throughout Central and South America, where the Special Forces worked against drug kingpins and cartels including Pablo Escobar and the Medellin organization.
Robinson was a soldier, but his time in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Honduras created a knowledge base that informs his work as an executive today.
“I got to work with so many different Latin American cultures for so many years, that I really developed a deep respect, but also a deep knowledge and expertise that most people wouldn’t even dream of. Even in my own company today, no one has worked or traveled throughout these countries as much as I have.”
An injury ended his Special Forces career in the field. Robinson left the military and got his master’s degree at Webster, then worked as a defense contractor for three years. He landed at Procter & Gamble in 1996, where he spent the next seven years. During his last year with the company, Robinson worked full-time on a project, prompted by the anthrax attacks of 2001, which would help the government identify bio-terrorism.
Robinson recruited drug store chains to contribute real-time sales information on cough, cold and flu medicine to a central database. Inhaling anthrax often leads to cold- and flu-like symptoms. The idea was the government could more easily combat a bio-terror attack if it could identify a spike in the sales of cough, cold and flu medicine.
“That year I worked 365 days, worked every holiday. We were trying to build this thing before the invasion of Iraq,” Robinson says. “At the end of the year, I was exhausted.”
LaVERDAD has been family group effort
Robinson started LaVERDAD in 2003, one year after the Census showed that Hispanics had become the largest ethnic group in the United States. By 2010, according to the Census, that population had grown another 43 percent to 50.5 million. Robinson saw an opportunity to help clients reach these growing, diverse consumers in the United States and abroad.
“Starting your own business and having the size that he has is extremely demanding,” Cornejo says. “He and (wife) Mary put in long hours.”
Mary Robinson is LaVERDAD’s operations manager; two of his three children also work at the firm. His youngest is studying journalism at Ohio University.
LaVERDAD’s currently has 25 employees and is adding more in the coming months. The employees have come from 20 countries, reflecting Robinson’s belief that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams.
He financed LaVERDAD by mortgaging his house and cashing in IRAs. LaVERDAD was profitable within three years, and Robinson is now considering taking on equity partners to keep growing.
“We learned how to be a multi-million-dollar agency, now how do we accelerate that? How do we get to be the $10-, $20-, $50-million agency?”
LaVERDAD has four divisions: Marketing, media, public relations and applied research. The firm has the capability to help clients identify opportunities in a specific region of the world, then help those clients test products.
“Helping a company or big brand get to a country like Brazil two years faster by using our methodologies than they could, (that’s) hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue,” Robinson said. “So it’s a big deal.”
Robinson said his employees, most of whom weren’t born in the United States, find him. Some may have spouses working for P&G or another international company. He says he hires for the person, not the position, and believes in having fun at work.
But at the core of LaVERDAD is the lesson Robinson learned in the military. He doesn’t forget it whether he’s at work or creating a new venture like the Verdad Institute on Social and Cultural Competency.
“Soldiering is serious business. If you’re not serious, you lose, and losing is not an option,” he says.
“And so when I go into a world like P&G or LaVERDAD, I’m serious. We don’t want to miss, we want to hit that target. I need to instill that in others, and leadership by example is sometimes all it really takes.”
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