We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Samí Haiman-Marrero a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Samí, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?
I started URBANDER as a solopreneur when I was laid off during the 2008 Recession, a fate experienced by many millions of Americans whose livelihoods were at stake as a result of predatory lending and corporate greed. After having a successful decade’s long career in Publishing, Marketing and Advertising Sales, the decision to launch my own business was an act of desperation – my husband Scott and I couldn’t find work that would cover our household expenses and we were ‘this close’ to losing our house. It came down to the basics of putting food on the table and getting formula for our son who was just a baby.
When our son was born the year prior, I had hired a caregiver to help us tend to him during the day while I worked from home and to support my husband when I traveled across the country for my then employer, the New York Post. Her name was Yolanda Martínez, a middle-aged woman who had been a school Principal in her native Colombia and was now retired and living close to her children here in Orlando where we had moved to when I started working remotely for the newspaper in 2004.
At learning the news that I lost my cushy six-figure income and noticing that Scott’s home remodeling business was suffering, Yolanda asked if she was being let go. I immediately reassured her that we needed her more than ever, and she wasn’t going anywhere. Yolanda and I met through my hairdresser Natalia when by son was 2 months old and she offered to help me find a caregiver at her church. Yolanda was a blessing from day one while I was still working in the corporate sector, and she was an integral part of the beginning of URBANDER – put simply, I couldn’t explore entrepreneurship without her.
For the first year it was all about making sure we caught up with our mortgage payments and didn’t lose our house. Thankfully, I was able to land three clients with the help of close friends, and Scott became the first official member of the URBANDER team when my friend Laura Álvarez began working for a tea company who needed to redesign their packaging. She called me with the great news that she was finally employed again and asked if I could recommend a really good Graphic Designer. I hired Scott on the spot. When we met in New York City before our move to Florida he had been working for a few years with Lord & Taylor’s graphics department and I knew he had mad skills as an artist as well.
Since then, every person we have brought into the URBANDER team has been a direct referral from someone I know or a close friend. They are mostly independent contractors, and we collaborate on projects together, with me as the lead. It’s been very rewarding to share our success with people I care deeply about, and at times it has also been challenging because having difficult conversations about work-related issues can be emotionally taxing.
What I would have done differently and sooner is create job descriptions for the roles needed at URBANDER (including my own as CEO!) and hire an expert to help evaluate our team’s strengths and areas of improvement using third party assessment tools. This past year, my friend Dr. Xaulanda Simmonds-Emmanuel helped me with this process and has been an excellent coach helping me navigate how to better improve our team’s performance and work passion. I have also retained her as our Fractional COO as we prepare to significantly scale our business in 2024. This investment in building our team and our internal communication processes is already paying off. Our forecasts for the upcoming year are looking really good.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
URBANDER is a Communications and Marketing firm that helps transform the way we do business to advance humanity. We do this by helping organizations in the corporate, nonprofit and government sectors better communicate with their diverse audiences through the power of storytelling in multilingual media formats.
For us, every business has four primary target audiences – employees, end-consumers, suppliers, and the community at large – who are becoming more diverse with each passing day. And at URBANDER, we collaborate with our clients to enhance their internal and external communication strategies to connect, engage and optimize their relationships with diverse audiences in an authentic and compelling manner. The end goal: to restore TRUST.
Our role is to serve as an extension of Marketing, Diversity, Human Resources, Procurement, Community Relations and Social Responsibility teams, providing innovative approaches in the areas of strategic marketing, content development, workforce development, community outreach and IDEAS (inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility and sustainability). We formulate and activate business development and integrated marketing interventions that help our clients attain their communication, engagement, and social impact goals.
All URBANDER team members and collaborators care deeply about responsibly guiding organizations as they navigate the complexities of humanity manifesting its inherent diversity – ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disabilities, veteran status, faiths, age, language, and culture. We are committed to transforming the world by directly impacting the organizations that have the power to affect change.
When our clients align with equitable compliance, communication, marketing, human resources, procurement, and community engagement practices, all aspects of society improve. The outcome of advancing the interests of diverse people – from employees to consumers and vendors to marginalized communities – is that business thrives, and humanity thrives!
What we are most proud of is that we have built a reputation for being adept at creating successful award-winning programs and content that impact society in a positive way. We are an “On Demand” agency meaning that we are very nimble and can jump right in to collaborate on projects effectively, whether it’s a civic engagement campaign, developing curriculum, preparing an annual report, filming video for TV or digital platforms, designing a new logo or deploying a strategy to engage with the powerful Hispanic market on social media. I can say confidently that we are badass at what we do, and the best part is that we have a lot of fun while we’re at it.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
All the people we have worked closely with – from clients to community leaders, business partners to government officials – have one thing in common: we have invested time in breaking bread together. Call me old-school, but nothing beats meeting people for lunch, coffee, or some tapa sand vino to get to know them better. It’s the best way to determine whether there is alignment in terms of your core values, something that is so important to figure out before you get deeply involved in any long-term project.
Is breaking bread a prerequisite of ours to doing business? Not at all, although eventually at some point it’s nice to break bread with people you collaborate with. Breaking bread has simply been part of how we conduct business at URBANDER since 2008. And this is how it works: You are at a business event and meet someone. All of a sudden you realize you dig each other or need each other somehow, and the proverbial “Do you have time to meet?” comes up. My knee-jerk response is usually: “Let’s do lunch! My treat!” Why? Here are a handful of reasons:
1. Guards Go Down: The consumption of food is a very primal human need, and so the experience of eating a meal with another person is about meeting each other at the foundation of human survival. Let’s face it, it’s not a pretty picture. Food is messy to manage, stuff gets stuck in your teeth, unexpected spills loom left and right, and chewing while trying to get a conversation going is always a laughing matter. Inevitably at some point, everyone at the table relaxes and for that time spent together breaking bread, we become a tribe.
2. Non-verbal Cues Run Amok: You can tell so much about a person while observing their body language and overall demeanor when you break bread together. Between the way they dress and how long it takes them to order food to their posture and tone of voice, there are a plethora of cues that communicate tidbits of information regarding your lunch companion’s preferences, likes and dislikes, mood, ideals, views and disposition. Their “vibe” helps figure out how decisive, accessible and comfortable they are in establishing a relationship with you, and quite frankly, if working together is going to be a pleasant experience.
3. Intimacy is Nurtured: Going back to the primal and tribal, breaking bread together sparks storytelling just like our ancestors did many moons ago as they gathered around the flame of life; today, the lit candles on the bar top. People tend to open up and share anecdotes, some related to the business at hand and many completely unrelated that are more personal. It’s human nature to want to explore areas where we can connect and bond at a deeper level, creating more meaningful and intimate relationships. And it’s so special when you start doing business with someone and you wind up making a solid friend.
4. Authentic Self is Revealed: My mom gave me this book about a decade ago called “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum that outlines basic tenets we should practice in our lives. They can also serve as a barometer of sorts to decipher the character and level of integrity of the people you interact with. Of all the gems written in this little masterpiece the three standouts for me are “share everything”, “play fair”, and “don’t hit people”, because they are at the core of being a decent human being. From a business standpoint I want to collaborate with others who are generous, honest and kind, and breaking bread together provides a series of interactions that can give you a sneak peek into a person’s soul.
5. Second Date Validation: The experience of establishing new business relationships is much like dating. You have to invest time, energy and resources into engaging and evaluating your potential collaborators and how they respond to different situations, settings and stimuli. If both parties are like-minded and aligned in terms of their core values, the relationship will be off to a healthy start. It’ll take more than one meeting before deciding whether to get hitched. But a good first date will usually lead to a second, and if you break bread together you just might confirm that it’s time to accelerate your plans to partner up.
This is how we knit the very fabric of humanity! So, I encourage everyone to break bread together and do it often, whether for business or with a close friend you haven’t seen in a while.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The saying goes, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, and I totally get the intention behind it. It’s often offered up to motivate someone to be thankful for what they have and encourage them to make the best of whatever challenging situation they are experiencing. However, I think this phrase undermines human potential, promotes mediocrity and doesn’t foster creativity and collaboration. When I hear a person say this I cringe, because this is what I hear, “Hey, this situation is all on you. If you can’t figure out that you can make lemonade with them lemons life handed you, then you are either not too bright, or you lack the basic skills to turn things around to improve your situation.” And that’s not cool.
So, this is what I propose instead: “When life gives you lemons, make lemon merengue pie”, but you can’t do it alone. I learned this during trying times, when business was slow or nonexistent, and millions were losing their jobs (the 2008 Recession and the recent COVID-19 pandemic), I was driven to figure out how I could leverage the multidisciplinary skills of the people on our team (including a lot of zest) to collaborate with other businesses and professionals who have the other ingredients needed to make lemon merengue pie. The idea is that if we all bring to the table our assets, we can develop a strong recipe, work on it as a team, pop that baby into the oven, and enjoy the outcome (the pie) together when it’s ready to be served. In order to do this, you have to have the following conditions:
1. There must be a pre-established relationship of trust and mutual respect between you and the people you explore opportunities with. This is the foundation – the baking pan – for the success of any collaborative project. Honesty, transparency and protecting your colleagues’ interests as if they were yours is critical. Basically, you have to feel that their interests are your interests, and vice versa.
2. You must be able to take into account the opinion, advice and weigh-in of others to adjust your approach and enhance what you are working on. Sometimes we get fixated on the way we do things or our preferences (i.e. collaborating through Zoom vs. GoToMeeting vs. GoogleMeets, etc.), and when we allow ourselves to experience new things and invite people to openly share their views and expertise, we bring new ingredients into the recipe that can possibly make it so much better.
3. During the beginning of the baking session, make sure to address how the pie will be cut. Once you come together with a group of other professionals or business owners and figure out which ingredients you can each contribute to making an incredible lemon merengue pie for a prospective customer, make sure to agree on how much you will charge for the pie, and who gets what in terms of compensation before you sell it. This is the part where you confirm you are working in a true collaboration because it shouldn’t feel weird to talk about this and everyone should feel they earned their fair share.
4. Create a supportive environment where everyone feels valued, people know their roles and expectations are clearly articulated. It’s smart to name an Executive Chef and have everyone else participate as Sous Chefs. But in the end, a unified vision, defined goals and a seamless process will direct the recipe prep and execution, delivering a delicious result. While it’s important to stay in your lane, working with others requires you to step in as needed to make sure the pie doesn’t burn.
5. Don’t invite too many cooks into the kitchen. I firmly believe that when you are starting something new you shouldn’t have more than 3 – 4 people in the thick of developing the recipe, tasting it and baking the samples. Also, if you have had an unpleasant experience with someone who has amazing expertise and you admire and respect, but your styles just don’t jive together, don’t bring them into the kitchen. Ask around to find someone else who has the same ingredient this person has and that you might be more aligned with. It’s like when you bump into someone you dated years ago and decide to give it another shot, only to realize within a few days there was a reason why you had broken up with this person in the first place. Spare yourself and the rest of the team the anguish of an unhealthy dynamic.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://urbander.com
- Instagram: @urbander_jefa
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Urbander
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samihaiman/
- Youtube: https://www.facebook.com/Urbander
- Other: TikTok: @urbander_jefa
Image Credits
Samí Haiman-Marrero