We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Richart Ruddie. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Richart below.
Richart, appreciate you joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?
I started my working career when I was 14 in middle school punching out calling cards for a warehouse back in Reisterstown, Maryland. From working as a busboy at a restaurant to being able to own restaurants as a completely passive investor and completely passive owner in a few restaurants between Miami and San Francisco I’ve always strived to better myself and grow. That hunt, desire, and drive to always improve is one of the most important traits you can instill in yourself from a young age.
When I was in high school making $100 a day I wanted to work my way up the ladder and increase my earnings. When I started my online public relations agency in 2011 the drive was no different. From landing a client for $1,800 my first week the website went live I thought how do I do this weekly and then how do I do this amount of sales daily, and eventually how do I increase and build on this so I can look back and see that I’ve set high expectations for myself and am not only achieving my goals but far surpassing.
Setting a high bar for yourself, while always looking to match and exceed your goals is a lesson for those who want to win and succeed in life. When I was in middle school punching calling cards I wanted to make enough to buy Abercrombie and Fitch. Now the goals still remain but are different of course. Whether it’s working so we can expand with building out new business divisions and ideas that I have, collecting fine art, making donations to worthy causes, and the intrinsic motivation to just keep pushing because I love what I do.
Richart, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I recently had an exit and was in the online public relations space. With one of the worlds largest agencies that I started with $500 in 2011 I was able to grow it into a multi-million dollar business and parlay the winnings there into a data privacy and AI compliance company. One of the many services that we provided at my last startup was to help individuals who had their personal information online have it removed and that sparked the interest to dive deeper into data privacy from a B2B standpoint to help companies that have to deal with the ever growing list of regulations in the data privacy world and have to comply with state and country specific regulations versus us sending out individual requests on behalf of the individual consumer client now we help from the other side of the equation.
Prior to starting up I did my diligence and joined the International Association of Privacy Professionals and started to network with members all over the world to learn more about their pain points and how I could develop a product or suite of tools to fit gaps in the marketplace. We’re just getting out of the gate now and booking revenue but I’ve been so proud of our team which has come together in such a cohesive fashion to create great products for a fraction of what the incumbents have spent to do so. This showcases our tenacity, grit, and ability to be lean to get the company off the ground.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
Obsessive customer service and delivering on what the client needs. My last business was a smashing success because we provided that and we are leading with the same mantra this time around. Our software has automated processes and made it so that the client work is visible in the dashboard. The majority of questions are in the on-boarding and initial stage. With a great product you have less variability and issues afterwards. It’s also important to stay in touch with clients to keep them apprised of new things happening in the industry that can or will affect them and how you either are or can help with the new industry regulations. Staying in touch on a personal level and not just tweeting something out is something clients appreciate and takes less than a minute to do if you send a text or email checking in. Those things don’t go unnoticed by the majority of clients.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
I’m in a business networking group called YPO and the criteria to join is as follows:
CRITERIA 1
Age
Under 45 years old
CRITERIA 2
Title
President, CEO, Chairperson of the Board, Managing Director, Managing Partner, or Equivalent title.
CRITERIA 3
Number of employees
50 Full-Time Employees
or
15+ Full-Time Employees
and
Minimum $2,500,000 USD Annual Employee Compensation
CRITERIA 4
Revenue by company type
Sales, Service, Manufacturing:
$15,000,000+ USD
Agency:
$12,000,000+ USD
Financial Institution:
$300,000,000+ USD AUM
or
Enterprise Value:
$25,000,000+ USD
So anybody who is a member has business experience and is vetted. There are thousands of people who apply each year and are denied. After a tennis match last year I was talking with a fellow friend in my chapter in Aventura, Florida and he mentioned that there are job boards for referrals within the YPO community I should check out. At this point I had posted ads on Linkedin, Dice, Indeed, Angel List, and numerous other job boards to fill different roles but one I was struggling to find the right contact for was the CTO role. I had interviewed over 180 candidates and didn’t want to outsource the hiring at such an early pivotal stage of building out the company.
We ended up connecting from the post I made explaining my recent exit and new company I was formalizing and he reached out because he had experience running a healthcare company with 100 engineers and dealing with HIPAA compliance and other sensitive data in the medical world made the data privacy realm seem like a rather easy task to organize. After numerous phone calls, lots of research, and back and forth the cofounder was officially there and now we’re family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://captaincompliance.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/captain-compliance
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/captcompliance
Image Credits
Richart Ruddie, Fort Lauderdale Florida