Inspiring Life Advice.

Fortune favors the brave because if you can get past your parents' guilt, you can live anywhere in the world. That's number one. And number two, there's a lot of naysayers and grave believers out there. And these are the people that love you, but they may not understand you. And as long as you're willing to die with your boots on, and you have a certain vision quest, a certain destiny that you feel you need to do while still being responsible with your family and your health, then by all means, live your life because you only get 100 years. The Business Vitality Podcast. Starting With A Clean Slate with Costa Rica's Center, Richard Blank. Episode 137 Catherine Cantey’s goal is to partner with individuals and teams to create positive and measurable change. She brings more than 20 years of professional experience in sales, consulting, and coaching with focus on results. Some of her experiences include strategic planning with board and leadership teams, training, and speaking. Her ability to facilitate, collaborate and share ideas has earned her exceeding results. Business Vitality® and the Business Vitality® podcast are owned by Cantey Advisors. Your host, Catherine Cantey talks with Founder, Richard Blank, of Costa Rica's Center. Richard started his journey at 27 years old teaching English at his friend's center. It wasn't long before he built his own center company, and now shares with us his experience with providing the best employee experience, delegating, and so much more. Business Vitality podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica as an expat. Topics include: advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation, phonetic micro expression reading. Effective Communication and Vocabulary Sensitivity Sure, regardless if it's a first time connection or the person you've known your entire life, the best bit of advice that I could do would be more for conflict management and strategy. We can always go into other topics later, but this is probably the starting point for me. It's better defense than offense. I believe in two ears, one mouth, double listening to one speech. You can still participate in the conversation, but there's some sort of hedging that you can do in order to let you lead and I could still dance with it. When you confirm things with people, they don't need to repeat it. So there's no rabbit holes. It shows active listening. Once again, you can refer to yourself possibly in third person or even mentioning things that could be done together just to get their attention again, to show that you are seeing a progression or something that is moving forward. Vocabulary is the most sensitive topic. And I always believe that a word like help, as simple as it sounds, could also provoke emotion or just knock you off. That could be the last straw. From Employee to Owner: A Journey of Empathy and Understanding Well, yeah, the best podcast. What an amazing question. Let me cut the pizza, okay? Because there's about four or five nice slices there. Let me go back to August of 2000. When I was 27 years old, I came to Costa Rica for only two months to work at my friend's center who wanted me to teach English. I took this opportunity to stay and to learn the business. So I did not start at a C level. In fact, I wasn't even at manager supervisor level. I was with the people. I might have been friends with the owner, but I was with the proletariat with thousands of center agents. So I would break bread with them, sit in the cubicles with them. And throughout those years, I learned every department of a center, minus the C-suite. But you saw the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. And for me, I cracked a couple of codes in regards to empathy and making sure these individuals have their dignity and not to feel like a number and expendable. So I went from just being an employee at my friend's center to now owning a center. https://youtu.be/tIp0F9mZlB4 https://youtu.be/3Xe4s6dKMnQ https://youtu.be/nkPtgFqvNgU Richard’s journey in the center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Center since 2008. Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level. Costa Rica’s Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies. https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/ #RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Leadgeneration #Appointmentsetting #businessvitality The Importance of Thinking Outside the Box These are all of the best practices of leaders and opportunities that have been coming up decade after decade. And a lot of this stuff has been in practice for more than 20 years, 30 years and beyond. And what we're learning is a lot of these folks that are remaining in business today are having to think differently. And to share a quote from one of my CEOs that I've worked with in the past, he told me all day long he can hire folks, but what he needs more of are people who think outside the box. Live Bravely and Stay True to Yourself Richard, this is fantastic. Okay, so as we're kind of wrapping up, can you give maybe your best one or two pieces of advice? You have so much to offer. Is there even a way to give one or two pieces?