Promoting People and Elevating Costa Rica.

A Dash of Grit Podcast. Do you trust your intuition or have you let fear stand in your way? Season 6 Episode #13. In this weekly podcast, Bryan Lefelhoc chats with local leaders who had to overcome challenges to find success. Be inspired by real, local stories of true grit and courage. By Spire Advertising In Northern Ohio We believe communities are transformed by local leaders like you. At Spire, we want to be a vehicle of connection, inspiration, and support for local leaders like you. Our purpose is empowering local business success that transforms communities.We are here to help you overcome hurdles that slow your growth and to support you with a team that can bring your ideas and vision to life. Our vision is to expand our community impact to a number of other cities in rural communities across Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania by 2028. If we can invest our lives doing this well, the local communities we all serve will be immeasurably better because of your success and your positive local impact. Have you had a dream that you were just too afraid to pursue? At just 27 years old, Richard Blank, CEO of Costa Rica’s Call Center, landed in Costa Rica with passion and a dream. What was seen as a risky choice, for a young man out of college, turned into his greatest opportunity. Do you trust your intuition or have you let fear stand in your way? Hear more about his decision to leave his friends and family as he pursued a career in another country and his advice on building a company and life that you’re proud of. Challenging Call Center Stereotypes with Empathy And in essence, we're a bilingual, dedicated call center in Central America. north of Panama, south of Nicaragua. And Costa Rica is a beautiful Central American country with some incredible ecotourism, wonderful labor, pool that we have here, and our infrastructure is incredible. And so maybe today I can break some of the misconceptions that people have in regards to what a call center is, a telemarketer, or even a CEO, because it does take a dash of grit to break those sort of stereotypes and to show empathy with those with whom work with you and to be able to not call people at dinner for that bad reputation that telemarketers have Creating Empowering Work Environments in Business The difference with the call center here is that we have infrastructure. And also, I do have the liberty of getting places without natural light and bad air. I chose to have vaulted ceilings and bay windows. And so it's really up to the leader of this organization. on how he wants to treat their people. And so not only do we give them all the resources, I once again tried to create a certain environment where not only people make friends, but they can grow within themselves to become more self-reliant and self-confident. And if you're afraid of me, that's your issue. If you're not breaking the law, why are you afraid of a police officer? And if you're coming to work on time, pen at the ready. You know, practicing at home dedicated practice so you improve your English and your speaking skills. Why wouldn't I want to put wind in your sails delegate and find ways to promote you to the top? And so I'm not here looking to fire you or to give you a walk of shame. Somebody could do that. My ego is just fine. What I'm really trying to do, once again, is to reduce my attrition, to have the synergy here in order for people to feel comfortable enough to really get fulfilled with their jobs. Ethical Business Practices in a Call Center Well, that's an excellent question there, Brian. The first thing is the sort of accounts that come into the center. I turn down more than I accept. And we're in a very strict Catholic country. So it's really a seller's market. If nobody shows up at your party at Chuck E. Cheese, you don't have any friends. And so if I'm offering certain projects here and they have options such as Amazon, HP, Intel and Oracle, they could work at those call centers. Why would they choose Vine? They have to go home and tell their mother what they do for a living as I do with my parents. And so that's number one. Secondly, I give them their dignity because not just in the call center industry, but any vertical, a lot of the employees might feel expendable, feel like a robot. They're just maybe not onboarded properly given the resources or even the encouragement to want to grow with a company. Grit and Determination in Personal and Professional Life Which is why, Richard, your wife is already impressed with you because of the grit you're showing in trying to learn the violin. And folks, it goes all the way down to when he decided to start his business. Starting is the first level of grit. Every single day, picking up that mantle and going to the next level is another level of grit. But you've accomplished something. When you go to bed at night, you look back and say, what did I accomplish? you've accomplished something there. It took some grit to get there Promoting People and Elevating Costa Rica But at the moment, I still have a goal. Once again, is to see how many people I can promote and how many ways in which I can put Costa Rica on the map and being the greatest call center location in the world. And also for your audience, a friend to come visit. If anybody's in Costa Rica, it doesn't have to be business. I'd love to make suggestions and to have somebody just come by and visit me. https://youtu.be/QtHsnC50__A https://youtu.be/Q8VDJTWXM50 https://youtu.be/AIuz7Xhdz_U https://youtu.be/23Ff5bhrpyE https://youtu.be/V-uJAI9KXXE https://youtu.be/s4N_lkflvNE

A Dash of Grit 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. Richard’s journey in the call 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 call 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 Call 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 Call 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 call 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/ #Spire #BryanLefelhoc #ADashofGritPodcast #RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Leadgeneration #Appointmentsetting #dashofgrit The Realities of Success: More Than Just Personal Effort But Richard, is it that easy? Can anybody do what you did? So you showed up in Costa Rica, out of Philadelphia, started a new business. You know, all these employees and doing all these amazing things. Can anybody just say, you know, let's just go and let's just make good decisions. Like there had to be something about you that made this success. It wasn't all perfect, was it? And it wasn't all me. I mean, no way that I could have scaled without people that have been with me over a decade or believed enough in me to invest their time. I'm not an octopus. I can't wear a thousand hats. I can't be in the kitchen and on the floor as well. And so there had to be a time. Or I let go of the bike and allowed a supervisor to represent me, allowed the human resources department to interview for me. I could, once again, out of all those years working with these individuals, show them my style, my culture, but to grow to the size that I did, no. And if you don't have your own internal balance, how can you expand on others? There's no roots or branches there. And so once again, being a leader is dressing for it, showing up for it, being respectful and following through on my word. You know, I'm not just I am a guest in this country. Richard's Aspirations to Master the Violin and Write Children's Books Well, on my personal life, I'd like to do two things. I'd like to master the violin to impress my wife. And the second thing is to start writing my children's books. So I'm just going to have to find the courage to be able to begin those two projects. begin to get at a comfortable stage to be able to show people. I mean, I still have a lot of ideas together and I'm just learning my scales, but it's the one thing that once again, it feels natural to me. And when I have more time to invest in that, I'll do it a little bit more.