I was honored to be interviewed recently by Refresh Miami reporter Riley Kaminer for a feature story on Nordis Technologies, A Baskin-Robbins franchise sparked this tech-powered communications company. He did an excellent job of profiling the company and the winding path that has brought us to our position today as a market leader and innovator in tech-driven solutions for customer communications and payments.
Click below to view a brief clip of the interview.
It’s also the story of my nearly 40 years as an entrepreneur. In retrospect, I can see some guiding principles that have served me and Nordis well over the years. They are important lessons for anyone building a career and/or a business.
1. Start somewhere, preferably doing something you enjoy or that interests you.
I was 22 and didn’t know what I wanted to do but I was enjoying working at my family’s Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop in North Miami Beach. When my dad decided to switch careers and sell insurance full-time, we worked out a deal for me to take over the store.
2. Seek out mentors and experts.
The Baskin-Robbins store was my first exposure to managing a business, managing people and learning about profit-and-loss statements, balance sheets, payroll and all the things that go on in a business. Fortunately, we had a really good accountant, and he became my mentor in understanding and interpreting operational and financial data.
Throughout my career, I have surrounded myself with amazing talent and amazing people, including the management team at Nordis Technologies. With a great team and product, we’ve been able to grow the business to where it is today, and it’s been incredible.
Paying it forward, I have mentored a number of people throughout my career as well.
3. Be open to new opportunities.
I was happily running my ice cream store when a high school student came in selling ad space on the back of a discount card as a fundraiser. I started seeing customers and students that I had never seen before because now they were getting a discount.
I started researching school fundraising and soon started a discount-card fundraising business that expanded to 2,000 schools in eight years.
4. Partner for greater success.
For the fundraising business, I teamed up Sid Bloom who had a business selling ads on book covers, including for my Baskin-Robbins store. We named our business Nordis, which is Ron and Sid spelled backwards.
I pitched the schools, and Sid sold the discount-card ads. As we grew, a fundraising sales rep from New York reached out to us and helped us revamp the entire program to go national. After adding more fundraising reps and 15+ full-time employees, I sold the Baskin-Robbins and Sid sold his book cover business to focus on the fundraising business.
5. Take ownership of your products’ quality.
Instead of simply cold-calling prospective advertisers, we created a direct-mail program as the first contact. But the letter shops kept messing up our jobs—putting the wrong letter with the wrong card and the wrong sample. So I called Pitney Bowes, bought printing equipment, learned about the postal service and we were off to the races.
Before we knew it, I had friends asking me to do their direct-mail printing because they were having quality problems with their letter shops too. I went to direct-mail conferences, hired a sales rep, bought more equipment and our printing business grew.
6. Be willing to change course.
A national fundraising company offered to buy our company, so Sid and I decided to sell. Sid retired and I made a deal to keep the name Nordis and the print/mail business. As I added direct marketing clients, I also moved into printing mortgage statements, maintenance fee invoices and other critical communications starting with one timeshare client.
7. Keep innovating.
Despite the high volume, I realized we were barely making a profit on the compliance mailings, with every state regulated differently. It was so complex that we needed programmers writing code to be able to drop in dynamic content depending on where it was being mailed. We had good software for the time, but it was still very labor intensive.
So I went to our timeshare client, now called Wyndham, about developing technology to better manage our business as well as their side of the communications processes. We brainstormed and that’s where Expresso® was born. With Wyndham as our first Expresso client, we figured out how to automate and manage the work. It was a game changer.
8. Focus on client benefits.
The home run with Expresso is not only the ability to automate and process communications, but we’ve made the technology customer-facing and enabling as much as self-service or full service as each client wants. Companies say one of the pain points in managing billing and communications is change management. Instead of going back and forth with a vendor for a month to make one disclosure change in 30 different documents at a cost of $10,000, clients just log into Expresso from wherever they are, go into that content for those disclosures and make the changes or the additions at no cost to them. We not only created the technology to automate the process, but we are giving capabilities and control to our clients to manage their processes.
9. Keep learning.
Regarding the technology, it was a bit out of my realm at the beginning. But I’ve become pretty good at it and made the decision years ago to make technology, cloud technology in particular, the core of our products and services. Technology has really helped us automate the process not only for our clients but ourselves.
Technology is advancing faster and faster, and we continue to focus on how to make the best use of it. One of the things we’re working on is what is the best role for AI in what we and our clients are doing? Right now, we’re evaluating AI for analyzing data and generating KPIs and other metrics for our clients.
10. Meditate.
I’m a spiritual guy, which came about during my journey. I do a lot of meditation. I’ve always been able to stay ahead and see what we need to do next, and my meditation practice has only helped me as a business leader.
I never could have imagined ending up here when I bought the Baskin-Robbins store from my dad decades ago. I have sons in their 20s and I know that many young people think their first adult jobs will lock them in for their entire career and the weight of these decisions is almost paralyzing. But they are just stepping stones, and there will be many forks in the road.
As much as this has been about my growth as an entrepreneur and business leader, it’s been a personal journey of growth. I think the universe has helped me when I’ve needed it to help me. All in all, it’s been an incredible ride for me and my team and anything I can do to share that with the world, I’m happy to.
Learn more about how Nordis can help you streamline your customer communications management. Contact us or request a demo of Expresso today.
