ORLANDO, Fla. – In the face of a failing project, business agenda or even of a fledging business itself, it may feel like you’d need a miracle before anything could improve. So, why not seek out a miracle maker?
This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Ted Santos, founder and CEO of Turnaround Investment Partners, a man who leads a New York-based team of problem solvers in stabilizing underperforming companies.
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“We are in the business of producing miracles. That is, you could say, our core competency is the outcome, the product we produce, and CEOs hire us when they’re looking to create a breakthrough and they’re not sure how to do it with existing resources,” Santos said. “One of the things I do is I work with CEOs — could be them and their executive team — but I work with them to create disruptive strategies, and that could end up being creation of disruptive technology or penetrating an untapped market.”
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Santos said that in every case he takes on, his clients wind up going after new revenue streams, not because they had never felt like doing it before, but because they simply never knew how to get at it.
“I work with them to transform corporate culture to ensure the culture is able to profitably execute the breakthrough initiative,” Santos said.
In the realm of problem solving, Santos said that problems come naturally to CEOs, and if a CEO should have little to no inclination to deal with or create problems to figure out, that on its own may be indicative of larger issues.
“When I work with CEOs, I have a philosophy, and the philosophy is, ‘If you’re the CEO and you are not intentionally creating problems, you should be fired or retrained immediately.’ So, your job is to create problems for the organization to solve, and a great example that everyone would know is a guy like Steve Jobs. So, you know, whatever he told people, ‘We’re going to create something that makes the Walkman obsolete,’ the people are probably thinking, ‘This is crazy. This guy is high. That makes no sense. Why are we competing with listening devices? We make computers,’ but out comes the iPod,” Santos said.
Santos’ more-than 30 years of experience in investing, for example, started with a chance he took with precious metals back in 1988, solely on intuition. Though potentially risky, it sparked a flame that’s burned him a path to success.
“I invested in platinum, I took physical possession, I didn’t know a lot about investing but what I did know is platinum and gold were almost never at the same price, they were like $10 apart,” Santos said. “In 30 days, I made like a huge return on that. So after that, I started looking at equities and options (...) at some point I did look at purchasing apartment buildings in DC, and one of the things that I’ve always thought is, ‘One of the best investments you can make is in yourself,’ investing in yourself and then looking at companies that you can buy into.”
The lesson therein? Get your feet wet in leadership, do something you’ve never done and make those miracles happen.
Hear the full interview and more in Season 2, Episode 33 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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