George L. Ortiz Jr. is making sure his company, Hispanic Research Group, has a presence wherever Latino populations are growing significantly.
It’s important for the company to stay close to those populations, he says, because its main clients are the mid-sized mainstream American companies that need help marketing products and services to Latino populations.
That’s partly why Ortiz – founder, CEO and director of the consulting and market research company – moved Hispanic Research Group’s headquarters to Rhode Island about a year and a half ago.
He said Rhode Island is a microcosm of the population shifts happening across the country.
The two-year-old wholly Latino-owned company also has offices in Costa Mesa, Calif., which is where the company started, and Douglasville, Ga., near Atlanta – where the Latino population has doubled since 2000 from 600,000 to 1.2 million. (By comparison, Rhode Island’s Latino population has grown by an estimated 27 percent in the last five years.)
Today, about 75 of the company’s business involves operational consulting services. But it wasn’t always that way.
When Ortiz started Hispanic Research Group with former partner, Juan M. Rodriguez, and his wife, Carrie Samboy Ortiz, the company was doing market research and conducting mystery shopping programs for large companies such as Sears, Lowe’s and McDonald’s.
Then Ortiz realized the entire mid-sized to small business segment of the market was not being served. As he shifted the company’s focus to those clients, he started getting requests for more consulting services.
The company, for example, sent a team of five employees to help Maine-based The Tangent Group LLC overhaul its customer service operations in California. The company was having trouble managing its large Latino work force, and it was losing money because of it. Hispanic Research Group conducted cultural sensitivity training for both workers and management, helping both sides better understand each other.
“We camped out there for seven months until the company had turned around,” Ortiz said.
Upon moving to Rhode Island, the company was hired as the marketing, fundraising and human resources arm for Progreso Latino in Central Falls, which is still its largest local client. Ortiz said the company does everything from establishing standard procedures to organizing events.
Hispanic Research Group has three full-time employees in Rhode Island, including Ortiz, and three contract employees. It has another seven full-time employees and 32 contract employees in Georgia and California.
All are fluent in Spanish and English, Ortiz said, adding that he makes an effort to match his employees’ skills and knowledge of a specific culture with the population the client is hoping to reach.
For example, Ortiz said, he wouldn’t hire a Cuban from Florida to help a company in San Antonio introduce a new product to the Mexican population there.
Ortiz said the reason so many mainstream companies are “missing the mark” when it comes to targeting Latino populations is that they don’t pay attention to the cultural and linguistic differences between the various nationalities.
South American populations, for example, have very different cultures and use different expressions than the Caribbean populations of Latinos, he said. That’s why Hispanic Research Group finds out which specific Latino population a company is hoping to target, then tailors its marketing advice to that population.
Progreso Latino is the company’s first Latino-operated nonprofit client, and it has made Ortiz think of a new market niche. In addition to helping mainstream American companies better understand the Latino community, he said, he wants to help Latino business owners to better understand the mainstream business community.
“We’re a business-minded company with a nonprofit heart,” Ortiz said. “We want to empower Hispanic businesses to do more business with the mainstream market.”
