Branding for Success
Supplier Diversity
CF Creative
Conchie Fernandez shares her story as Founding Partner at CF Creative
By Johanna Hoyos
Conchie Fernandez is a multicultural business development and communications expert focusing on the minority business segment. Originally born and raised in the Dominican Republic (DR), she pursued a BA in art history, liberal arts and curation but gravitated toward building country brands.
One of her first success stories is when Conchie established a positive brand placement for American Airlines in the Dominican Republic. This career opportunity allowed her to learn how brands work and communicate with the communities they serve to ensure proper representation of the people who buy their services. She discovered how important it was to connect brands to the communities they serve.
After working in sales, marketing and branding, she ventured into the IT industry with Hewlett Packard for the Caribbean, which led her to move to the states in 2006. Later she joined Microsoft with the responsibility of opening new territories, from hiring the people to ensuring that training them would deliver Microsoft tools and solutions in new countries. During this time, Conchie was based in Costa Rica and South Florida. She enjoyed communicating with other Hispanics, particularly in Latin America.
An opportunity presented itself when Conchie started working at a Procurement company, where she first learned of supplier diversity. “The experience showed me the importance of making sure to be minority certified when starting a company. It will allow you to build yourself up as the eligible underdog everyone wants to cheer on.”
A year later, Conchie and her husband decided to take the plunge to build their company, CF Creative, founded in 2014.
Initially, they were a video and written content company, given Conchie’s background in corporate writing and business development. At the same time, her husband focused on video editing and production. The first collaborations were with SDI International, the University of Miami, and Microsoft - the rest is history.
She understood procurement, proposal writing, supplier diversity, and business development from the get-go. This advantage allowed her to scale very swiftly.
As a small minority-owned business, they have always found corporations and the public sector to be tremendously welcoming. They have participated in numerous requests for proposals (RFPs). They won and lost some but have seen the tremendous willingness in public and private sectors to welcome qualified small providers. “If you have proper documentation and strong references, the government and corporations continue to send opportunities to work with small vendors,” Conchie states.
The expectations of large corporations are met if companies keep an eye on automation, are nimble, lean on processes, deliver on time, and have enough people to do the work. "The issue is scaling. When entering a supplier service portal, you must be sure that the company is where you say you are and can provide the expected level of service."
Conchie’s most significant challenges have been accessing capital tied to cash flow, finding respectable collaborators, and finding the right team.
CF Creative was awarded the 2017 “Minority Marketing and Communications Firm of the Year” issued by the US Department of Commerce Minority Business Development Agency. The recognition led to many open doors and opportunities to work closely with the federal government by hosting national workshops for Spanish-speaking clients, which changed their dynamic.
This broadened the government's perspective about CF Creative, not only seeing them as a company giving marketing and business development consultation but also giving back to the community by hosting workshops to provide the proper tools to remove the complexities when working with the government and corporations as suppliers and provide advise on how to get certified to be able to win bids with private and public sectors.
As an Afro-Latina Dominican American, Conchie wants to conquer Latin America and eventually Mexico by empowering the people there. CF Creative has a secondary HQ in Colombia. From there, they want to ensure doors are open for companies and makers across Latin America who want to export their products and services to the US. They provide support to align them with the quality and expectations of the US market by building better services to sell to the US while keeping the intellectual property and talent in our countries.
Her advice for new generations of Hispanic entrepreneurs is to "find a mentor to answer your critical questions. I was lucky to have found mentors along the way. At the same time, I want to make sure that I support the next Conchie and build a pipeline of Conchies behind me. I don’t want to be the only one!”
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Editor’s pick: As an Afro-Latina Dominican American, Conchie wants to conquer Latin America and eventually Mexico by empowering the people there.
**photo credit: Dave Craig, CF Creative