Born in the Washington DC Metropolitan area with roots in Kentucky and El Salvador, Kevin loves to travel, is drawn to technology and music in his downtime. Between 2010 and 2015 Kevin worked as the Associate Peace Corps Director of Peace Corps, Costa Rica where he built a project focused on improving the pedagogical practices of public school teachers in conjunction with the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica.

Kevin twice received a scholarship from Georgetown University in conjunction with the United States Department of State to live and work in Lomé Togo, West Africa where he built various projects within the University of Lomé with the assistance of the United States Embassy in Togo. Kevin received a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Trinity University in Washington DC in 2006.

In this next chapter of his adventures Kevin partnered with his wife to found HR Innovate, a recruiting agency based in Nicosia, Cyprus.

• CEO Hack: (1) Being data-driven as opposed to emotionally-driven (2) How I Built This with Guy Raz
• CEO Nugget: Stay authentic, staying focused and running your own competition
• CEO Defined: CEO is Life

Website: https://www.hrinnovate.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hrinnovateorg/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hrinnovateorg/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hrinnovateorg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hrinnovateorg/
Medium: https://medium.com/community-hrinnovate
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmNhQz85chvzS4Jhi01FEcw

FULL INTERVIEW

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today, Kevin Brown of HR Innovate. Kevin, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Kevin Brown 0:39

It's great to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

No problem, super excited to have you on, and what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Kevin so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And born in the Washington DC Metropolitan area with roots in Kentucky and El Salvador, Kevin loves to travel and is drawn to technology and music in his downtime. Between 2010 and 2015 Kevin worked as the Associate Peace Corps Director of Peace Corps, Costa Rica where he built a project focused on improving the pedagogical practices of public school teachers in conjunction with the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica. Kevin twice received a scholarship from Georgetown University in conjunction with the United States Department of State to live and work in Lomé Togo, West Africa where he built various projects within the University of Lomé with the assistance of the United States Embassy in Togo.

Kevin received a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Trinity University in Washington DC in 2006. And the next chapter of his adventures, Kevin partnered with his wife to found HR Innovate, a recruiting agency based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Kevin, I appreciate you. I appreciate the bio and everything but I wanted to kick everything off and ask you if you're ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community.

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Kevin Brown 1:54

I'm excited to speak to everyone.

Gresham Harkless 1:56

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. And when did you start your business?

Kevin Brown 2:03

Well, let me say my background in education. And I'm from Washington, DC. I'm excited to speak to you for that reason for the DMV. I was born in PG County. And as such, Salvadoran Americans, have a lot of Salvadorans there. So anyway, I've been I studied at Trinity, and I got my degree in education, the top public school in Columbia Heights. And I've just been traveling the world teaching, building curriculum.

And I got married to this wonderful lady, Katerina, Andrea, and I came to Cyprus, which is really off of my life plan. I was looking forward to actually working with the Ministry of Education of El Salvador before I came, I don't know if that was going to work out or not, but that's what I was looking at. But I'm in love. So I came to Cyprus. And she had started up her own recruiting agency here. And I joined the team. And in the last year, we have taken off, and it's really exciting, Right?

Gresham Harkless 3:01

Nice. It's funny. I've kind of taken you in different routes, and you always plan to do X, Y, and Z. But it'll take you to A, B, and C.

Kevin Brown 3:08

Yeah, yeah.

Gresham Harkless 3:10

Yeah, that makes sense. So could you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with HR Innovate? Tell us exactly how you're serving the clients you're working with.

Kevin Brown 3:17

Sure. Well, HR Innovate, what we do is we match people looking for jobs with companies. Companies, our clients, they call us are the ones who pay us, the candidates, people looking for jobs, they don't pay anything. We give them advice, we help them with their digital profile, and we fit them with the best job for them. If we haven't, if we don't, we don't. I think things that we do differently here, they turned into Vedas were very human-centered me with my background education, and my wife, a background and psychology and human services from the UK, really looks at people and tries to help them move to the next level of their career, wherever they want to be. We try to make a really nice fit there. I think it ends up serving all three parties, the client, the candidate, and HR Innovate.

Gresham Harkless 4:03

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like any time you're able to have that kind of win-win environment or win-win situation, that's always good. And I feel like that's always when things really start to move forward and really start to kind of break ground.

Kevin Brown 4:15

Yeah, yeah. And then my role here at HR Innovate is specifically all around digital media. I call myself the Chief of Operations, given that it's a small business and we own it, I guess I could call myself anything. And that's said, I've played with the title Chief Digital Officer, because I like it. But truly, it's chief of operations because I do everything from the Facebook to go into get coffee and get in the water facilities management, you name and it's, we're a small team. And so I've got my hands, my sleeves rolled up and my hands into everything around here.

Gresham Harkless 4:53

Well, I know that makes sense. And a lot of times you have to do that. You know when you're in whenever you're building something. I also have sleeves rolled up as well, too, that wasn't planned. And in every form, shape, or fashion whenever you're going to work doing your thing. So do you find there's a lot of, I guess, how has the digital industry affected your industry specifically?

Kevin Brown 5:18

Well, let me tell you coming out of Washington, a lot of my friends work in politics, obviously. And a lot of them work in digital media politics, running campaigns. And we used to hang out and have dinner and have drinks or whatever, and talk about that. So I've taken some of those strategies with me put them in my back pocket and applied them to the recruiting agency here in Cyprus. I think, honestly, we've really changed the conversation in Cyprus, I won't call them our competition, I've actually written it down to our sector colleagues, I believe. I see them kind of following what we do.

So I feel like okay, I'm on the right track. If I'm doing this, and then our sector colleagues are like, Hey, that's a great idea. We should do that, too. So when I came to Cyprus, people were posting maybe 50-60 times a week of just the same thing over and over and over. And I came in and just said, You know what, let's get real. Let's get authentic, listen, and engage our audience. And we have grown over the last 9-10 months on some platforms up to 400-500%.

Gresham Harkless 6:26

That's awesome. I usually ask for what I call your secret sauce. And this might be your secret sauce, but definitely let me know. But I find that when you have a strong mission or a strong differentiator, that you touched on that human-centered focus, do you feel that it manifests itself in so many different ways like you mentioned, the digital media, where you're able to build and engage on maybe a better level because you have such a strong base related to that?

Kevin Brown 6:51

Yeah, that's really it. And when you look at the reviews, for example, on Google reviews, everyone is saying, Wow, these people took time to listen to me. And that goes back to what I was saying, at the beginning of my coming from education and my wife from psychology, we're not here to make a million dollars. We're not here to be the biggest agency in Cyprus or Europe, although I wouldn't be mad about that. But we're not here to do that. What we're here to do is to be the best. And really the reason is, that this is how we want to participate in society. We could go to the United Kingdom, we could go back to DC, we could get jobs with the government, we can do that.

And we can make plenty of money and pay the rent. That's no problem. But this is what we want to do with life. So we wake up excited, and we want to talk to people and it comes through in the business. And people are appreciative because we're not doing hard sales for everyone. We're not pushing people into jobs that they don't want to do to make a quick buck. Doesn't matter if they want to or if they don't want to. What does matter is if they make the right decision for them at that time in their life.

Gresham Harkless 8:00

That makes perfect sense. And let me ask you this. So people that use you or they use the service that you provide, it doesn't matter where they're located, do they have to be in Cyprus?

Kevin Brown 8:11

They do not have to be in Cyprus, and our clients are not necessarily in Cyprus. We work mostly within the framework of the European Union, it's easy for people to move back and forth between countries. As far as work visas go. I find it interesting and I have no idea what's going to happen with Brexit. But there's a lot of just general chatter movement around Brexit because if they leave the European Union, this poses issues that I'm not even certain that I know what they might be.

But that being said, we just launched our London number, we have clients in London, one of our clients, and I won't name them because we like to be very discreet, but they work with the National Health System. And they're doing health tech in London. And so we do London recruitment, as well as Cyprus recruitment, and look forward to hearing from the rest of Europe.

Gresham Harkless 9:06

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app or book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Kevin Brown 9:14

I think the biggest thing when my wife and I decided to join forces was to become data-driven. So we stopped making emotional decisions. while I love to design personally, and then when I look at something I innately know if it's pretty or not. But that's not really how we make our core business decisions. Everything we do is data-driven.

Gresham Harkless 9:36

I love that because a lot of times you get lost in the emotional part of the business where you are making decisions based on and I think there always is, of course, like you even mentioned with your core of your business areas that place for that but you also want to make sure that you do and are looking at what actually is moving the needle because that's you're in business to do. Now, I wanted to ask you, you might have already touched on this for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Kevin Brown 10:10

Wow. My CEO's advice? Well, I tell you, I was thinking this morning and my first words early this morning were what if he asked me about my competition? And I said to myself, well, they're not really my competition, right? Because if it's a competition, it's some sort of race, there's a finish line, the prize. There's no finish line here, right? There's no prize. That's what my wife said, sector colleagues. But if that question becomes how to stay focused on that. It's every day. And as a small business, it's not like when I worked for, let's say, the US Department of Labour and I got up, I telework twice a week and got up to the train went to work, smoked cigarettes, had lunch long, it's not like that. This is four or five, six in the morning, I'm coding 6,7,8,9, and 10. At night, I'm still coding and this is seven days a week.

So how do you stay energized and focused? My wife, Kat, the founder, just wrote an article about staying healthy, about nutrition, and about running. And so it's a great article, and you can check that one out. So that's her strategy. For me. I listened to how I built this on NPR, with Guy Raz. It's just what does it for me, right? And I listen to these people that I admire who are who, who talked about when they were struggling when they were just getting started.

And that's how I stay focused. So I mean, I think earlier, when I set this up, there was a question there, my nugget and I said, stay authentic, stay focused, it shows. And so for me, that's really what it is just trying to be real, not trying to put on airs about who we are, we are who we are. You don't have to like us. The awesome if you did, but we're gonna stay us and we're gonna stay focused, stay the course and keep going.

Gresham Harkless 12:11

Absolutely. And when you stay your course, and you are running your own race, there is no competition, just like you touched on because nobody can run your race like you can. So I love that nugget. And now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So I want to ask you, Kevin, what does it mean to you?

Kevin Brown 12:33

What does it mean to me to be a CEO? Well, life really, to me, it's life. It's everything. I grew up with a family of as I said on Twitter, the other day hustlers. And people thought that was a bad word, but where I'm from, it's not a bad word. It's just who we are. We're hustlers. When we work hard, and we're not trying to con anybody, we just keep going. So 43 years in now. It's just who I am. And to me being a CEO and working in this business, I pulled up in front this morning at 8:30. And thought this is exactly what I want to do if we can, as long as we can pay the rent and maybe have a bologna sandwich. This is amazing. I'll keep doing it.

Gresham Harkless 13:28

Absolutely. CEO is life. So I definitely would echo that. So I appreciate your time. But I wanted to do was pass you the mic so to speak, to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know and then of course, how best they can find you and hear about all the things you're doing.

Kevin Brown 13:42

Okay, great. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'd like to say please come visit us at hrinnovate.org. So there we have it, right? But we are extremely content-heavy. We have a lot of videos coming out. We have a lot of blogs coming out. We're active on Twitter and Facebook and just across all the channels. So I really love to engage with people, talk to them, and give them advice. Take advice. However it may be that we're a people-centered business, we like people, and we want to talk to people. And that's what I'm here for. If you see us online, that's me, and hello.

Gresham Harkless 14:29

I appreciate you for taking some time out Kevin. We will have those links in the show notes as well, but I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Kevin Brown 14:35

Okay, thank you very much. Gresh

Outro 6:25

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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