Business Fortune
Fierce, Inc. is a multi-award winning leadership development and training organization that improves workplace communication to achieve corporate and educational goals. Fierce engages in effective discussions with customers and coworkers that result in measurable ROI and honest, motivating, and satisfying connections. Worldwide, the company's initiatives have been effectively implemented at CARE, Ernst & Young, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Crate & Barrel, among other non-profits and educational institutions.
The CEO of Fierce, Inc., Edward Beltran, discussed how his company's products address cultural issues in an exclusive interview with The Business Fortune.
Interview Highlights
How do you see the current changes in the industry that you serve? And what is the current status of Fierce, Inc.?
The need for the leadership and development training sector is greater than ever, especially as businesses learn to maneuver beyond the obstacles that COVID-19 posed. Over the course of more than 20 years, we've come to realize that our clients want real-world, hands-on, tangible ways to become more effective leaders—not theoretical ones that will only help them in the future or in a year or two. They want results immediately.
Susan Scott, the founder of our organization, learned early on that the basis for our current strategy came from her talks with executives around the nation at various sizes. Over the past two years, we have discovered that any company's capacity to establish friendly and efficient work environments is fundamentally based on its ability to communicate effectively.
Scale, application, and sustainability are the three pillars of the industry that Fierce is focused on achieving.
To what extent does Fierce, Inc. adapt to the evolving needs of its customers?
As we assist corporate leaders in becoming more proficient communicators, we have dedicated time to both listening to our clients and conducting our own independent research. We recently appointed Dr. Gabe de la Rosa as our chief behavioral science officer to assist us with this. He will collaborate with our clients to improve the communication, leadership, and culture of their clientele. De la Rosa has extensive expertise assessing the effects of stress on people in high-stakes job environments, such as the U.S. Navy.
This comprises breakthrough, peer-reviewed research on "Operational Stress and Correlates of Mental Health Among Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay Military Personnel" as well as other related topics. We've developed some innovative new services and products with our other team members that we plan to launch in the near future.
How can intelligent dialogue provide fruitful results and a quantifiable return on investment?
The key to accomplishing remarkable results in human-to-human communication is having conversations, which serve as the API (Application Protocol Interface). Through conversation training, leaders may develop the mindset necessary to take on even the most difficult tasks while fostering stronger bonds with individuals they engage with. This program gives participants a model for starting a discussion as well as a step-by-step instruction manual on how to carry it out.
All initiative or program needs conversations to be successful; these are especially important for those whose success depends on interactions like influence, change management, cross-functional collaboration, diversity, equity, and inclusion, to mention a few. According to our research, using these abilities helps leaders become more resilient and adaptable while also improving their ability to control their stress and practice mindfulness. For executives and leaders, these abilities and conduct optimize your return on investment for your projects and are essential to the day-to-day blocking and tackling of strategic execution.
Our corporate assets were designed with "lego bricks" in mind. To meet the most demanding needs of our clients and overcome their most difficult obstacles, we may put together various content assets together with delivery methods. This puts us at the table with our customers to co-design effective training into the crucial people initiatives, along with our internal implementation and client success specialists.
What strategies do you think Fierce will need to overcome in the next five years?
I firmly think that disruptive innovation can occur. As a result, I must accept as a leader that there will be rivals in the market who will put pressure on us to be more inventive, adaptable, and creative in the goods and services we offer to our customers. In order to adjust, change course, and proceed, we must always be looking forward, listening to our clients, and developing our research. Based on our experiences over the previous two years, we have faced issues we never could have predicted in the typical operating environment.
The result? We challenged ourselves to consider innovative approaches to providing our services using virtual simulations. Through our partners, Dr. Yasmin Davidds and Kaplan Mobray, and Conversation Catalysts, we were able to help our customers solve a range of issues, from customer management to unconscious prejudice and microaggressions. To overcome your most difficult obstacles, you will always want conversational approaches or APIs that facilitate human-to-human interaction. Fierce will be there to help connect the dots to application as the difficulties we face—whether they be related to DE&I, devise politics, change management, resilience, and adaptability—as they continue to evolve.
The forward-thinking leader
Fierce Inc.'s chief executive officer is Edward Beltran, CPA. He has been a leader at Fierce since 2017 and offers over 20 years of experience in operations and finance. Mr. Beltran was Head of Finance at several large, international corporations before joining Fierce, including Agilent Technologies, Avnet Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Arthur Andersen. He also provided advice and assistance to start-ups and early-stage businesses.
Edward has an MBA from the University of Michigan and two Bachelor of Science degrees in accounting and computer information systems from Arizona State University. In addition to his Wharton and Harvard credentials in entrepreneurship, he has been a licensed CPA since 2004.
He rides a road bike year-round, covering more than 120 miles a week, which he claims helps him maintain his physical, mental, and spiritual equilibrium.
