Interview: Mauricio Ferro Returns To Battle With Tank, His New Strategic Communications Firm That Goes Far Beyond PR

It is often hard enough for domestic companies to properly manage reputations and perceptions, let alone when a foreign company opens operations in a new country. Serial communications entrepreneur and founder of Bogotá-based Tank Consulting, Maurico Ferro has over three decades of experience seeing companies and governments do things the right way and the wrong way when it comes to strategic communications.

He sold his previous company to Edelman for a tidy sum, and after cooling his heels for a few years during an agreed upon period, he’s back in business. While his first company was closer to a traditional PR firm, Ferro says his new firm, Tank, is a different kind of entity. While more than competent in traditional communications work, Tank is more of a management consultancy that works on public engagement, government relations, and strategy.

Using a military analogy, hence the name Tank, Ferro tells Finance Colombia’s executive editor Loren Moss how the firm is willing to go to battle in the trenches in order to win the war for hearts and minds, and is not afraid of representing entities in challenging sectors when the going gets tough.

Finance Colombia: I’m here with Mauricio Ferro, the CEO and founder of Tank. So, you’ve had a successful career in strategic communications. I don’t want to say it like it’s over anything like that because in fact, you’ve had a string of successes, but now you’ve launched Tank which is your latest entity and it’s a little bit different than the things that you’ve done in the past. Maybe if you could tell us a little bit about Tank.

Mauricio Ferro: Yes, thank you, Loren. Well, Tank is my latest newest startup in PR, we come from the PR scope, but we do a lot more than public relations. Actually we take pride in not only doing public relations and whatever it involves, talking to media, the media relations or going to Congress, but what we do is actually build relationships with publics, and building relationships with publics means going and hiring different types of influencers or going to a community that is not allowing the big bulldozers of a mining company come into a town, so we do work and facilitate the work of many national and multinational companies in Colombia with Tank, which is my newest venture.

“We were able to differentiate ourselves through technology. We’re doing it again.”

Finance Colombia: So when is it that companies—it’s interesting because I was speaking the other day with an international company and they were asking me about the business climate in Colombia, if they were going to come into Colombia. And one of the things I mentioned to them was that Colombia has a thriving democracy. No country is perfect in Colombia has its challenges.

But in Colombia you can’t come in here like the South America of the 1950s or maybe some other countries today where you can just come in and go to the president’s administration and work something out and then do whatever you want to do. It’s not like that. It’s like today you really need the buy-in of the public. The public does have a voice. The public, you go into rural areas and there was the famous case of Anglo Gold where they had all their permits and everything on paper. But they didn’t have the acceptance of the community and they were forced to kind of sell their assets and leave. And so, what are the different—you’ve worked in many different—not just Latin American countries, but in America and with European countries. What are some of the peculiarities of Colombia in the Andean region that a lot of times companies don’t necessarily take into account when they want to come and do business and in Colombia or the region?

Mauricio Ferro: Well, Colombia is very democratic and it’s a country of many regions. So you have to understand what is going on in in each area that you want to go and conquer, and you have to be a good neighbor. If you are in a community, you have to show goodwill. You have to have a good ESG strategy and it’s not just a matter of knowing a couple or a bunch of politicians. I mean, you have to have all the right connections, which we can help with. But more than that, you have to build your reputation and build your attributes to that reputation so that people understand that you are well-intentioned and that you’re going to bring benefits overall to the community and to the city or the town in which you are.

Finance Colombia: What about when things go wrong? You know companies, sometimes you have…whether it’s a natural disaster, whether the company simply made a mistake. In the worst-case scenario, the company…there may have been some negligence. But even still, whatever the situation is, the company needs to deal with it and needs to recover. What is the importance of using outside professionals and outside consultants, whether that might be crisis management or really being able to get out in front of a situation whether the company is at fault or not? Still, you know, a lot of times the companies are not equipped internally to deal with unexpected situations and just like companies might need to go and bring in outside counsel for legal situations or outside and environmental experts, that’s the role in critical situations for outside experts and strategic communications?

Mauricio Ferro: Well, today in managing your communications, transparency is the name of the game. I mean, you can’t have a hidden agenda, you must work along with the country, with the community. You have to show your intentions and if you have gone wrong, you know there’s a wealth of experience in many cases that we have managed in which have we have been able to turn around the situation and go from a law, a bill, or a company that has a bad reputation and be able to turn it around and position it positively in front of your stakeholders.

You know, there is, for example, the TIC [telecommunications] law. I helped the first minister of President Duque, who was Sylvia Constain. She had this bill that was very, very well-intentioned, but it had gone under in terms of reputation because of a separate issue that had gone wrong with somebody, the state radio station, radio and TV station. So what we did was talk with everybody that we had to, go to every single stakeholder and tell them about the benefits of the bill. And three months and one week later, we were able not only to reposition the reputation of that bill, but also we were able to have a majority of the lower Chamber of Congress and the Upper Chamber Senate to approve it, with a majority even having a strong partisan environment. So that’s the kind of thing that we do. For example, the Colombian Stock Exchange, they called us when the largest broker went down. So, what we had to do along with the lawyers along with…

“Today in managing your communications, transparency is the name of the game.”

Finance Colombia: Interbolsa?

Mauricio Ferro: Yeah, it, it went down the drain and our job along with the other teams, you know the legal, the legal counsel and the CEO was to stop the rest of the Stock Exchange of going under. There, keep maintaining the credibility and keep investor confidence. So, you had one brokerage go down but the exchange is still solid.

Finance Colombia: Now tell me about the difference. So, they’re obviously, there are strong Colombian companies. Some of them have become multi-Latinas and even multinationals, a few even global companies, but tell me about the special challenges that foreign companies may have when they decide to come and do business in Colombia. Colombia has an exceptional legal environment. That’s to say that it treats foreigners and foreign companies on equal legal footing as domestic companies which is a good thing. But let’s talk about, aside from the legal and fiscal, when Colombian companies or when foreign companies come and decide that they want to do business in Colombia, where have you seen them struggle and stumble and where maybe some of the mistakes that could have been prevented if they had the right kind of professional advice from the beginning?

Mauricio Ferro: Well, generally in the 1980s, foreign companies used to bring somebody from the headquarters to be the general manager in Colombia. Nowadays, I would say that 98.99% of the companies do have expats, but their CEO, their general manager is generally somebody who’s local, somebody who is bicultural, perhaps somebody who’s studied in the states or in Europe and is able to understand both the culture in Colombia and the culture in headquarters, you know, so that’s a better formula and that generally keeps the companies out of trouble because that person is going to come in with the right knowledge of the idiosyncrasies again and be able to you dodge around the red tape and the difficulties of doing business locally.

You know, of course we help a lot of those companies to understand what they want to do and then what they have to do to be able to be well perceived. For example, in mining and we advise a lot of oil and mining companies. We see that there’s a common term whenever somebody arrives from headquarters, and they say we want to be low profile.

Guess what? They come in with a huge Caterpillar which is twice the size of the narrow roads which they come in! And they come into a small town and everybody in the town sees the big machine coming in and they start talking and of course…We are in the middle of fake news. They are in the middle of gossiping about the company. So, what is there about being low profile in that? You know, there’s no profile. Low profile does not exist, right? So, it’s much better to come in first and ask the people what they want. What are they lacking? What are their needs? You know, to be able to understand how to become a good neighbor, you know, a good neighbor when somebody comes next door, you know, at least you have to come in and say hello.

Finance Colombia: Exactly. Especially if you’re gonna do some remodeling!

Mauricio Ferro: That’s right, you know. So we advise companies in how to go the right way so that there is not a first bad image or a second bad image, but we have a good and positive relationship with all the stakeholders that are being taken into account.

Finance Colombia: How can executives that are either hoping to enter Colombia or that are already doing business in Colombia or the broader Latin American region, contact Tank to explore more about the services that you offer?

Mauricio Ferro: Well, we have our website that’s www.Tank.com.co, we are in social media as Tank consultants or Tank Communications and they can reach for us. Also, through the Chamber of Commerce and we are also in the Presidents Forum in Colombia, Foro de Presidentes, and we advise the companies in different levels. You know we do what we call the aviation, we what we call the artillery of communications and the infantry of communications, OK, so that CEOs of companies are able to communicate in the three levels.

The first one, aviation, is communicated 1 to 1,000,000. So, it’s putting your name in the paper being able to have positive media relations. The second level or the artillery is to be able to communicate with your social media, with your stakeholders that might be noticing you not in the news, but in Twitter or in Facebook or Instagram or in TikTok. And our last level is the one to few communications. You know, that’s the infantry, and generally the war starts with aviation, but only the infantry is able to control their territory, right?

You know, just like in a regular war and, this time we’re talking about the war for the mind. The war for the mind is works pretty similarly to the regular war. So, if you’re going to battle, you have to be able to communicate in the three levels and in the last level, we are introducing a lot of technology. For example, we are doing the training of the CEOs. We do it through VR, OK, with virtual reality, we simulate the different types of scenarios that that CEO is going to be challenging if it’s a town hall meeting or if it’s a Ted-talk or if it’s a talk in front of 1,000 investors, you know, we can train that person to have prior experience so that the actual experience seems something very, very normal and regular.

So, with my prior company that that I sold to Edelman, you know one of the reasons that they bought my company was because we had great methodology and we had great technology. You know, they came in and they picked us, they came and knocked on our door from a bunch of PR companies that are in Colombia and we were able to differentiate ourselves through technology.

We’re doing it again. We’re differentiating ourselves through technology so that you know, we are very different from any regular PR company.

Finance Colombia: What’s your vision for the company? What do you want Tank to look like 5 years from now?

Mauricio Ferro: Well, more than just a PR company, we are well-rounded and a full-service agency.  You know we can buy media for you. For example, we have a client in Florida which is Jorge Perez. Jorge Perez is the person that put the name to the Perez Museum in Miami, Related Group, right? That’s the Related Group, they turned around the city because Miami was a place in which you went to the beach, but not more than that. Now the city is full of culture.

“You have to have a good ESG strategy and it’s not just a matter of knowing a couple or a bunch of politicians.”

You can go to the Wynwood neighborhood and see a lot of galleries, a lot of culture, a lot of happenings going on there because of the turnaround that Jorge Perez is leading in the city of Miami and he’s our client and we brought him to Colombia. So, we bought the media in social media, we bought the media in the newspapers and we had such a big splash that his best latest projects are almost sold out.

The four projects that that we promoted were all in the city of Miami and they are almost sold out from investors that are coming from Colombia, from Peru, from Chile, from Argentina, from Brazil and from Mexico mainly.

Finance Colombia: Was there anything that I forgot to ask you that you wanted to mention?

Mauricio Ferro: Maybe the fact that our business is kind of countercyclical, like you would think that companies are being nervous about investing in Colombia because of the new government. I can give some peace of mind in that sense, you know, because one: Colombia is very democratic. So, there’s a very good system of checks and balances that is going to be difficult to dismantle. Also, in Colombia…the big industry associations, you know, the gremios. Many of them are coming to us for advice on what kind of communication they should be doing on how to communicate. In difficult times or in times in which they are having a very low interaction with the government or very low capacity or ability to speak up and participate together over the garbage, you know and understand what’s going on. You know, so many companies and many associations, are coming to us to, to ask us for guidance, for assessment on how they should communicate in these times.

Finance Colombia: That’s so important. I mean you look at certain sectors, every government comes in and has biases towards certain sectors and against other sectors, right? And even, it’s kind of easy if you know if the president is a friend of whatever business you’re in. But if not, that’s when it’s more important than ever to get your message, to shape your message, to get your message out there, and then to try to the extent possible, get the public on your side, right?

Mauricio Ferro: You know now that that’s why we have invested so much in ESG: Environment, Sustainability and Governance, but particularly we are also providing the companies for example the big soda pop companies with technology to be able to separate their waste. Why? Because they are being critiqued of by for how much plastic they generate, you know, and of how committed they are of taking that plastic after it’s become waste, to bring it back into the possibility of reusing that material.

That’s one of the products that that Tank has. Tank more than just a PR company as I say, as I said it’s investing in different types of technologies and we are kind of a Think Tank. That is sponsoring and launching different types of technologies and methodologies to make your company’s reputation much better.