One company that is finding rapid traction supporting international businesses, especially those in North America, is BI Consulting Lab, located in the residential Medellín suburb of Guarne, Colombia. The company’s offices are a beehive of activity, with data scientists, programmers, and client executives buzzing about. Company founder Brian Castaño Rendón made time for Loren Moss, the executive editor of Finance Colombia and Cognitive Business News to come by and learn more about the firm’s rapid progress.

Finance Colombia: So I’m here with Brian Castaño Rendón, a friend, a colleague, a former co-worker. I’ve known you for quite a few years now, probably seven or eight years. Cool to reunite with you here at your company headquarters in Guarne, which is a bedroom community outside of Medellín. And you’re doing some really interesting things. Tell me about your company. What’s your company called?

Brian Rendón: My company is called BI Consulting Lab. First of all, thank you for having me and for spending time with us.

Finance Colombia: Of course. So, what is BI Consulting Lab? I know it’s software-focused. I know it’s data-focused. But tell me in your own words what BI Consulting Lab does.

Brian Rendón: OK, so basically, what we are is a company that specializes in data and AI. And we use that technology to help businesses make better decisions. We do decision support. And we try to allow the executives and the managers of every company to have the tools to come up with the decisions and support those decisions. Hopefully, by implementing the right decisions, the productivity of the company will progress exponentially over time.

Finance Colombia: I think one of the things that happens when I think about the companies that I’ve worked in, small companies, large companies… A lot of times, the problem is not collecting the data or not having enough data, but not being able to extract the value out of their data. I think that what happens is we might have, I don’t know, let’s say a grocer who has two types of inventory. They have the actual products that they sell, but then they have their shelf space. And it’s easy to say, “How many bottles of ketchup did I sell today?” or “How many cans of tuna fish did I sell?” or something like that.

But then there’s another level to that. And that’s to say, “How do I optimize my inventory when it comes to real estate?” And I don’t mean real estate like buildings or shopping centers, but I mean the shelf space that they have, and how they might not know how it is going to affect sales if I move this product from one level on the shelf to another level. Or “How do I optimize the shelf space?”

One of the things that annoys me here in Colombia, I’m more of a Pepsi guy than a Coke guy, but I go into the store and Coca-Cola has like eight racks of just Coca-Cola. And there’s like two bottles -not two racks- there’s like two bottles of Pepsi. Now, they’re not doing that by accident. They must know something. I do know that Coke is more popular in Colombia than Pepsi, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe the way that the stores optimize their space, they’re going to not just put things on the shelf because they want to, but they have to figure out what the optimum size is.

What are other use cases for where a company might want to call on you all and enlist your help, not just as software people, but as real consultants who can go in and analyze and look at what they’re doing?

Brian Rendón: Yeah, of course. So, to your point there, when you were talking about specifically the retail industry, we do have experience working with large retail stores, specifically in the US. We are working right now with Kroger Acosta, which is a supplier from Kroger. We help them analyze their space distribution, their shelf distribution, and what they call planograms.

Let’s take three steps back. And, what you said first, companies don’t have issues collecting data, not that much of an issue, all of them have spreadsheets. All of them have Excel. Most of them already have SQL databases and stuff like that. What they struggle with is extracting its value. And usually here in the data industry, we say that you usually need three things to be able to extract the value from the data, to convert the data into information, and the information into decisions.

You need three elements to converge: you need the business knowledge, you need the technical side that allows you to do the computations, and then you need the statistics. So you need the ability to concatenate these three elements, like in a Venn diagram. And at the center of it, you kind of have the formula for you to be able to extract information and convert it into decisions.

So, on the shelf space, just to take an example, in this case for Kroger, what we did was to create something called a space analysis tool. What we did for them was to help them get all of those hundreds of millions of records that they have on the different commodities and the different stores and the different departments and sub-commodities and divisions, and stuff like that, organizing it into a cohesive model. When we say modeling in data analytics, we mean the relationship between dimensions and transactions for a company, and how we can take a specific transaction and dimensionalize the transaction into when it happened, how it happened, and why it happened. So we create a cohesive model, take those hundreds of millions of transactions, and we try to put the values into perspective.

And if we alter this or that combination, we could, with probable cost, assume that we could get a better performance, or maybe we could have a worse performance if we do that. So, having the data and organizing it helps you to do those what-if analysis scenarios that allow you to make the right decisions or try to make the more probable right decisions, because this is a game of probability.

Finance Colombia: Crystal ball or something.

Brian Rendón: Crystal ball, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, so what we deal with here is probability. So if you do this, data-supported, it could probably go up; if you do this or that, the data tells us that it probably won’t go as well. And then we do a hypothesis, we test it on our models, and then we give you a possibility and a scenario that you could utilize in your decision-making. That’s an example of how businesses, specifically from the distribution company, the distribution and the retail company, can come to us and we can try to help them improve their decision making, for example, in their distribution or their shelf space in a specific market chain. But that applies to any industry.

That’s the cool thing about data, because data is omnipresent in all industries. There could be problems whether they capture it, all of it, or not, but they are constantly being generated at every time in every industry, in every division of any company. So what we try to do with that is to take it, analyze it, capitalize it, and utilize it in a way that the company can make decisions based on that. By improving their decision-making, they can improve their productivity.

“Companies don’t have issues collecting data…What they struggle with is extracting its value.”

Finance Colombia: I think one of the areas, I look at forecasting, and I think even to stay in the grocery sector, I remember I’ve been down here in Colombia for a long time now, but I remember right before I left and moved down here, a really interesting thing was happening in the US at Christmas season. And that was that, traditionally you have Christmas, and then right after Christmas, you have these big giant clearance sales to get rid of all the Christmas stuff and all the stuff left over from Christmas.

Well, in the later years, those were going away. And the reason… I mean, there’s always some sale, but it wasn’t because they had excess inventory, but because the forecasting got so scientific that they were able to put in all of these variables and economic indicators and all this stuff like that. And they were able to predict very, very accurately how much of whatever product they would sell. So by the time Christmas was over, they didn’t run out before Christmas, but there wasn’t an excess inventory after Christmas.

And I think about how these types of tools and disciplines that you all specialize in can be applied. Do you guys have any cases where you’re able to use your data expertise for predictive analysis, let’s say, or to be able to do forecasting for clients?

Brian Rendón: Yes, we do that all the time. Where we focus is on trying to understand the historical trends. And for that, machine learning is a pretty powerful tool to do that. So when a company has a lot of records and a lot of, let’s say, let’s think in a tabular way. So you have a table with your transactions, and those transactions have a lot of characteristic attributes. So you have the type of store, the type of commodity, three or four subdivisions, they have dates, they have comments, even, like plain text, string elements. And we can use all of that and put it into a deep learning algorithm, for example, an algorithm.

And we can try to understand what attributes are the most impactful about the transactions to discover patterns or clusters, or different elements that allow us to understand the data. And then what we do based on those algorithms is to take the most important elements for us to predict a consistent behavior from the historical data.

So we first allocate the important elements for us to do a calculation, and then we set up the calculation. And what we do then is do an 80% to 20% analysis. So you take 80% of the data to train a model, and 20% to test it. So when that 20% of the data, when the model gives you a performance, or I would say around 98%, 97% of accuracy, then you take that information that you got left, that the algorithm has never seen, you fit it to it. You already know the answers for each of those values. But you want to test how accurately they predict the right price for a specific day, for a specific week, maybe, or month. And you want to see how the prediction compares to the actuals.

And if you see that there is not much difference, you have a statistical base to say, “Okay, based on this statistical way that has proven 80% to 90% accuracy, let’s plan our inventories by that, and let’s keep testing it.” So we do a six-month, three-month, and a year forecast, and we even adjust the model to allow us to adjust the forecast as time goes on. Because as time goes on, the model has more data to be trained on, and has actual factual data that has happened with the respective attributes, and can infer the most important elements for the whole bunch of time you have on your data source. Or you can even segment it, segment it, and then try to find asynchronous spikes or stuff like that.

Finance Colombia: How far away, and I’m sure that there are so many other business use cases for what you guys do, but you guys also are very well-versed in AI, in building AI into your data solutions. How far away are we from, let’s suppose one of your clients says, “Okay, we have AI and we have all of this data, and can I just ask the software, hey, how much shelf space should I allocate to Seven Up?” In plain text, just like an AI, like a generative question, or is it still a lot more complex than that? Even though, yes, I know we can get the data, but how far away are we from being able to just say, “Should the Tide laundry detergent be on the third shelf or the second shelf?”

Brian Rendón: Yeah, so I would say on that one, we’re not that far, we’re rather close, but we need to figure out a couple of things. So let me go into that. So when you or your users use ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek, what they do is to enter a context in the context window, the chat window that you have, you start typing a problem or a comment or whatever, you give some instructions, you add some context, and based on the training that the model has given, he will answer you, right? That’s basically how it works.

The issue with doing that with corporate data is that, first, the corporate data is not that well-structured in most cases, so that’s the first thing. And then most of the models limit your ability to input information into the model. So the way it works is that you buy, for OpenAI, which is the most famous one of them all, you buy a subscription to them, right? You connect via an API, and you insert information that you want into the model so it can use it as context and then answer you. So each of those lines, each one of those syllables that you input is are token, and for those tokens, you are charged money.

So it becomes very inefficient when you want to process millions and millions of records, which will turn into billions of tokens, which you will have to pay for to get a single answer. So that is not an efficient solution right away. So, for example, what we do to try to improve that and make that process more efficient is we do the connection to the model, the LLM, the Large Language Model, even Anthropic or Claude or OpenAI, in this case, ChatGPT. We can connect to all of those models. We can connect to the open source, which Facebook is the powerhouse for that; we can connect to Llama. You can connect to all of those models or any of those models.

Brian Rendón: For you to make it efficient, you want to have like a small step in between. So what you want to do is you query your information directly via an API, so that the API provides you with the actual value. And then you use the LLM, ChatGPT, to generate a text-based answer. So it tells you in a normal English-speaking way the answer that you want to hear. But the processing, you push the processing not into the model, but into the SQL engine, or the database engine, or the data warehouse that you use.

And there are different ways for you to do that. There are also ways you can input multiple inputs into the model, so the model processes them and generates an answer.

But usually the most effective way for easy questions, for example, if  you are in finance, you say, “Okay, how many subscribers did we get last week?” You can go and check your database and do a query, and get an answer. But if you want to talk to an assistant, we can do that. We can connect your WhatsApp, for example, to an LLM that will connect to your database. And you ask that, that will go to do a query into your database and get an answer. And that answer will give you back your answer either by text or by speech, whatever you prefer. If you send a speech message, a voice message, it will answer you with another voice message. We can improve the voice using Flask, another model that is out there. So we can do that. And in that way, the LLM, the AI model, is not doing the processing of the information.

Finance Colombia: It’s just packaging it.

Brian Rendón: Exactly. It’s just doing the delivery nicely.

Finance Colombia: Like in networking, we used to call that the presentation layer.

Brian Rendón: Yeah, exactly. And that’s important because the way our LLMs work at the moment is that they get confused. When you give them a lot of information, like you overextend in your context window, the LLM model will start to hallucinate. What I mean by hallucinate is that it will start to give you a random answer that is not correct. And that’s because the model itself doesn’t know what answers are correct or not. They answer in a probabilistic way. And that’s precisely why you don’t want it to process millions of records of information, at least not at this stage. Because it can get confused. And you don’t want to take an answer from it, maybe a hallucinated one that is not accurate, and then you allocate some of your budget based on a not very accurate answer.

Finance Colombia: Exactly.

Brian Rendón: So, at the moment, at least, you try to push the processing with accurate models that we can easily do at the moment using APIs. And you query the information from the model. First, you need to have a very good data architecture, which that’s some other thing that we do. We help businesses to understand how to capture the information correctly, how to extract it, normalize it, and place it rationally into a data warehouse, Datamore, and different databases.

So that their transactional information is arrayed with their dimensional information, so that they can be combined in a way that is efficient and answers questions for you. So when you have a very robust and very good data architecture, it facilitates a lot the transition to implement AI models. Because when you have accurate information, and rather than accurate information, very well normalized and organized information in your company, that information can be easily queried.

And when you query that information, which is easily, again, queried, and you push the processing into a very powerful engine like SQL, for example, you get specific answers, so the right amount of answers that you want. And then you put it into the AI. And then the AI can just give you the packaging that you set, tell you the answer nicely, and it can perform a couple of other layers of analysis as well.

So you can ask it to give me a projection of sales for my next six months. So it pushes into the SQL engine a query for your actual revenue or whatever metric you are measuring for your last 18 months, and uses that as an input for it to calculate your following months. And it can give you a trend. It can give you a chart. It can give you a lot of things. And it is based on actual information that, with the right amount that it can process with a high degree of certainty that is accurate.

Again, we are still working on the probabilistic element. The different models right now, what I believe they’re doing based on the news that we hear, is to make more efficient what we have, to reduce the number of hallucinations, to make it have short-term reasoning and long-term reasoning, which is basically what we do. We come up with an easy answer, but then we reflect on that answer and maybe confirm the answer. Or in other words, change the answer.

Finance Colombia: Refine it.

Brian Rendón: Refine it, exactly. So if you see one for OpenAI, the ChatGPT model, that one usually gives you, when you ask it something, it starts reasoning. And you can visualize the questions that it is asking itself, and how it conceptualizes the question that you asked, and the possible answers, and try to refine it. It was way lower, like eight months ago, but it gives you more accurate answers nowadays.

Finance Colombia: What are the applications that companies can use that you’ve seen in your business, and with the kinds of companies that you’ve all been able to help? Where companies have engaged you to help them improve their customer experience. How can the work that you do translate into a better customer experience for companies? Do you have any examples of that?

Brian Rendón: Yeah, we have a couple of them. Usually, in the context of virtual engagement, for example, they have multiple challenges to be approached. And they are struggling to be able to answer, one person to answer in different channels, keep track of the different requirements, and answer them in ways that are more optimal with the whole context at every time.

So it’s hard for them to keep track of all their chats in WhatsApp, Instagram, and maybe others. So what we do for them is we create automations that connect up their context database. So we create a context database for them. And then we connect that context database to ChatGPT, for example, to OpenAI or other AI models. And those AI models get, we’d say we create a custom ChatGPT, trained for that specific business. And that way, whenever there is a person who comes, that triggers a reaction in our pipeline, that pushes the question or the comment from the social network as an input, and then sends it to the LLM that has already been trained with the context of the company. So they have the context on how to answer that question, or comments, based on whatever the company has at the moment. So it is very important, the connection, the connectivity with the databases of the company, at every turn. Even more so when you are trying to do a service on time, and live services and stuff like that. So we have a couple of restaurants with that. And we are discussing a solution for a stockbroker here in Colombia. They… I met him at the event that you held at the Marquee.

Finance Colombia: Oh, great. Last year. So, Finance Colombia events lead to business.

Brian Rendón: Exactly. Yes, it does. So he told me that time, “Look, I’m the CEO of the company. We are a very large stockbroker company. And whenever we have, let’s say, the dividends coming from Ecopetrol, it is a madhouse in my company because we have 13,000 customers calling at the same time trying to confirm that we are depositing their dividends, on how they went or how much it came, stuff like that.” And he told me, “I have 15 people at customer service and they get overwhelmed immediately with that type of information.”

So I thought at the moment a couple of ways to reduce that pressure from customers trying to get access to their data specifically. I asked him, “Okay, we could do dashboards for them, dashboarding and reporting, custom reporting for them that they will automatically get once the transaction comes with the usual context that they ask for, so that they already have it, and that way they get this incentivized to call because they already have the information and that could reduce the number.”

Another thing is to try to automate part of your customer service using these LLMs. There was a more recent solution that we proposed to him, because he said people want to talk to someone, to hear, and since we are advancing pretty fast in the speech element of the AI, the sounding is less robotic, it can be trained.

Finance Colombia: It’s getting pretty spooky. Yeah, it’s getting pretty impressive.

Brian Rendón: Yeah, it’s getting pretty impressive. Today we can connect to those models and train it into a Colombian, Argentinian, Cuban, Mexican, whatever type of accent that you want, it can be pretty realistic and can help you send automatic messages or answer calls if you need to and give the answer, the simple answers to people based on a couple of parameters. So you need to parametrize all of that.

Finance Colombia: You’ve been very generous with your time. Last question for you. So we’re here in Guarne. Guarne is kind of a bedroom community, a suburb. We’re probably about 20 or 30 minutes out from the city limits of Medellín. You’re Colombian. I realize that, but why does Colombia work for a business of this type? If we think about your clients that are in the US and other parts of the world, a lot of times, people think of IT, they think of a company being in India, or something like that. Why Colombia and why the Medellín metropolitan area for a tech company of this type?

Brian Rendón: Okay, so I’ve been working with you actually for a lot of years now in the BPO business, and understanding the relationship, the US relationships in terms of outsourcing and in general, and specifically for technology. I know that there are three major hubs for outsourcing technology services. So we have Latin America, we have India, and we have Eastern Europe, right? So, when you have Latin America, I would say two elements may differentiate us from the other two. First is the time zone. We have a very good time zone.

“I would say Medellín stands high as a digital nomad center. We have a lot of people coming from different places. The last time I checked a nomad list, I think it’s called Nomad List. We were ranked, I think, first or second in Latin America.” – Brian Rendón

Finance Colombia: We’re in the US Central Time right now, Texas, Chicago.

Brian Rendón: We have the same time zones as the US, so that’s a first element. And then due to our proximity to them, we are more culturally close to them than an Eastern European from Ukraine or Belarus, or Macedonia.

Finance Colombia: Very true.

Brian Rendón: Or also an Indian. Our accent is usually more familiar to them. Our way to speak to things that are relevant to both sides is also closer. So there are ties, cultural ties, that facilitate the communication. So I would say that that’s something that maybe can be impactful for a decision-making process for a US company to choose a Colombian or Medellin company over a Belarusian company. That could be some major points there. But the other element that I would say is that we have… specifically Medellín, which is particularly high-skilled in technology than other areas in Latin America in general.

I would say more than Lima, more than Monterrey or Guadalajara, more than maybe Montevideo. I would say Medellín stands high as a digital nomad center. We have a lot of people coming from different places. The last time I checked a nomad list, I think it’s called Nomad List. We were ranked, I think, first or second in Latin America. And in the world, here in Colombia, we were like third or fourth after Bali, Barcelona, maybe another one. So we have a lot of talent coming over here. We have a very friendly environment for development. We have cultural ties, like I described before, the ability to work in the same time zone, the cultural ties, and the high-skilled people.

So that, I think, makes a pretty good combination that differentiates us from the Indian and the Belarusian. Also, we are a bit more expensive than our other Eastern European and Indian counterparts. But I think the quality part, which is hard to quantify sometimes, but I would say in most cases, the quality part, which is the more humane part, like the easy to speak in a way that is more understandable for people, can be a very good point.

We are very, very present in most of the operations. And within the Latin American people, Colombia and specifically Medellín stand pretty, pretty high in the rankings of people. Wherever I go, there are half-Latin American teams. I usually see people from Colombia, and specifically from Medellín.

Finance Colombia: It’s kind of like the Silicon Valley of Latin America. It is, you know, access is easy. We’re probably half an hour from the airport right here. And then once you’re on a flight, it’s two hours to the US. And yeah, I think that, you know, you also have that Paisa entrepreneurial culture that you find specifically in this part of the country, maybe a little bit in the Coffee Axis down in Coffee Country: Manizales, Pereira, which is part of this region. It is, you know.

So Brian, what is, if people want to get in touch with you, if people want to get in touch with your company, what are your if you could remind us of the company name and, of course, your website, but any other channels of communication that would be convenient for you and potential collaborators or clients?

Brian Rendón: Of course. So, first of all, our webpage, again, is www.biconsultinglab.com. My corporate email is brian.castano@biconsultinglab.com. You can also find me on my LinkedIn profile with the same address, Brian Esteban Castano Rendon. When you go to our web page, you have a Contact Us page, and that will automatically help you to set up, to direct you to a landing page where you can set up a meeting, a 15 meeting with one of our sales representatives. So we can do a first assessment, a quick assessment on whether we could be a good match for whatever you need.

This one may be important for people to know. So, the way we classify a company that can be a potential customer for us, we don’t receive anyone, because our solutions could help anyone, but not all companies are prepared, or at the stage where our services can be of good value for them. So, we are pretty sincere from the get-go, and we tell them, “Okay, look, we want companies that already have some sort of infrastructure of data or have enough transactions that they think is necessary for them to start setting up a data infrastructure.” We can help them there, where you want to make sense of your data, we can help you there, and when you want to start automating and maybe do predictive analysis and try to incorporate AI into operation, we can help you there.

Either you know what you need, we say, okay, maybe you specifically need this. We both agree, we give you a quote, and then we start our payment process, and then we do an onboarding, and we start working together.

Or if you want to kind of implement the concept of what we sell, like getting the data, if you have to improve your decision-making, but you don’y know how to do that practically, what we do is we offer you a free diagnosis, we take around three hours to make with your top executives and department, head of departments. And it has to happen within a week. So, we take the three, maybe four hours, we sit down, we understand your business, we understand your applications, the integration within the application, how you extract information from them, what are the pain points that you have, each of the departments in general, and also each of the departments, what are your strategic goals?

And we try to combine all of that information to understand your current state and where you could be. Once we understand those two, we lay out a plan that says, okay, maybe from, coming from where you are to where you could be, we think that you could do this and this and this or that steps, and we can help you do those, for this amount of money. And we will send you a formal offer. We did a diagnosis that, again, is free. So, you get your diagnosis at the very least, you get a good sense, a better sense of where you are, and how you could eventually implement AI or data in your day-to-day operation. And if, maybe, if we see that we could be a good fit and you like our proposition, we start working together, we discuss the quotation, you pay us, and we do an onboarding session with you. And hopefully we can bring you value, we can start a long-term relationship, helping you do the transition from a business model that is not AI or data-centric into one that very, very much values their data assets and can monetize them along the way.

Finance Colombia: Impressive, you know, and it’s been impressive to see your success grow as a person, you know, I’ve known you for almost 10 years, but, you know, we’re here in your offices, and it’s full of people. I walked in today, and it’s just like a beehive, everybody’s on computers and having different calls and things like that. So people must realize these aren’t just a couple of guys with a laptop; this is an impressive operation here.

So I would encourage, of course, any kind of company that is looking to better utilize their data to support their corporate decisions, or not even just companies, but even organizations, government agencies, things like that, that you guys obviously, you have the advantages of being based here in suburban Medellín, Colombia, but are already serving clients in North America and throughout the world. So, I’m excited for you, I’m excited to watch you guys grow, and of course, we’ll continue to keep in touch, and I can’t wait to hear about future successes, so congratulations.

Brian Rendón: Thank you so much.

Julián Lopez: Yes, that’s correct, for sure. We just finished the deeper hole in HQ with directional drilling. It’s a sub-horizontal hole, for a tunnel, so that is a very successful hole in Colombia. Especially because it’s an HQ, so it’s a big diameter for exploration.

Finance Colombia: What is the diameter of the hole?

Julián Lopez: The diameter is 3.78 inches. So, usually, you drill in 2.38 inches. So, for this deep hole, it’s 1,000 meters.

Finance Colombia: Wow, a kilometer. Wow.

Julián Lopez: Yeah, one kilometer.

Finance Colombia: And where have you guys drilled this hole? Where is this?

Julián Lopez: Okay, this is in Antioquia. No, it’s difficult to say which project is right now.

Finance Colombia: Okay, I understand.

Julián Lopez: But the hole, it’s still drilling, right now. We will be the deepest hole in Colombia, it’s 2,000 meters in NQ.

Finance Colombia: So, tell me about Target Directional. You guys are specialists when it comes to drilling. When does a company, when does a mining operation, call on specialists like you all?

Julián Lopez: Okay, so, we start doing, like…Helping the drilling companies. Like, we start to help in drilling companies, and we are specialists in directional drilling, from the oil and gas industry. So, what we did: we take that technology, we bring for a diamond drilling industry, so we mix the technologies, and we start to drill in, and getting targets in Peru. We started in Peru. But the company [was] just born in Colombia.

Finance Colombia: Directional drilling has revolutionized the business because you can drill around obstacles. I see in big construction projects they use it, but then, obviously, with oil and gas to get to different deposits. And in mining as well, because a lot of times the most valuable deposits are not the easiest ones to get to. How has directional drilling revolutionized the industry?

Julián Lopez: Okay. The main idea for directional drilling is that you can save meters. Why? Because from one hole, you can get multiple holes. So, you only need to drill the mother hole one time. And, let’s say, if you will drill 5,000 meters, 1,000 meters each hole. Okay? With directional drilling, you drill one mother hole to 500 meters, and from 500, you can open zone holes. So, you will save time, you will save, let’s say, water, you will save environmentally, roads… A lot of things.

Finance Colombia: I’ve seen- I visit mines. I love when I get a chance to visit mines, especially early-stage mines, when they’re under exploration. And sometimes they’re in very difficult areas to reach. They’re on the side of a mountain, it’s this deep mountain, or something like that, and you have to get these big drill rigs up on some mountain. And then, like you mentioned, saving time. Time is money. One of the biggest risks for early-stage exploratory mines is running out of money or running out of investments before they complete their drilling, right?  So, how does directional drilling help those companies to be better stewards of their investments and to be more successful?

Julián Lopez: Okay. Let’s say this is your target, okay? So, if this is the azimuth of the target. You want to go from the front, okay? So, you need to build different platforms. With directional drilling, we use the same platform, okay? So you can turn the holes wherever you want, and impact in the inclination, or azimuth, so you have absolute control of the direction.

Finance Colombia: It makes it easier to explore and is less expensive, right?

Julián Lopez: The cost of the directional drilling, you save with the meters that you leave to drill. So, at the end, it’s one extra cost, but you save meters, you save time, you save water, you save people. So, in the end, you save money, and you get better information about the target because we have precision. So, if you want to get one coordinate, we will get there.

Finance Colombia: Okay. Even by degrees or things like that. Wow.

Julián Lopez: It doesn’t matter, yeah.

Finance Colombia: So, if somebody wants to…Let’s say an operator or an early-stage mining company wants to contact Target Directional. How can people find the company? Do you have a website, or how can people reach you and communicate with you?

Julián Lopez: Yes, for sure: www.targetdirectional.com. We are on LinkedIn: Target Directional. We are on Facebook, Instagram, and, yeah. It’s easy to find us on social media, for sure.

Finance Colombia: Great, great. Well, congratulations on this great news. I understand that with mining, there’s a lot of confidentiality, but you know, we know that you guys have done this here. We’re in Medellín, which is the capital of Antioquia, one of the most active mining regions, and so really, that’s great news, and “un hito.”

Julián Lopez: Yes. Colombia is not drilling too much at this moment. But here we have four projects with directional drilling. Not only Target, other players, okay? But what does that mean? Colombia is getting into a new market because it is the leader right now of the directional drilling market. Even right now, 80% of the technicians for directional drilling are from Colombia. In the South American market.

Finance Colombia: That’s a great achievement for Colombia, even though we’re in a time of uncertainty when it comes to mining. Now, let’s talk about…We’re here at CGS 2024, we’re here at Colombia Gold Summit. Tell me about how is this event for you all. How is the Colombia Gold Summit for you? How do you like this event?

Julián Lopez: Okay, really, really good. We always find friends and clients. Even here are some clients, “Hey, the hole is going well, thank you so much,” you know. So it’s a very good space for the people that you need to meet. Each person here is somebody that you need to talk to, you need to meet him, and that’s what we like a lot about this event.

Finance Colombia: It’s the most important gold mining event in Colombia, if not the entire Andes. So it’s always great so see you here, to meet old friends and new. Again, congratulations on this great achievement that Target Directional has made.

Julián Lopez: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for the interview and this space.

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.

Here are excerpts of their conversation.

The Singularity U Colombia 2020 Summit takes place August 18 & 19. For More information click here.

Finance Colombia: So, I am here with Duleesha Kulasooriya. You are Deloitte’s executive director for their Center for the Edge. What is that?

Duleesha Kulasooriya: We are a small group within Deloitte, it´s based at San Francisco and Silicon Valley, we have another unit in Amsterdam another in Melbourne, (and now one in Singapore). We look at how the world is changing and why it matters and what you do about that, and if you ask a consulting colleague what drives their behavior, they will tell you it is whatever keeps their clients up at night. Our mandate is slightly different, our mandate is what should be keeping clients up at night and how do you bring that to the table. So, we look five to ten years out, we frame the perspectives in a way that you can understand it, and then, not only do we frame the future in a way that you can understand it, we say, well, given that, what do we do about it today? We do three things. We do research, we write papers, we do the research to kind of understand and frame, so we write papers about it, we do eminence, speaking like this and we also do advisory with a selection of clients, we work with them to help with their own transformation.

Finance Colombia: That´s interesting, because, you know, I think of Deloitte coming from a finance background, I think of Deloitte as an audit, and large company accountant basically, but it´s interesting because we see companies like Deloitte, and the traditional Big Four have been evolving, then we also see companies, I am reading a book right now by Bill Mattasoni and when his time met at McKinsey and also BCG and its fascinating because his focus was marketing, he kind of pulled them away from traditional strategy into a different area, and so now, how important is it for companies, even if you go as a consulting you tell, for example General Electric how to reinvent itself, but you guys as a company that has been known 20 or 30 years ago, Deloitte, ok, they do my audit as a publicly traded company or they do our taxes for a multinational, but here we are talking about innovation and ways to disrupt and ways to see the future. How does that fit into the core DNA of a company like Deloitte?

Duleesha Kulasooriya: It´s a very common misconception that we are still an audit and tax firm, those are our roots, it started as an audit firm more than 100 years ago, and in most geographies that’s still what we are commonly known for. Now, in the US, in Europe and Australia, our consultants…at this point, consulting makes more money than all the other businesses combined, so it´s very dominant, and beyond consulting, we have many other edges like The Center for the Edge, we have a practice in blockchain, we have a practice on the future of work, all these different edges that are relevant to everything here at the Singularity Summit. I mean our partnership with Singularity University itself, is an example of that where the other guys aren’t. So, we recognize that we too need to evolve, and a big part of the evolution is kind of pushing the boundary, pushing the edge from where it is and I think the marketplace is coming to realize that Deloitte is more than an audit firm. I think for Colombia we had to do something like this, for them to say “wow, I didn’t know you guys did that!”

Finance Colombia: That´s interesting and especially in a place like Colombia, I don’t know how familiar you are with the country…

Duleesha Kulasooriya: Not enough unfortunately. It´s my first time here, I have been reading a lot before I came, this Orange economy thing is very interesting and I´ve done very relevant work for that in the US but I am learning more about that.

Finance Colombia: I live in Medellin and Medellin works very hard to position itself or has the aspiration to be like the Silicon Valley of South America. And it’s fascinating because you have San José California and then you have San Jose Costa Rica that also has had a lot of success, and so Medellin is really trying to be the new version, there are a lot of fascinating things happening…

Duleesha Kulasooriya: Santiago de Chile has also done really well in some of those aspects.

Finance Colombia: You spoke about how a lot of companies or too many people traditionally depend on the resume or old traditional qualifications and I think that that is fascinating, especially in Colombia, if you spend time here you will see it is a very traditional country.

Duleesha Kulasooriya:I spoke at Deloitte Colombia yesterday and I was the only male not wearing a tie. And I was definitely the only person with a mohawk! Well I am the only partner at Deloitte with a Mohawk.

Finance Colombia: Especially in Bogota. It would be very hard for a nonconformist to come up through the ranks in a place like Colombia, many times you will go to some talk and you will see introductions and the speaker will spend five minutes reading about what university the speaker went to 30 years ago and what they did and all this…

Duleesha Kulasooriya: It´s a qualification for you up there…

Finance Colombia: While back in the states on the other hand, you might see somebody who is a great programmer for example: “Well how did you learn Python?” “Oh, I taught myself”…We´ve got a friend visiting right now in Medellin, I had to leave him to come here, but he has been a CTO, he lives in California, and he has been a CTO for several companies that have been clients of ours, and his whole career has been in IT and software, but his degree is in music, and it would be extremely difficult for somebody to do that here in Colombia. I think that as they can shake that they can accelerate, and you see that need for…

Duleesha Kulasooriya: Absolutely. So, in all of these places, either we break the culture or not, so, that is no different from what I am talking about in an organization and having to do something different, and having the conviction and the courage to do something different. Once you find one or two examples, if you shine the spotlight on them, then more people feel you have permission to try something as well. The reason I have this mohawk (haircut) is kind of for that reason, there´s a festival called Burning Man, actually in the next building they have a whole lot of….

Finance Colombia: A lot of people here know about Burning Man, I´ve got a friend from Cartagena who goes to Burning Man every year.

Duleesha Kulasooriya: Yes, I go to Burning Man every year, and I shaved a mohawk for the festival because that is what I wanted to do, I could be myself and be that for that week. So, I come back, shave it back, go bald, it’s hair, right? Not a big deal. One year, I kept a little longer than that, and this lady walked up to me and said thank you, and I said for what, and she said, well, I don’t know if you noticed, I am wearing a snow string. I don’t, it´s a tiny little thing, and she said, well I take it off during the week and only wear it on the weekend, because I didn’t think it was appropriate then I saw you walking around with a mohawk and it made feel okay to bring my whole self out to work.

So, what I realized was that inadvertently I had created a space of permission, where others can be themselves. so, I kind of took that to the next level, so, even, I have an office, but I don’t sit in the office, I sit in the bullpen with all of the younger colleagues so that I can also learn from them and then can learn from us, and I am also in their day to day so that we can interact more, and we can have a normal conversation, so we can actually talk about it, and there is not like a hierarchy. I go to work in a hoodie, I go to work in jeans and a hoodie, because we always had this thing of “dress to the level of a client.” Well, what do you think people at Facebook and Google and all the startups wear? They are not wearing suits and ties, it´s a different world, right? You realize that stuff is very superficial, it´s not what matters.

So, what you need in Colombia, and it will happen over time, are more examples of people who are doing things differently, you will need that startup, Rappi or something else, that suddenly begins: Oh! So, I don’t have to go join a large corporation, I can do this and be successful too. You need someone who is kind of flamboyant in some way to show a case and be successful. You need alternate models to succeed in order for others to have permission to do so as well.

Finance Colombia: We look at scale and one of the things you talked about, disrupting at the edge, that reminded me of the book “The Innovators Dilemma” which is a very popular book in Silicon Valley, and there are cases of companies that are very large for example, General Electric, IBM, Kodak, and what happens is that sometimes there are business reasons why the cant necessarily bet the whole company on something, maybe the right thing is to disrupt yourself, eat your children, and it´s fascinating because I wonder how that can apply to countries that are medium size economies like Colombia that just entered the OECD and are advancing, the basic infrastructure is here such as fiber optic, and 4G and all that stuff, but still in many ways they are playing catch-up. How can they leverage those concepts to be able to either leapfrog or to grow more quickly?

Duleesha Kulasooriya: So, a few things. One, you do need the technological infrastructure, if you are saying that is already there, that is great, because that gives everyone access and the ability to take part of the digital economy. That’s the first one.

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