The Niche Pitch:
Dr. Jo Ann Piña
www.dRjoAnnPinA.com
Business model profile: Specialized speaking, consulting
and coaching in cross-cultural communications.
Years using this model: 7 Annual income: Six figures
Staff: No full-time staff. “It’s mostly virtual—I hired someone
to reorganize my office and someone else to work on my
technology, that type of thing.”
number of speaking dates per year: Combined training
and keynotes: about 75 days. The remainder is consulting
and coaching.
marketing efforts: Dr. Jo recently reworked her home page
to target the appropriate and specific customer base. She’s
looking into search engine optimization, blogging, sending
her books to key industries and speakers’ bureaus. “When I
lived on the East Coast, I had a lot of referrals. On the West
Coast, I’m doing more networking and phone calls.”
Like it or not, Dr. Jo Piña doesn’t usually
get a call until there’s a problem. “Until
an organization feels the pinch, they may
not be aware of their internal diversity and
communications issues,” she says.
Dr. Jo’s specific area of expertise is cross-cultural
communications training, helping individuals and businesses increase their influence, either with employees
or a customer base from a different culture. She cut
her teeth in diversity training during the 1990s. Since
2002, that has evolved into a more global focus. “As
companies went global, it meant understanding those
different cultures in Asia, the Middle East and South
America,” she says. “How do we reach them, connect
with them and influence them?”
Dr. Jo drills down to the specifics of helping people from a different culture understand their own
cultural values, especially leaders and emerging leaders. She cites the example of Hispanic and Asia-Pacific
Americans, who often hesitate to interject an idea in a
client meeting if it might make a supervisor look bad.
“That’s in a person’s cultural DNA,” she says. “So it’s
about learning ways to speak out that still preserve
their supervisor’s stature, allowing them to save face.”
Of course, culture challenges aren’t exclusively
about ethnicity or geography. They can also be genera-tional. “I recently worked with a company that’s heavy
in research and development,” she says. “As it turns
out, the company was founded in the 1960s and some
of the original engineers are still there—and they don’t
value the input of the young engineers.”
