Joaquin Cordero is the Founder and President of Lumen, a communications company that provides creative and advertising services including media commercialization, 360-degree agency work, BTL, print, and point-of-purchase services. He founded Lumen in 2009 in Guatemala, expanding it into El Salvador and Honduras and serving both local and global brands. Joaquin has also founded over eleven companies, and serves in leadership roles in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, including Global Board Director and EO Global Chair-Elect.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [03:05] What inspired Joaquin Cordero to become an entrepreneur
- [07:03] The power of relationships and the importance of formal contracts
- [12:11] Why Joaquin started Lumen and how it grew from a production house to a full service communications agency across Central America
- [16:29] How rock climbing shaped Joaquin’s leadership style and created a unique culture at Lumen
- [27:30] Why serving in leadership roles within Entrepreneurs’ Organization has fueled Joaquin’s personal and professional growth
- [34:21] The value of building trust and leading volunteers in EO
In this episode…
Stepping away from the day to day demands of your own company can feel risky when growth and stability are on the line. Yet some of the most successful entrepreneurs insist that leading beyond their business creates new energy and ideas. How can taking on outside leadership roles actually spark innovation and strengthen resilience?
According to Joaquin Cordero, a global entrepreneurial leader, dedicating time to serve in volunteer leadership opens doors to fresh perspectives and powerful relationships. He highlights how working with peers who run their own companies forces you to lead by influence and build trust instead of relying on authority. This approach has helped him foster a stronger company culture and inspire long term loyalty among his team. Joaquin’s experiences prove that growth often happens when you challenge yourself beyond your own organization.
In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran speaks with Joaquin Cordero, Founder and President of Lumen, to talk about why stepping outside your business sparks innovation and resilience. They explore how serving in global leadership roles fuels personal and professional growth and how trust and collaboration transform company culture. Joaquin also shares lessons from navigating unexpected challenges and building long-term client relationships.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “I usually tell people that I’m not against child labor in a funny way, because I started my business when I was in my teenage years.”
- “Nobody’s coming to save you, right? Like I would look down on my friends who were running away from me, but they couldn’t do anything.”
- “I always say that I owe the culture of my company to EO, because a lot of the culture that I applied here is from what I learned at EMP and from many others.”
- “It challenges you to new ways of leadership because these are leaders that you’re not paying them, but you have to convince them of doing it for the greater good.”
- “Business happens at the speed of trust. You call someone in whatever chapter we have and they’ll pick up the phone and they’ll be helpful to you.”
Action Steps:
- Step outside your business to serve in leadership roles: Engaging in external leadership broadens your perspective and brings fresh ideas back to your company.
- Build trust-based relationships across industries: Cultivating genuine trust with peers accelerates collaboration and fosters opportunities for growth and partnerships.
- Embrace challenging experiences outside your comfort zone: Facing difficult situations like extreme sports or high stakes projects strengthens resilience and decision making skills.
- Invest in continuous learning through programs and training: Structured leadership development provides valuable frameworks that improve strategy, communication, and organizational culture.
- Apply insights from volunteer leadership to your company culture: Lessons from leading volunteers enhance your ability to motivate teams without authority and drive innovation.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about why it’s important to step outside of your business and serve in leadership positions in other organizations so that you can bring ideas and energy back to your company and back to yourself personally. My guest today is Joaquin Cordero. He’s the Global Board Chair of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a wonderful organization I’ve been a member of for a number of years. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:23
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:39
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that every week we feature smart CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, gusto Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, lots of great episodes for you to check out. So go check those out. And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, We help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that?
We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We have the easy button for any company to run a podcast launch and run a podcast. And we do strategy, accountability and full execution. I absolutely love doing it and I actually have a podcast here today. Joaquin is actually a podcaster as well, so we’ll talk about his podcast as well.
If you want to learn about what we do, go to rise25.com and you can learn all about it. And first, a shout out to Eduardo Montano, who I interviewed a while back about raising resilient kids in the age of AI, and Marc Stöckli, also another past board chair of Entrepreneurs Organization, because both of them led me to Joaquin here today, and I’m grateful to both of them. So, Joaquin Cordero, you are based in Guatemala. You’re a serial entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of lumen, which is a purpose driven communications firm operating in Guatemala and a number of other countries in Latin America, and started in 2009. It started as a production house and evolved into a full stack advertising, media and brand agency serving clients like Volkswagen and Volkswagen and Mitsubishi and others.
And we’re going to get into your whole story. You’ve been very involved in Entrepreneurs’ Organization and now are serving as the global board chair, which is really exciting. We were together in Hawaii earlier this year at the Global Leadership Conference, where you gave a great speech talking a bit about your passion for rock climbing and comparing that to your business journey. And so I’m really excited to hear about that. But first, let’s start with one of your first business ventures, which was a VHS store. I want to hear about that because I just got back from Bend, Oregon, which is the home of the latest blockbuster in the world.
So first of all, how did you get into doing VHS tours? And for the younger listeners, what is a VHS? You’re going to have to explain that to those younger kids who don’t know what that is.
Joaquin Cordero: 03:05
Yes, definitely. Thank you very much, John. I’m very honored to be here with you. You know, it was just starting university. I was in my first semester when I started this business.
It was called the Video Store. Some friends had already started a video store, and they had a couple locations, and I wanted to start one near my home. So that’s how it started. And we invested all this money in getting all the VHS, and it was like the next day DVD started happening and we’re like, oh, shoot. So it was a really good thing.
It was. It went on for like a couple of years. Then I closed it because plans changed and I went to study abroad, to Mexico, to Monterrey. I, I chased an opportunity to be able to study there. My brother was studying there, and I wasn’t doing really well here in the university in Guatemala. To tell you the truth, they actually gave me six months of vacation.
If you were not able to get to a certain average above 80%, they would tell you to think, take six months to go out and think what you want from life. And in those six months, I started a business, went back again at a different starting as a lawyer. I wanted to be a lawyer at the beginning, and then I went back to business administration and after six.
John Corcoran: 04:14
Months recovering lawyer here, I can say you made a good decision.
Joaquin Cordero: 04:19
Thank you, my friend. And after those six months, I decided to go to study in Monterrey, Mexico. And I and I closed the business, the video store, and I and I was able to sell some of the VHS, but there was a, you know, reminding everyone to, to rewind, like, what the hell is that? Nowadays you get most of your money from people who didn’t rewind paying penalties and penalties. Yeah, but, you know, there’s so much I usually tell people that I’m not against child labor in a funny way, because I used to start my business when I was in my teenage years.
I did everything from selling toys, selling posters, selling so many different things, and it gave me each one a unique learning that I’ve applied in my journey.
John Corcoran: 05:02
What drove you to do that? Was it wanting to earn money of your own? Was it, you know, you had entrepreneurs in the family. You had this uncle, which we’ll talk about in a second. What motivated that?
Joaquin Cordero: 05:17
You know, I guess when, when, when life happens and you go back and you start thinking about what were the igniters, especially participating at this level in the entrepreneurs organization, in the board. And I came across that the first time I heard the word entrepreneur was from my mother, and she was telling me about my grandfather, who I have his name, Joaquin. He was a Cuban immigrant, got out of Cuba during Batista times before Castro and how he had owned his time and he represented some brands. And he was able, you know, to enjoy life more. And it stuck with me.
And I’m the only entrepreneur in the family. My two brothers have very successful careers and they’re, you know, super smart, one in Amazon, the other in Hertz, in the US, in the car rental company. He’s been there for like 15 years. And I admire them so much. I kind of started entrepreneurship when I was very young.
One side on making money and being able to, you know, manage my expenses and the other side. It was really easy for me to sell. You know, I am extroverted, I like to talk to people, make relationships. So it was a natural thing that started happening to me.
John Corcoran: 06:36
So you ended up having this kind of series of different companies from a young age. But then when you end up graduating college, you have this uncle who owned a cable TV station and invited you to come work there. You end up working there for seven years. Talk a little bit about what that did for you. Spending seven years working under your uncle’s tutelage and learning from him and learning the business?
Joaquin Cordero: 07:03
Sure. This is Willie Schmidt. He’s a mentor of mine and a great person. I admire him a lot. One of the things I admire most about him is how he’s probably the best PR guy I know.
Relationship master. Always happy, always uplifting everybody. Great energy. And he was in the International Olympic Committee. So he was on the board of the Olympics.
Only two Latinos at that time. One was a Mexican and he was born in Costa Rica, but lived in Guatemala for all his life. And when I graduated school, he was starting to do this, you know, he had acquired this national company, that it was on national TV. It was cable TV. It was not a network.
And he knew that I had taken some classes on communications. And he said, you know, I need someone to come help me out. Come on. You can be the person in charge of production. So I went there.
I was the second employee I got in there. To tell you the truth, when I got in there, I was like, what the hell am I doing here? Because, you know, there was nothing. There was just like Celia Cruz singing on the TV and very old episodes of many things. We were retransmitting some channels.
But throughout the experience and after being there for seven years, I learned a lot from it. After a couple of years, I became the CEO of the company and he started working with the president of Guatemala, Oscar Birch. He was my uncle, and was the commissioner for tourism in Guatemala. And it was a smart move because he knew so many people from all over the world, and he actually managed to bring to Guatemala the decision to participate in the Olympics, Winter Olympics that happened in Sochi. So, you know, seeing the Antonovs from Russia coming to Guatemala, seeing the Austrian committee delegation coming to Guatemala and Pyongyang as well.
And in the end, Sochi won. But because of him, I met the Prince of Monaco, I met Putin, I met so many international figures. I, you know, if James Bond exists, he was in that gala evening night for sure. So he was a really good mentor for me. And one of the takeaways that I got from him was formality contracts.
And I’ve been, I think, one of the strengths that we’ve had in, in my company, in the, in the advertising agencies, we do very smart contracts. But we don’t do business without contracts. You know, everything is great until it’s not. And to have something to go back at and say, you know, this is what we agreed upon. It is tremendous.
John Corcoran: 09:52