: Marc Robertz-Schwartz
: The RED APPLES Way How Nine Core Values Transformed A Business Founded On Fear& Desperation
: Indie Books International
: 9781966168591
: The RED APPLES Way
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Management
: English
: 178
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Laid off from his job, desperate to provide for his family, The RED APPLES Way is the candid story of one 'accidental entrepreneur's' trajectory to small business greatness, growth, and international honors, guided by nine impactful and transferable core values. Put aside your mission-and-vision exercises and discover how a foundation of values including integrity, accountability, and community impact can become your most valuable competitive asset.

Marc Robertz-Schwartz is an award-winning media and marketing executive and entrepreneur with a background in broadcast, branding, multi-platform video content development, creative, and advertising. He founded and grew Red Apples Media, a fullservice marketing agency, until its sale in late 2024. Marc is a three-time regional Emmy Award winner and nineteen-time Telly Award winner.

Chapter 1But First, The Back Story


For the first twenty years of my professional career, I worked in both affiliate and owned-and-operated television stations up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Miami. As you move through this book, you‘ll find many of the anecdotes and “interstitials” are derived from some pretty extraordinary experiences during those years, from celebrity interactions, to a horrific helicopter crash, and bosses, as well as coworkers, who shaped me (whether they intended to, realized it, or not).

One influential person was Don Browne, president and general manager of WTVJ—at the time, the NBC-owned television station in Miami. As his vice president of creative services, he and I had a very challenging relationship. However, I have to admit that he was one of the more influential people I had the opportunity to work with; we had some great experiences, some not so great, and others I swore I would never repeat.

I bring Don up this early because one of his favorite expressions was,

“In order to know where you‘re going,

you have to know where you‘ve been.”

While a similar phrase is credited to Maya Angelou, he will forever be the person I attribute it to. With that philosophy in mind, I chose March of 2008 as my jumping point to begin the story that would eventually lead toThe RED APPLES Way.

Don Browne and me at the groundbreaking for the new NBC6 broadcast facility in Miramar, FL, an interesting juxtaposition of our relationship

March 2008 marked my fifth anniversary with The Villages Media Group. For those of you who are unfamiliar, The Villages is a massive, active lifestyle, senior community in central Florida, about an hour north of Orlando. In 2003, when I was first recruited away from WFOR, the CBS television station in Miami, The Villages had an impressive population of about 50,000 people, spanning three adjacent counties. At the time of this writing, the population is estimated to be more than triple that amount and still growing.1

A couple of months prior to my hiring, I received a call from an unknown number and instinctively sent it to voicemail. A while later, I played it back. It was from the head of human resources at The Villages—a place I had never heard of—asking if I would be open to talking about potentially coming on board as the general manager (GM) of their twenty-four-hour cable channel, VNN (The Villages News Network).

It had long been both a desire and goal of mine to be