Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Raimondi.
Nicole, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Thank you for having me.
My story begins with my family in the northeast. But like every absconded New Yorker before me, the good stuff is rooted in South Florida, where I spent my formative years.
The grandchildren of Italian immigrants, both of my parents found their niches early on. My father was a keen business owner, having operated companies both in New York City and later in West Palm Beach. My mother was, and still is, a brilliant physician. Throughout the years between high school and university, I diligently studied biology while maybe not-so-secretly falling in love with the jobs I held in hospitality. Especially when it came to Miami.
Entertaining guests and hosting family dinners on weekends and holidays had always been one of my fondest memories growing up. Everything and everyone around the table was dynamic and alive in a way that was uncommon elsewhere. In the days leading up to Christmas, or to a birthday, the excitement in the air was palpable. The food was always just slightly better in the company of others. We all smiled more and laughed easily. Over the years, delivering that type of experience to people in the restaurant setting became something I genuinely enjoyed.
So I stuck with it. Inside of Miami and outside of it.
“Could you do something about this,” and “do you have an idea for that?”
Sinequanon was formally incorporated at the end of 2017 as a means to give local bars and restaurants the operational support and latticework that would help them thrive in an impossibly competitive field. At this juncture, I had been privileged enough to spend thirteen years working both under the supervision of, and eventually in partnership with, some of the most innovative, creative, and disciplined minds in food and beverage within the greater Miami and South Florida area. I had also developed relationships with my former colleagues, who, like me, wanted to bring their experience to someplace it could make a positive impact.
It quickly became our founding mission to protect the diminishing number of family-owned establishments by sharing our collective knowledge in ways that could benefit them the most, keeping them in the communities and towns they loved.
I had just enough money to create an LLC with legal backing for the execution of sound contracts. My car did not have A/C that year.
Things had accelerated slowly at first. But as word-of-mouth took hold, projects began to range from small interventions to operational rescues; from advising and consulting on layouts and staffing to executing full grand openings. Our clients owned everything from diners to breweries, and from hidden gems to paragons of fine dining.
By the end of 2018, we began to put down roots and added a digital marketing and social media division to help support our local clients with some real continuity and volume.
And then there was 2020.
The pandemic struck our sector particularly hard. Every avenue we were involved in professionally ground to a deafening halt. Restaurants were forced to close their doors and furlough their employees with little to no financial relief from the State. We turned on a dime to expand our marketing team and help drive takeout and delivery revenue with the accounts we had active. We forgave contracts for those who needed it.
To keep our own team employed, remote, and safe, my partner and I developed strategies which included local businesses of every variety in our digital marketing and social media efforts. We worked with every budget. We deferred client payments. We made it happen any and every way we could. None of it would have been possible without the talented young professionals we met and worked with over the years, nor would it have been possible without the first client, one of our agricultural purveyors, who genuinely believed in and funded our marketing objective.
We set the entire team up for project management, marketing, and programming classes.
By March of 2021, Sinequanon had reached a milestone in its number of onboard team members and was able to increase its baseline pay to 3.5x the federal minimum wage. For every obstacle we overcame as a small business, ourselves, the ability to support the people who make us exceptional is my proudest achievement.
I look forward to many more years of this type of service.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ours was a little more like off-roading with an RC car for the most part.
Smooth? No.
Fun? Absolutely.
Determined to maintain direction and control of the company, we incorporated from the jump without investors. We took no loans. We started with the laptop I had in college and maybe a couple of Hail Marys. Even Mary was tired of hearing from us.
We worked with clients who had limited budgets and struggling concepts almost exclusively in the first two years. While this was often to greater intellectual and personal reward, it meant our expansion had to be calculated to the dollar. There was no room for error, there was no fiscal safety net, and I spent countless nights bartending or gig working to make ends meet.
Excel was both my most sacred ally and most hated nemesis.
I had to triage my bills and turn my water back on at the curb while the city wasn’t looking.
To complicate things further, trying to meet people in a professional capacity as a woman presented some unpleasant challenges. Venture-capitalist-backed startups with minimal oversight, as well as a lack of professionalism overall across genres, has made the small, often male-dominated suburban business network a hostile environment to navigate. My phone is no stranger to ambiguous requests. My LinkedIn mail looks like the trophy room of the Post-2nd-Divorce Tinder Olympics. One man’s icebreaker after a business consult was a picture of his mom lounging in a pool with no caption and no context.
Pure chaos, really.
I have nightmares about prospective clients offering to pay our firm “in exposure,” and about the winking face emoji at the end of what could have been a very normal text message.
But despite these trials, or maybe even because of them, the entire journey has been completely worth it. I suspect it always will be.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I would be happy to.
We are your team at Sinq, and we specialize in bespoke business-to-consumer operations, digital marketing, branding, and social media management services in the agricultural, independent retail/service, and food and beverage sectors.
It is our priority to deliver results with transparency, ethics, and honesty from inception to execution, and implement models for sustainable growth that each of our businesses can replicate and maintain themselves.
Locally founded, independently owned, nationally contracted, and committed to excellence, we assemble and lead a focused team on a per-contract basis to meet the specific needs of each business we interview. Passion for, and a belief in the importance of, the role of family-owned businesses within our communities is the engine that drives us.
We are thrilled to be doing what we love in the places we love.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Bad luck builds character, good luck gives you an opportunity to use that character to its greatest advantage, and a solid friend can outperform them both.
Contact Info:
- Email: hello@sqncgroup.com
- Website: www.sqncgroup.com
- Instagram: sinequanon.consulting
Image Credits
Myles Dante, Myles Dante Media Jess Nicole, Pour la Vie Films
