Robin Dimond, Founder and CEO of Fifth & Cor, is helping organizations tap into the growth of their people by developing future leaders, fostering meaningful relationships, and creating a culture where employees and clients grow together. Through a collaborative agency model built on trust, innovation, and continuous learning, Robin empowers organizations to adapt quickly while creating lasting success.
In this conversation, Robin introduces her Grow Your People’s Lives in 5 Ways Framework—Health, Wealth, Spirituality, Friends & Family, and Mental Health. She explains why investing in the whole person creates stronger leaders, how requiring employees to train their replacements builds a sustainable leadership pipeline, and why every client engagement begins with a discovery process and strategic blueprint. Robin also explains how fostering innovation, embracing AI as a tool rather than a replacement for human judgment, and remaining agile help organizations thrive in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.
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Tap Into the Growth of Your People with Robin Dimond
Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Robin Dimond, the Founder and CEO of Fifth & Cor, a marketing and innovation company harnessing the best tools to support brands, consumers, and communities. Robin, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I appreciate it.
Well, it’s exciting to have you, and we already have some things in common that might or might not come up in the conversation. But what I’d like to ask you, which is kind of my favorite question on this show, is: What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in Fifth & Cor?
I think my personal why—I know what it is. My personal ‘Why’ is my legacy. And because I do not have children of my own, I get the great pleasure of being able to touch so many lives through employees, clients, and partners. So I get to live my ‘Why’ out every day. And I’m a little bit different than most CEOs. I’m looking for the next CEO to replace me. So I go in with the mindset of, “One of you will take my job one day,” and it makes me super happy. That’s my ‘Why’.
Wow. So what do you want to be when you grow up?
What I want to be when I grow up? Technically, I’d like to be the janitor. I believe in cleaning up the messes that are left, and I love that. I love the difficult clients. I love the difficult situations. And I think I’ll step down one day and be the support for somebody who’s currently on my team or the next person to join my team.
Wow. That is awesome. So you want to focus on the message as opposed to running the day-to-day, because that’s where your interests life and where you’re building your legacy.
Yes, I think that is. They call it a Chief Heart Officer in some places. It’s that person who makes sure that the message of the company, what it’s built on, and its foundation are seen all the way through. And that’s the part I love.
Yeah. So you’re a real visionary.
Yes.
So we’ll talk more about your vision, but what I want to ask you about is this podcast is really about frameworks. What we’re trying to do here is find unique frameworks, processes, structures, or ways of looking at the world that CEOs have come up with that could help audience members think about business through a different lens. So is there anything that comes to mind along those lines?
What we found that really works for us is when meeting somebody, we talk to them. Then we do a discovery to figure out if we're aligned, and we find that to be very helpful Share on X whether it’s with people, partnerships, or clients. So that discovery process, to make sure we’re all on the same page, is so important. From there, we build out a blueprint for them, and then we present the blueprint as if we were the ones running the business. We want to make sure that we’re answering those questions.
We make sure that we’re doing that, and then we have checkpoints. So we sit with a blueprint, saying, “Okay, over the next 30, 60, and 90 days, what are our processes?” The thing that we do differently than most companies is you don’t get an account executive when you come to us. You get a team of people, and you’ll see all their faces all the time. So there is no miscommunication. If you hire us, you get a team. You’ll get a director who’s overseeing your strategy.
You’ll get a coordinator who’s on top of trends. You’ll get a public relations person. And you’ll get a project manager who oversees—we call them our handlers—because they oversee the project all the way through. It has made us successful, and it’s made our clients super successful.
I love it. Especially the blueprint part of it, because it kind of chimes with the framework. So is this your blueprint? How is it unique?
It is, because everyone told us, when you look at agencies or agency models—and we try not to refer to ourselves as that—an agency model will have one account executive, and that person goes back—I call them the man behind the curtain—because they go back and talk to everyone.
What we do is say, “Hey, you’ve hired us, and you’ve hired experts.” We put all of them copied on every email, on every call, working on strategy with your team. And that’s why some of our results are 10,000% growth on your platforms in only 90 days, because we can all work together as a team.
Wow. So that’s very interesting because it’s not an easy thing to pull off—
Nope.
To have so many people work together. But maybe that’s the secret sauce here.
The secret sauce is you can’t even get promoted at this company if you don’t hire your replacement. So if you haven’t trained someone behind you, don’t come and ask me for a raise. Don’t ask for a promotion. You should come and say, “Hey, Morgan’s ready to move into my spot. This is how I got her here. I’m ready now to be promoted to the next role.” So we are building tiny leaders behind us who are building teams.
That’s such music to my ears. Yes, I mean, it’s all about leaders building a company, right?
Yes.
I totally agree with that. So how do you do that? How do you even do that? Does it mean that any subject matter expert you hire has to be a leader first and foremost? You can’t have someone who just wants to be a specialist stay a specialist?
So I say, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” So it should be in some way. It starts in the interview process, and I think this is where a lot of CEOs miss. In the interview process, we start with those questions. Where do you see yourself? Who are the five people you surround yourself with? What do you bring to the table? Asking those very open-ended questions.
Where do you see yourself going? Some people are so honest, Steve. I’d love to bring you on interviews because they’re so honest. They’re like, “Oh, I want to go to law school.” I’m like, “Great. So your time here is going to be short. It’s going to be the next year. What are you going to do in that next year?” “I’m going to help you with contracts.” “Perfect. Okay, let’s get your portfolio looking better so you can go on to the next thing.”
Sometimes we’ll get a subject matter expert who is hyper-focused on public relations, but they say, “I want to be a creative director.” “Okay, great. So during your time here, what are you going to learn? What courses can we invest in you? What trips can we take you on?” So we work with people who have a growth plan of their own and are willing to be agile. That starts at the bottom and moves toward the top. Share on X
That’s genius. Working with people who have a growth plan. Because ultimately, if they don’t have a growth plan, then most likely they’re not going to grow, because you can’t just grow without a plan, right? If you don’t have a vision for growth, it’s not going to happen. Does it mean you’re flexible enough to adapt, to some degree, to these people with a growth plan so that you can share in the fruits of their growth?
Absolutely. We have people start in one section. So we have operations, growth, and delivery. We’ll have someone start in delivery and see that they’re so good at operations that we’ll move them, and then backfill their role. So we have people who move horizontally as well as vertically into different groups. I think that’s the part where you have to be open with your team. You have to say, “Hey, Steve, you’re not that great at creative.
You know that.” And you’re like, “Yes.” And I’m like, “But you are so amazing at operations. Let’s move you over there.” Or, “Steve, you’re such a great thought leader, and I’ve wanted to start a podcast. I’d like to bring you in. Let’s backfill your other role that you started with at our company.” So it’s having that open dialogue from day one and having the team be able to recognize where they’re strong and where they need to move.
I love it. Love it. So what are the challenges with this model?
So many. When I first started, I think I saw what was not working. Before, for you to get ahead, you had to… I spent my time in New York. You had to outpace that person. You had to kind of put the other person down so that you could get promoted. And I saw some negatives in that. This, I would say, is about being transparent and being vulnerable.
It’s also admitting where my mistakes lie or where my weaknesses are. I have dyslexia, so I should never proofread anything for anyone, truthfully. So it’s about being vulnerable. Sometimes that leads to not the greatest people coming into your company because you’re putting yourself out there with that vulnerability. But for every bad apple, there are 20 great apples out there.
Yeah, I mean, this is beautiful. I always believe that in order to have people trust you, you kind of have to trust them first. That’s a fragile thing, and you have to put yourself out there. Okay, some people are going to take advantage of it, and you have to…
They are, and it happens. I think every business owner or any leader has to realize that that’s going to happen. But that’s going to happen in your dating life. That’s going to happen in relationships. It’s going to happen in partnerships. In business. It’s going to happen.
But the great part, and the great reward, is seeing someone else come alongside and take your business to the next level, or take your clients to the next level. I think it’s worth being vulnerable to gain that traction.
Yeah, because those people don’t want to work for A-holes, right? They want real people who treat them as equals in some ways because they’re also very talented people. So Robin, let me switch gears here and ask you: what drives growth in Fifth & Cor?
I think what drives growth is our innovation. And we're able to adapt very quickly. In a world where marketing is constantly changing Share on X and I don’t know what the correct term is, Steve, but I say “squished”—we’re getting pressure from the platforms, from social media changes and updates, all of that. We get changes in our coding.
We get changes and pressure from our clients. And we get industry changes. From Boomers to Millennials to Gen X, there’s constant change, so we have to be agile. In our industry, when I started, it was doing billboards. Design was a long process. Now, if we’re not adapting and changing every 30 to 60 days, we can’t keep up. So I can’t make a roadmap or a blueprint for our company three years out. TikTok was here one day.
It was gone the next day. Then it came back again. So planning and strategizing means being agile, being flexible, and being able to move around that for clients so that they don't lose their numbers. I think that's what's driving growth. We're extremely innovative, and we think quickly on our feet. Share on X
Can you give me an example?
Yes. I would say the TikTok one is a huge one because we were like, “Clients, you’re about to lose TikTok. They’re warning it’s going to disappear.” Then the next day it was back. So we came up with complete strategies to get rid of it and then bring it back. The next is PR. Sometimes the world changes.
Unfortunately, September 11, we had some other things happen in the news that were really big. It was something where we had to go to our clients and say, “Look, we need a new plan. We need a change. We cannot be tone-deaf right now going into it.” I mean, that all happened, obviously, in September. It was a really rapid change in what was going on. Another example is Shopify went down last week, so all of our clients’ websites went down. There was nothing we were doing.
It was something outside of our control. But we sat there with our clients and said, “Okay, let’s ramp up your social. Let’s go live with some videos and talk about it. Let’s do a press release about how you didn’t lose sales during this time and how you’re going to bounce back.” So it’s constantly thinking on our feet. It’s constantly communicating with our clients and saying, “Look, this happened outside of our control—and yours. This is how we’re going to fix it.”
Yeah. That’s amazing. So how do you keep the team? We talked about how you’re attracting these A players to your business and being flexible to make sure that you tap into their desire to grow, and you grow with them—their way and your way, obviously. But how do you get all these stars to work together?
So culture comes from the bottom up. It doesn’t come from me. That would be a dictatorship. So culture comes from the people we hire, and we let them run with new ideas, and they take ownership of those ideas. We did not have public relations four years ago. That was someone else’s idea, and now it’s one of our largest service lines. Project management is another one.
We were not ready to do project management, but people kept seeing our project managers, and they were like, “Well, can we just hire them? Can we just hire them to do this service?” They saw our projects through. So even if someone wasn’t using marketing, they were using our project managers for tech implementations, events, and marketing.
So we’ve created opportunities for people to grow with us. But if you come with us, we say you have to grow in five areas of your life. Health. We actually have a challenge right now, Steve, if you want to join it. It’s who can walk the most miles in June. So health is a challenge to make sure we focus on your health.
Yeah.
And we have health-related activities—kayaking. It’s on my LinkedIn posts if you want to go look. We do wealth. We want to make sure you're debt-free. When you come to us, you don't have to be, but we want to make sure you're working with our CFO to become financially independent. Share on X If you’re going to buy a home, we want you to be financially responsible outside of our company.
So in case something does happen, you’re growing toward that. We want you to grow spiritually—whatever you believe your spiritual growth is. If that’s going outside and lying in the grass, if it’s going to your church, if it’s giving back to your community, there should be a spiritual challenge. We look at your family and friends. They don’t have to be blood relatives, but you should be intentional about what you’ve done for your family and friends to help them grow. Whether it’s a family dinner…
You’ll see my team posting about their family dinners on LinkedIn. You’ll see them talking about taking time to do activities with them. So we look at five areas of their lives, making sure they’re growing, and we have challenges to support that. And then mental is the last one. What books did you read? What courses did you take? What did you do to advance yourself?
And Steve, they hold me accountable. They’re like, “Did you finish that CEO book, or are you going to…?” I’m like, “Oh my gosh. Okay. Let me do it.” So it’s something our team can challenge. And if you don’t want to participate, that’s okay. But we’re probably not the company you should be joining.
That is amazing. So people really look after each other. You have this peer accountability going that makes sure everyone is healthy, gets out of their financial challenges, has a social network around them, and takes care of their mental health. That is amazing.
Isn’t that too much for a company to take on? That could be seen as a huge burden—that you worry about all those people in so many different ways, and then you worry about your clients, and you want to make sure your people work together. Doesn’t that become overwhelming sometimes?
I don’t have to work with my clients because I have the most amazing team. I work and focus on my team, and my team’s love and joy get passed on to our clients. It’s a pass-it-down, share-it kind of thing. When they’re happy, healthy, and financially wise, they take care of our clients better than I could ever. They know their birthdays. They know their activities. They know different things. We’re constantly monitoring that. I’m supposed to take care of our team.
Isn’t that something that… I don’t know if it was Jeff Bezos in the early days…
Back in his early days, he did say that. And I want to be focused on that. I want to be innovative. We reward innovation. If you come up with a new way of doing something, you can win prizes, bonuses, gift cards. It is always a challenge: how could you do something better? Someone solved something the other day that we couldn’t figure out for the past three years. I was like, “Open up your email. There’s a gift card in there.” We want to reward people. We want them to enjoy the bonuses of doing different things and thinking outside the box.
That’s very exciting. It sounds like you’re running a perfect business.
No, it’s not perfect. People are messy, and I want other business owners to see that. There are some days that I look at the day and I’m like, “Oof, this is a big one.” Or it’s saying goodbye to the people who don’t fit into that culture, who might be the bad apples. That’s hard.
Not every person we bring on is the right fit. Not every person wants to grow. Some people want to be button-pushers for the rest of their lives, and we might have missed that. Those are the challenging days. Some days, when you get super involved in people’s lives, it means you get super involved in life. Their health might diminish, and you have to step in and take over.
We had somebody who fell backward and fractured their skull. Well, we had to keep going while they recovered. That whole part isn’t easy. It’s scary. There are some days I’m like, “What the heck am I doing, Steve?” I say that a lot. But looking back, it’s rewarding.
So Robin, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business?
Right now it’s where the industry is headed, and we’re actively, all day, every day, trying to figure that out. We are seeing the most innovation happen during these times, and keeping up with it is exhausting. To give you an example, the printing press came. The car came. Right now, it’s the next generation, who were born with one of these in their hand. Whether it’s AI that’s coming, or something else, every day there’s something new being released. So it’s, how do we adapt, but also not get burned out? That is the biggest thing I’m trying to solve right now.
Yeah.
So if anyone would like to help me, please email me. I’ll buy you cocktails or coffee. I’ll do either one, because that is exhausting for a business owner right now.
So what part of adapting is the risky part? Give me an example of adapting and risking burnout.
The burnout comes from trying to stay on top of what’s new every day, whether it’s a new platform that came out or whether it’s AI that’s going to replace all your marketing people. It’s about being flexible, but also being smart and not making too many decisions too quickly. Our advisory board is my backbone.
There are five advisors who pour into us, who are sounding boards and give as much time as possible. I think they’re the ones who keep me in line. I didn’t have them at first, so I would recommend getting a board of advisors that you really trust, that you can look at their lives, and they can show you where burnout could happen. Share on X
And if you had a magic wand and you could fix something inside your business, what would that be in the next 12 months?
If I had a magic wand and I could fix anything inside our business, I think I would fix the rate at which we’re growing, if that makes sense. We’re growing way faster than I thought, and my magic wand would be to have enough systems in place to keep up with it. Once we build a system, we outgrow that system, and I’m like, “Cheese and crackers, we’ve already outbuilt it.” So I think it would be staying on that hamster wheel, making sure we put more infrastructure in place.
Yeah, and with AI, it’s a different kind of operating system for a company, isn’t it? It is.
AI needs to be used across everything. AI should be in your business. You should be using it. You should be leveraging it. But AI can’t replace people. I think that’s the biggest thing. It’s being able to adapt your team into AI-powered systems, while also having them use their judgment and their brains. They’re going back and checking it.
Yeah. You know what I’m wondering sometimes about AI is, yes, it is making us very productive. I can get a lot more done. But at the same time, I have to make a lot more decisions, so the cognitive load has increased.
My brain load never decreased with AI. I now have to solve problems faster, and I think that’s where people are missing it. People are like, “Well, my blogs will write themselves now.” I’m like, “Okay, but who’s putting in the content for your blogs?” Or, “Oh, it’s going to put this product on my website faster.” Okay, but who’s double-checking it?
Where’s the shipping going? Where are the numbers going? People need to think about the fact that we’re doing things way faster. And then there’s fatigue. We’re being exposed to things at the swipe of a finger. You can see six, seven, eight things happening, and that’s exhausting. What is happening to the mental load of decision-making?
Yeah. And then at the same time, it’s not just that we have to make more decisions, but there’s more noise out in the market. So you’re out-competing… Okay, everyone else is more productive, so it’s just a war of… what’s the opposite of a war of attrition?
I don’t even know. I know what you’re talking about, but it’s like you have to be so intentional now.
Yeah. It’s the war of overwhelm, basically. Yes. The war of overwhelm. Yeah, that’s wonderful. Okay, but let’s go back to Fifth & Cor. Basically, you’ve come out of your discovery with this blueprint, and then you have this team approach. These people are all fully self-realizing in the five areas of their lives, and they’re coming together, working together, and incorporating AI. So who is an ideal client that can really take advantage of everything you can do? Not just parts of it, but everything. What’s the ideal client for you?
I love that question. An ideal client is not an industry or a revenue number they have to have. An ideal client is someone who comes with a problem and is flexible and agile enough to let us come up with a solution. And they’re a true partner. We’ve had a client who’s been with us for four and a half years, all the way since our inception, and they’ve been able to roll with all the new changes.
They trust us. So it’s someone who is innovative in their business. They’re willing to be agile as they move. That is the perfect client. Revenue does not matter. You can have all the revenue in the world, but if you’re slow to adapt or you’re not willing to go with the times and the changes, that’s a problem. What we did pre-Covid does not work right now. The same things that worked six months ago don’t work now. So the ideal client must be someone who’s willing to be innovative, attract new ideas, and execute quickly.
Do you have a way to help your clients be more like that?
Yes. Even in our onboarding stakeholder session, before we do a discovery call and present the proposal, we talk to them about that. We help them get set up. We come up with SOPs so they have documented processes throughout the entire engagement. I always say, “In case we get hit by the lottery bus…”
That’s my way of saying, if we disappear tomorrow, you have systems in place so your business won’t need us. So we help them grow, and then we have checkpoints with them. “Okay, are we doing this? These are the results. This is what you trusted us with over the past 30 days. Here’s what we’re doing over the next 30 days.” So we’re constantly meeting with them and saying these things. The clients who don’t work out long-term are the ones who say, “No, we’ve always done it this way, and we’re going to keep doing it that way.”
Those are the ones where I’m like, “Well, why did you even call us? If you’ve always done it that way and you weren’t getting results, that’s the definition of insanity.” So it’s clients who are willing to move with us, move with the times, and are willing to bring in other teams. I love that. They’ll bring in their tech team, or they’ll bring in their logistics team, to sit there and say, “Okay, what are we doing, and how do we take it to the next level?”
Love it. And you can only do this with A players because otherwise it would be very painful. Love it. So if you’re listening to this podcast and Robin Dimond explaining her business and how she’s putting her employees first and making sure they have a well-rounded life so they can live up to their potential inside the business, while also harnessing their own growth ideas, so you’re tapping into what they already want to do.
Then the clients are brought along, and the same thing happens to them. They’re inspired, they’re challenged to do better, and then you help them. So if you want to be a client who enjoys that kind of approach, then my question to you, Robin, is: where can they find you and your colleagues, and what should be their first step?
Perfect. You can find us at fifthandcor.com. Fifth represents the five senses, and Cor is Latin for “heart.” So that’s the reason why we do everything—the heart behind our senses. So, fifthandcor.com, or you can find us on LinkedIn. You can personally reach out to me. It’s Robin Dimond. I’d love to connect with you. I already have 30,000 connections, so I’d love to do that and set up a meeting with you.
That’s fantastic. Both my parents were doctors. My dad passed away, but my mother is still a dermatologist, and my dad was a cardiologist. They had a company, and it was called Dermacor, which is basically the skin and the heart. I love that.
Yeah. Well, now that we know we’re related… I feel like that’s just part of our story too.
Yeah, that’s a Central European idea, perhaps. So if you enjoyed this episode, obviously reach out to Fifth & Cor, find out more about what Robin and her team are up to, and stay tuned because every week I bring a wonderful entrepreneur like Robin who’s got great ideas, and you can try to steal their ideas. So thanks for coming, Robin, and thanks for listening.
Thank you.
