Respecting the Universe: Navigating the CHRO Paradox with Marc Robertz-Schwartz

**Stacie Baird** (0:08)
Hey, humans, welcome to The HX Podcast. This is Stacie Baird, and we have a guest today. I am gonna jump right in, because I am really excited for this conversation today. We've been doing a series on thinking about the paradox of sitting in the seat of being a CHRO today.
And I think for me, it has become obvious over the last several years of my career, but also, I really think right now, right place, right time, the intersection of tech, the intersection of the elevation of the experience for people. There's reports of layoffs and now people coming back.
It's just a little bit of a wild time. And I also believe, and I think my guest and I are in the same age group-ish, which is that we've been through a lot of change in our careers and in our lives related to technology, innovation, et cetera. And for me, I think I didn't have such a visceral reaction to the up and come of AI automation, workflow automation, mostly because I think this is just, I've been here, done that before. So I wanted to have a guest on that we can dive into this conversation. He's not a CHRO himself, works with leaders every single day, has built a company and sold it, like has been through lots of iterations in his life and in his career, to have a variety of different perspectives around this conversation. And Marc, I don't know whether to call you Dr. Marc or Marc, you can set the record straight. When I was sick last week, definitely I needed some prescription from Dr. Marc, but we have Dr. Marc with us today. I'm going to have him give a little bit about his background and history to jump off. We're going to get into it and talk about the paradox that we're in right now and the current state of the state. So thanks for joining us today, Marc, and really excited. Somebody referred you to us and really excited to have this conversation today.

**Marc Robertz-Schwartz** (2:19)
It was awesome. Thank you for having me. First of all, I'm glad you're feeling better.

**Stacie Baird** (2:23)
Thank you.

**Marc Robertz-Schwartz** (2:23)
I don't know how much my recommendations may have helped. I am the son of a pharmacist, so maybe that helped play into it.

**Stacie Baird** (2:28)
A little bit.

**Marc Robertz-Schwartz** (2:30)
A little bit, but yeah, look, if my parents watch this, they're going to love right off the top that you're referring to me as doctor. Probably one of the regrets in their life is that's not what I actually turned out to be.

**Stacie Baird** (2:41)
Well, same same. Same same over here.

**Marc Robertz-Schwartz** (2:44)
To answer your question, what I did turn out to be though was a television junkie. The first 20 years of my career, I spent working in television stations up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Miami, ABC, NBC, CBS. I worked for a lot of the larger television station groups, worked for NBC when it was owned by GE. As we get into our conversation, I do have that perspective of that corporate background, as well as the very small business, which I built on my own.
After 20 years in television, I was recruited to a place here in Central Florida called The Villages, which is a massive retirement community that I imagine probably half the people watching this are not in their heads going up. I know somebody who lives there. They had a 24-hour cable channel, and they hired me to be their general manager. I worked for them for about five and a half years, launched their in-house advertising and marketing agency, managed all the national marketing and advertising for The Villages. Then when the economy crashed in 2008, so did my department and found myself laid off without work. Nobody hiring six-figure marketing people and relocating them from Central Florida and found myself in a position of desperation. I spent half my day trying to find a job and half my day trying to figure out what I was going to do to keep the roof over our heads and launched a company called Hometown Health TV and went to market with at the time a pretty unique concept, and that was producing a monthly subscription-based 60-minute health medical program that was distributed across doctors' offices in the area. We eventually teamed up with the local cable system, and as we grew and started to better understand thinking about the timing, understanding things like social media and YouTube, how we started to then repurpose the video content to help our clients better utilize what we were creating for them.