Today we’d like to introduce you to Cynthia White.
Ceatro Group – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I have two companies – Ceatro Group and Cynthia White Art. Ceatro Group, founded in 2010, is a research and consulting firm that helps organizations design better products and services in order to improve satisfaction, decrease costs, and improve revenue. By coupling understanding, strategy, design, and implementation planning we can provide our clients with realistic plans that balance external needs with internal strategies and realities.
Cynthia White Art, formally founded in 2016, creates and sells custom and finished original works of art. Each painting is unique but they share a look and feel that can best be described as bright, colorful, and full of movement. The finished abstract paintings range from 4×4 inches to 4×4 feet and the custom paintings vary in size depending on what the customer desires. I have 50 abstract paintings in a solo show at The Gallery at South End Realty Group in the South End through Summer 2018
I’ve been studying people and designing my whole life so having both of these efforts running simultaneously feels right.
Cynthia, we’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Although I can run a thread through my career and make it look like a linear path, one tied together by art, design, people research, and business strategy, it didn’t truly unfold that way.
I was planning a career as an anthropologist with an African specialty when I fell in love with business. And I’m so glad that happened! My first degree is in studio art, anthropology, and African Studies from Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.
I spent a few years in Ghana, West Africa studying and working – first during college and then as a Fulbright Scholar doing field research on the cultural sharing of wax print textiles between Africa and the African diaspora. Wax print textiles, typically seen in West African ladies’ dresses and men’s shirts now, are the perfect nexus of art and anthropology – intricately designed and crafted cloth used for adornment with patterns that convey messages that shape societal interactions. I also taught painting at a local high school there.
When I got back to the US, and there were, not surprisingly, very few jobs for African textile specialists, I stumbled into a great job at Forrester Research in its very early days. I didn’t know that there were businesses that sold services and ideas instead of products. I also didn’t know that work could be so much fun and that you could have such great colleagues. I loved the quasi-academic environment and enjoyed the increasing international scope and growing responsibilities, for which the tech boom was known. I still painted on the side and taught a few local classes but there wasn’t as much time for it.
With Africa still on my mind, now colored by an interest in business, I got my master’s degree in foreign policy, conflict resolution, and negotiation from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, with a special interest in business operations in conflict zones and hostage negotiation. This program showed me that I was still very interested in understanding people and helping people listen to each other.
To make a long story a little shorter… It took a few more job moves to find the right fit. I eventually joined PRTM, a management consultancy that is now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to help build a Customer Experience consulting practice. We focused on helping companies understand customers in order to do better by them by creating better products and experiences and, in turn, delivering greater value for both the company and the customers. I didn’t set out to combine all of the bits and pieces of what I had learned – art, design, anthropology, negotiation, customers, and business – into one area of expertise but I feel fortunate it happened this way.
After 7 years shuttling between Helsinki, Abu Dhabi, Chicago, Tokyo, San Francisco, Boston, and everywhere in between, full time, every week, it was time for a change. I loved the work I did and the clients I got to work with but I needed to find a way to get back to my everyday life more often, for lots of reasons including creating art. PRTM supported my interest in building a separate business and let me take most of my practice area with me.
Now, at Ceatro Group, I get to do the work I love – human behavior, human understanding, customer experience, concept design, customer retention, and customer service. And I get to be home more often. I still travel to see clients or for speaking engagements but, the true travel test, I am now around home enough that I was able to adopt a dog, Sybil (Ceatro’s office dog and the art studio dog.)
I was also able to start painting again! My paintings, prints, and photographs are in more than 30 homes. I am absolutely in love with the abstract medium I’m working in – it is so exciting to see people’s reactions to the movement in the paintings. The solo show is really exciting too. A third of the pieces sold before the show’s opening so right now I’m working on 10 new paintings to go in the show and 2 large-scale commissions.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Looking backward, I can make it look like it all made sense because I like where I am but most of my choices made someone in my life say, “Why would you do that?!”
Making decisions about which direction to go, which interest to pursue, which jobs to take, where to live, who to work for, how much income is needed, when to quit jobs, what degrees to get, and so on have all been hard. Each felt like a leap of faith. However, if I hadn’t chosen to veer off the traditional path, I would have missed lots of exciting opportunities.
Running a small business is dramatically harder than I thought it would be. I had been advising large companies for more than a decade when I started Ceatro. I was downright cocky in my assumption that I knew what it would be like. The level of stress is so different than being an employee. The volume of back-office work – from legal to finance to marketing to HR – is much greater than I thought. This is true for the art business too – painting the painting turns out to be about 10% of the effort needed to get it marketed, shown, and sold.
It has been very humbling.
If you had to start over, what would you have done differently?
I would have started both companies earlier!
Contact Info:
- Address: 50 Malden Street, Boston, MA 02118
- Website: http://www.ceatro.com
- Phone: 617-834-9606
- Email: cynthiaewhite@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cynthiawhiteart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cynthiawhiteart/
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