My Professional Story

Published by Robi | Filed under Uncategorized

Robi L. Banerjee

320 Montgomery Street #18 | Syracuse New York 13202
315-657-3200 | robi@robibanerjee.com

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate enough to work with a variety of great organizations and inspiring individuals. All of these interactions have afforded me success both professional and personally as well as setbacks giving me the opportunity to reflect and learn.

Destiny USA (2001 – 2008)

One of the more unique elements of my professional career has been my involvement with Destiny USA. It started with the vision of Robert Congel, a self-made billionaire and a successful shopping center developer. Mr. Congel had an ambitious desire to expand one of his very profitable properties in Syracuse, New York and transform it into one of the most visited destinations in America, attracting tens of millions of visitors annually. I was fortunate enough to join his executive team early in the project’s development. During my time at Destiny USA, I had the privilege to interact with the highest levels of local, state and federal government, potential corporate partners as well as the financial community. This executive team operated with a very dynamic, free-flowing management style, providing me insight and visibility in several aspects of the project. Some of the initiatives I led include:

• Workforce, Addressing the Challenges of Acquiring Talent –The Destiny USA workforce strategy addresses how to identify, acquire, manage, maintain and even outplace the talent required for successful operations. The desire to positively impact Syracuse coupled with the need to scale a workforce model into several tens of thousands of individuals; an innovative workforce strategy was pursued. The lynch pin of this strategy was to create a culture that infused passion and commitment in its employees, supported by a performance-based incentive strategy. The first phase of this strategy had been implemented, screening over 5,000 individuals and providing an initial offering to 200. To date this has been a highlight in my career, experiencing the passion in our partners and the impressive accomplishments the workforce demonstrated throughout the training. Unfortunately due to challenges in the project’s financing, the workforce strategy was ramped down and we assisted in the redeployment of the first phase employees.
  
• Security Infrastructure, Safety and Security Facilitate Commerce – I led the coordination of the design and philosophy of the life safety and security plan required for the entire multi billion dollar facility designed to process tens of millions of people and hundreds of millions of transactions. I managed world-renowned individuals and corporations in a collaborative environment to create a plan that addressed safety and security issues, but also turned safety into a positive guest experience.
  
• Technology Architecture, The Opportunity Afforded by a Controlled Environment – Understanding the size, scale and visibility associated with Destiny USA, an amazing opportunity was realized: To capitalize on a controlled ecosystem that would provide strategic partners the opportunity to both help design the platform/architecture required to provide an amazing level of guest satisfaction and, at the same time allow those partners to benefit from the visibility of their accomplishments. I lead the development of the architecture and the guest experience mapping.
  
• Market Research, Breaking the Traditional Paradigm – In today’s day and age, destination marketing is completely based on comparable destinations along with a demographic / psychographic analysis with concentric rings of population and affluence. The challenge was to break that paradigm and create new models that would provide confidence to the lending institutions. This was done through collaboration with several leading market research firms.
  
• Tourism Marketing, Creating a New Market – A fascinating challenge was to address building a tourism magnet in Syracuse, New York. Upstate New York is filled with existing man made, natural and cultural tourism attractions. A tourism-based marketing and rebranding strategy was created that addressed International and domestic travel, leisure and business. This was accomplished by lobbying New York State and creating legislation signed by Governor Pataki which dedicated the new sales tax dollars to a projected marketing fund in excess of $30 million annually.

Onception (1999 – 2001)

Persistence leads to success; one of my greatest learning experiences was the CIO of Onception. We repackaged a failed business concept that incorporated proven technology into a very profitable new business. Onception became a pioneer in the calling card industry. This was done by creating a partially facilities based Application Service Provider that enabled large calling card distributors the ability to better manage their voice traffic through improved real time reporting, rate management and least cost routing adjustments. Along with the voice services we grew a several thousand person ISP and explored unique opportunities for corporations to private label ISP services and add value to the customers.

Bristol Myers Squibb (1994 – 1999)

Understanding your customer; I was a founding member of a Laboratory Robotics Engineering department that was a part of the FDA regulated division of Drug Discovery. Our departments charge was systems / process engineering to create physical robotic systems that would either increase throughput of analysis or minimize negative interaction with pharmaceuticals to humans. We quickly realized that as opposed to trying to change the way scientists work through technology, giving them new information tools and methods to perform their experiments, gave them the opportunity to be more efficient and successful.

Personal Background