Breaking Through

Twenty six year old Daniel Martinez is working on a new concept in a new downtown office in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dan is a co-founder of Rhino Media Productions whose new office sits on Rose Street across from the Amtrak station. Its big picture windows, high ceilings, and open layout give its team of Media Ninjas room to roam while they fill the entire space with creativity energy.

There is a bottle of mouth wash sitting on Dan’s desk—“I hate coffee breath. It’s the worst”, he explains. Dan is working on a commercial for Biggby Coffee, a coffee business from Lansing, Michigan with several branches in the Kalamazoo area. He uses FinalCut Pro on his big screen Mac to get the edits just right.

Rhino Media is not an advertising agency but they do make a lot of ads. “We’ve made commercials for brand names like Doritos and Coke”, says Dan. They had the opportunity to work for these big names because of Rhino’s submissions to Poptent, a website built for video business upstarts like Rhino whose goal, at least for now, is to get their name and their work out into the world through any venues available to them.

The amount of commercial work that Rhino currently produces, is a concern for Dan whose real passion is telling people’s stories, especially the stories of those whose environment and circumstances don’t normally allow it to be told.

Dan, dressed casually in his black and blue Rhino polo with jeans and business loafers, says he grew up in a corn field. I grew up two doors down from him, in the small farming village of Lawton, Michigan. His path from his small farm town, surrounded by grape vines and corn fields, to small business owner has not been a straight one. Ever since those early days, Dan says, he has had a fascination with Africa.

“I used to have this vision of four boys in Africa, asking me to help.” After three years of college at Taylor University, Dan’s life, he says, took him in a completely different direction. In 2008 Dan pursued his dream of traveling to Africa. He found an opportunity online to go to Swaziland for three months. Dan went despite warnings about the high rate of disease and economic dangers, at the time, it was his calling.

When he returned, a second opportunity arose. This time he traveled to Uganda with a group called “Be A Number”, based in Marshall, Michigan, that contacted Dan and recruited him to work on a company documentary there. Their mission is “to empower those in extreme poverty to connect with you”. What Dan walked away with after building houses, editing film, and volunteering at the local Sunday school, is that “I needed to come back and tell stories. Everyone has a story to tell”, he says, and he wanted to tell the stories that don’t get told.

Kevin Romero is twenty nine years old. When I walk into his office on Rose and West Michigan to interview him he greets me at the door. He’s wearing a plain black sweatshirt, jeans, and a hip white and black white watch. He looks concerned. “How does this work?”, he asks, “how much time do you need?”.

Down to business it is, I think, and refocus my thoughts away from the small talk I had been planning. “It’s casual, I say, I’m going to record it if you don’t mind. We can start with where you’re from.”

  “Hartford”, he says, “a small town in a pretty rural city”, and he relaxes slightly—as much as he’s going to anyway. Kevin is soft spoken with a tough looking exterior. His full, thick beard and his serious, intense, brown eyes can throw you off when he tells a joke. Kevin is a people person and an artist. He grew up with big aspirations—major league baseball, painter, musician—today, he and Dan are the co-founders of Rhino Media. Business savvy Kevin is the primary owner. “We met bowling”, he says, through mutual friends. “I thought he was a fun guy, we started hanging out and I invited him to church.”

Kevin thought he might someday own a small business, “I was thinking restaurant, probably an Italian restaurant.”

“I got out of college and worked a couple of jobs and got a taste of some jobs I didn’t want to do”, like working in the Citibank call center. Through his manual labor job with a landscaping company he found his business mentor. “I took it upon myself to learn from him.”

One of his most validating jobs was his substitute teaching; he liked giving people hope and things to think about, to offer a unique perspective to high school students. He’ll have past students come up to him today and say, “Hey, you’re Mr. Romeo! Man I loved you”.

When Rhino started in 2010 Kevin had been developing his skills as a photographer. “We didn’t really know what we were doing, we wanted to be creative but no one took the reigns of the business” Kevin stepped up, “to put the skills he learned in school to use.”

Since then Rhino has been morphing and growing, building on who they are, Kevin says. “We’re all very relational people and we capitalize on that. It’s tough to balance that in a creative field; I think often times artists have a hard time being more into their work.” Rhino doesn’t embody that says Kevin.

Shortly, I will be working close at hand with these two young business founders as a Rhino Media Intern. Kevin doesn’t worry as much as Dan about the work they are doing in advertising the overtures of Dan’s goal of telling people’s stories are mirrored in Kevin’s belief in business and knowledge that everyone has a message—even if that message is to drink their coffee. Kevin’s goal for the company is to “up Kalamazoo’s game” as a place for business to thrive.

Dan is the idea man behind the Rhino in Rhino Media. Rhinoceros are mostly blind, he explains, they move in a “crash”. It is Dan and Kevin’s hope that Rhino Media will continue to break on through its obstacles as it has since its evolution as a “pipe-dream” to where Rhino is now, “on the verge of something big, says Dan.