Leticia Latino van Splunteren, business isn’t just about the bottom line. It’s about changing industry culture, building meaningful relationships and contributing to a family legacy.
Neptuno Group was founded in 1972 by Baldassare Latino, an Italian immigrant that left his country in the late 1950s looking for better opportunities abroad. He arrived in a blooming Venezuela where anybody willing to work hard had plenty of opportunities to contribute to the country’s imminent growth. Although he didn’t have a Bachelor’s degree, he got involved with the deployment and installation of the first Power and Electrical Networks in Venezuela and that led him eventually into Telecommunications, where his company has helped deploy over 10,000 Towers in America, some of which were the very first Cellular Networks. Baldassare Latino now at age 85 still is the CEO of Neptuno Group and shows up at the office every day. While Antonio Nativo, is the General Manager of Neptuno Group and has been with the company for over 35 years, he has been instrumental to its growth and solid reputation. All of Latinos kids eventually got involved in the family business, Salvador Latino, a Civil Engineer with over 20 years in the business, runs all international operations and is the Group CTO. Antonella Latino joined the business after gathering years of work experience at SHELL, and she’s the CFO for the group.
Leticia, who wanted to be recognized for her own talent and not because of her family correlation, was the last one joining the company after having worked several years for Merrill Lynch and Telecom Giant Nortel Networks. The purpose of her joining was to open and manage Neptuno USA and try to penetrate the challenging US market. “Our goal is to create meaningful relationships that transcend products, services, projects and TIME. A family business, if run well, has an ‘always there’ quality that is certainly valuable to our customers as it provides continuity and convergence of past, present, and future”, says Leticia Latino-van Splunteren, CEO of Neptuno USA, Corp.
The culture of the company has always been about ‘Legacy’ and now a full transition of leadership with the second generation is transforming that culture into ‘Leveraging the Legacy and know-how to bring Innovation to our customers and our Industry’.
Tera Jenkins
Tera Jenkins is a Best Selling Author, host of Business Innovators Radio and contributor to Small Business Trendsetters and Business Innovators Magazine covering Influencers, Innovators and Trendsetters in Business, Health, Finance, and Personal Development.