"I'm a frustrated athlete," says Ricardo "Ric" Elias when asked about the secret to his success. "To me, business is the Olympics for non-athletes. It comes down to loving competition; figuring out whom we should compete against and how to beat them," says the gregarious Managing Partner of Red Ventures, a privately held company based in Charlotte, North Carolina whose businesses are primarily marketing-focused.

Ric was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and came to the U.S in the early 1980s to attend Boston College on an academic scholarship. The fact that he didn't speak English very well didn't cause him any concern until he actually arrived on campus and realized that by and large, he couldn't understand what his professors were saying. "I adjusted my schedule and my whole first year took only classes that dealt with numbers," he says. "I'd always been decent at math, and things like calculus and accounting were non-lingual. I was able to buy some time to improve my English skills. I look back and think, 'Had I known what I didn't know. '" He laughs and shakes his head. "Ignorance is indeed bliss!"

After his years at Boston College, Ric applied for the prestigious GE financial management program for recent college graduates. He made the cut and began the two year program working in both Philadelphia and Japan. "It was a great job," says Ric. "I had a chance to meet Jack Welch and work for Jim McNerney [former CEO of 3M]." With GE, he traveled the world - Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Australia, and many other countries. "I had a real thirst for adventure and for learning about other cultures. Being immersed in different cultures for short periods of time helped me develop deep intuitive skills. I love talking to people, learning about them by asking lots of questions, and figuring out what makes them tick," he says.

From GE, Ric went on to Harvard for his MBA. "It's a good thing for me they needed a few minorities at Harvard," he jokes. Upon graduating from Harvard, Elias took a job with CUC (later Cendant), a holding company for marketing businesses. "It was a fertile learning place," he says. "Cendant would buy companies, then come back to headquarters and look at the available players on the bench and say, 'You, go run this company.' You didn't have to prove you were ready to get the assignment; you proved yourself while carrying it out. I had the opportunity to do six different jobs in six years."

In January 2000 Ric and his business partner, Dan Feldstein, who had also worked at CUC, started redf.com, an on-line/off-line discount and loyalty program company. As the dot-com industry began to unravel, Ric and Dan quickly adjusted their business model and refocused their team's energies toward what would become Red Ventures.

So what's next for Ric, early retirement to some exotic locale? "No way," he says. "I am having too much fun. At Red Ventures, we have built a world class technical platform and are now starting to exploit opportunities across our businesses. We recruit top talent to build great businesses. We've got really solid relationships with our clients and after five years we've finally hit our stride. The future is extremely bright here." No matter how much growth Red Ventures experiences, Elias is not content with reflecting on past successes. There's always new opportunity in the pipeline for the team at Red Ventures.

Ric Elias lives with his wife Brenda and their two children in Charlotte, NC.