The leader of Australia’s most-honoured project-based training firm got an early start as an entrepreneur and hasn’t stopped teaching – or innovating.
Alita Harvey-Rodriguez arrived in Australia on a hot December day with no more than 400 bucks to her name and went to live in Wangaratta. “I spent my early years in the bush,” Alita explains. “The sign across the road said Kinglake National Park. When I say the bush, I mean the bush. I think because there is nothing around but your imagination, it naturally fosters or even forces the creative mind to evolve. Honestly, I couldn’t have imagined a better place to grow up,” she avers.
Living in a country town and having a proud mother who wanted her to learn the value of working for what she wanted led to Alita’s introduction to entrepreneurship. “As a creative kid I’d make crafts, which my proud mum said I should sell at our local market,” Alita recalls. “So, off this little 10-year-old went, setting up a stall with all sorts of things I’d made, such as personalised leather keyrings.”
Alita first entered the official workforce at 15, teaching dancing, but her real career started at 19 as a marketing and sales associate for a chain of gyms. Quickly proving herself and becoming the manager of marketing in a year, Alita received what she describes as “brilliant training, which jump-started my ability to understand buyer psychology”.
“Knowing multimedia and coding, I also had a ‘side hustle’ before side hustles were even a thing,” Alita enthuses. “I built websites for a number of small businesses, until I realised I didn’t know how to grow a business beyond myself because I didn’t know how to implement systems and processes…I was winging it.”
“What we love the most is partnering with SMEs.”
Wanting to get some real corporate experience and elevate her knowledge, Alita left the gym and went to work for an SAP business process outsourcing specialist, where she was mentored by someone with whom she is still friends today.
“From there, I wanted to get back into fields that were creative but digitalised,” she says. “I also wanted to stay in systems automation like SAP, which naturally led me to email marketing. I loved this job, using email automation to deliver higher conversions online. This was, at the time, the only trackable form of marketing and this made my curious brain happy because I was able to test creative messaging, images, timing, flows – you name it. And this got me into customer experience, because I could use email to understand customers and enhance the entire shopping experience.”
While Alita was working for a global software company that had a less than desirable Net Promoter Score, customers were asking her for training in the form of help with creative strategy. “Our clients needed to know how to develop campaigns that their customers would love,” Alita explains. “I asked if I could develop some training workshops; they said yes, and the clients loved it. They could now understand how to think about developing and implementing an email marketing strategy without having to use an agency on top of the expensive tech. I was sent flowers, champagne, cards, etc., as thank yous for the newfound education. After a while they asked me to stop. I respectfully thought, ‘No, I won’t stop, the market needs this’.”
Wanting to do something special with this need she saw in the market, Alita jumped into researching how to deliver amazing training that stuck. It all started with the question, ‘How do adults learn best’?
“It turns out adults best learn via experience, same way dyslexics learn, which I found fascinating as a dyslexic human,” Alita says. So, using all the skills she learnt in agencies, marketing psychology and strategy, Alita launched MI Academy, a business that has become Australia’s most awarded project-based training firm. “My inspiration for starting MI Academy was a desire to help people learn the creative and digital strategy I’d learnt over my career,” Alita says. “I was infatuated with email marketing, customer experience and cross-channel communications after working within software and agencies on global accounts like L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Activision and Sass & Bide.
“We work with founders, leaders and their teams to develop more strategically creative, high-performing teams by enabling them in leadership, creative thinking, marketing and customer experience. We bring creativity and implementation skills to teams and the boardrooms. This training style is unique…because we take a goal of the organisation, such as ‘increase retaining customers by four per cent’ and train [staff in the necessary] theory and strategy, and keep educating them as they execute. This means their investment in education has a direct impact on their business’s success.”
MI Academy is renowned for doing things differently in the market. “We’ve been really lucky to have received many awards, including Best Holistic Customer Experience Provider in consecutive years,” Alita enthuses. “What we love the most is partnering with SMEs because this is where real change can happen. We’re able to make cultural and sales performance shifts and this is what I’m so grateful for. As much as I love working with our flagship enterprise brands, my heart is in SMEs – founder-led businesses that want to invest in their business and teams to grow from within.” One such example is TennisGear Australia, which achieved triple growth in less than 24 months despite none of the team members Alita worked with being a marketer. “All of them were tennis coaches who wanted to help TennisGear grow and achieve its potential,” she recalls.
Among all her achievements with MI Academy, Alita is most proud of is an event she launched in 2020 that is recognised as one of the retail industry’s most innovative events. “It’s Australia’s first retail Hack-a-Thon, called HackGames, where we bring together some of the best minds in retail and eCommerce to work in teams to help develop solutions for our industry’s most pressing problems, such as mental wellness at work, sustainability or how to make stores more valuable,” she enthuses. “Normally hacks are only for tech, but we have developed this for the whole industry, no matter their skill set, to come together and collaborate to develop real solutions to problems facing the industry.”
Alita is excited about the next few years. She will continue to grow HackGames as her flagship event, to keep being the driving force for innovation in the eCommerce and retail market. “But what I’m really excited about is eSchool,” Alita says. “We’re bringing our project-based learning programs to short courses online. As part of this, we’re inviting some of Australia’s leading retail CEOs and entrepreneurs to share their knowledge on the platform, where you’ll be able to find courses from project management to email marketing strategy and ‘workshops in a box’’ – basically everything you need to run your own MI Academy-style workshop in-house.”
This article first appeared in issue 39 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
