Victor D Latson is the CEO and Founder of Refinerz International Business Solutions (REFEED). With 23+ years of experience in the Aviation Industry, Victor D Latson is a distinguished leader and entrepreneur. He utilizes his training capabilities, military experience, and process improvement management expertise to enhance and foster positive work environments.
REFEED incorporates an effective and productive team that works towards goal achievement to the fullest. With a strong dedication towards helping people find jobs, REFEED is doing excellent work. Under the leadership of Victor D Latson, the company assists people to enhance their skills and find better opportunities to keep moving forward in this fast-paced world.
Victor D Latson is of the view that one has to think they can do anything in order to achieve that aim. Not only that, through REFEED, he aims to transform changes in the way recruitment and employment work. Let’s learn more about Victor D Latson and his path with REFEED.
Explain the background of you and the company in detail.
Refinerz International Business Solutions (REFEED) is a training, recruitment, and migration enterprise. The company provides HR/manning/staffing solutions and opportunities for the public to re-skill, upskill, or cross-skill to better individual opportunities for candidates to enhance their skill sets and improve their chances to gain meaningful employment as well as greater chances of promotion.
So many people have come to Dubai and other locations with the dream of a better life for themselves and a better quality of life for their families back home. However, when they arrive in Dubai, they discover that their so-called employment agency has duped them, and they are left scrambling to find employment.
Most of the people that I have come across in this particular situation have copied and pasted someone else’s CV because they are of the belief that getting any job will be the solution to the visa issue. So, they end up in a job that pays less than their value and working extraordinarily difficult work schedules leaving them no time to seek better employment.
I have come across a lot of 4-year degree holders that are not working in their field of study. Many of them have taken loans in order to pay their agents so they can come to Dubai. It’s a very heartbreaking cycle of events.
We, as a team, have all been touched by someone else’s story, someone’s struggle, and we have all decided that we must do something to change these narratives and do our best to help people have a happy ending.
What are your goals?
My goal is for REFEED to be an organization of global change. Not just an employment/recruitment enterprise but a place of transformation. REFEED will need to be agile and innovative in finding solutions.
While recruitment is our foundation, some locations may have more diverse situations. For instance, in the USA, REFEED competes for state and federal government contracts in Career Services and areas dealing with improving educational programs and processes. As a result, we have become very competitive in areas that we had no intention of working in when we started out.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/company right now?
I feel my biggest strengths are resiliency and determination. The biggest strengths of REFEED are competence, compassion, and expertise.
What was the path you/your company taking to get to where you are today?
The path I took to get started was to start with people. Everything starts with people; in order to deal with that, you must deal with yourself and remember that it is not about you. Once you can learn to separate yourself, your attitude, your emotions, and your fears from the situation, the more you are able to be consistent in functioning on the level needed to help people.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
Why did I start REFEED? I started REFEED because it was difficult to reach the number of people who I actually felt needed help as an individual. So, as I began to put the vision together, I came across other people with the same or similar interests, and we began working together. The feeling one gets when someone you are working with successfully gets placed is a great reward. However, each placement takes quite a bit of work because, in most cases, there must be a shift in mentality in order to place the client in the position that, on paper, they are qualified to fill.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The biggest challenge I’ve had to overcome is getting people to understand the value of what we are trying to accomplish. Whenever you are seeking funding, the investors have to see the value of what you are providing.
As I spoke about earlier, the situations and struggles are not the same in every location. So, there are complexities when trying to raise funding because you have to address this in a way that seems attractive to investors while also staying true to your core values.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Resilient is the one word I would use to describe myself. My Motto is “sooner or later the man who wins is the one who thinks he can.” In order to do so, you have to answer the bell to start every round. You must keep getting up off the mat if you get knocked down, shake it off, and keep fighting! Every day is a new opportunity to win!
What makes you excited about Mondays?
Every Monday is the beginning of a new adventure and a new opportunity to be great, purposeful, and helpful to those around you.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
What I value most about my vision is that it is not about the individual, we help individuals, but we are trying to reach nations. We want to change the world through people.
Tell us about a project that forced REFEED to be innovative and creative.
When we were putting together our bid to transition a school from a charter school to a district-managed school, we were initially getting rejections due to lack of enough technical response. We had already been working with a software developer to create a one-stop-shop for our services, so we reached out to a couple of curriculum design specialists and decided to develop a model that would offer micro-credentialing in technical skill areas. Unfortunately, we didn’t win the bid, but we are now developing this model to implement as a core program for our recruitment training.
What are the strategies of REFEED, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
REFEED is an all-in-one career enterprise currently seeking accreditation in the USA, UAE, and internationally. So once any individual candidate comes through our program, that candidate will have an internationally certified certificate of completion that will not have to be attested or certified in order to compete for job opportunities that meet their career path immediately.
What key values helped you overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership?
How have I overcome roadblocks? As a US Air Force veteran, education forged my leadership style into a more autocratic one. It was a blind spot I had before attending Hult International Business School. While there, I’ve learned so much about leadership from a civilian perspective. It made me take some long hard looks at some of my behaviors and attitudes about certain aspects of leadership and my overall perspective as a person.
How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
How do I see REFEED changing over the next two years? First, REFEED will be reaching out to governments and offering diverse services to some government agencies and colleges to bridge the gaps in career education. REFEED has already been invited to take part in a few joint ventured projects once the projects meet government approval.
I also see opportunities in the secondary and primary school levels to feature our curriculum design specialists to offer alternative learning opportunities to students who may have difficulty learning certain subjects.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
Mentorship, Executive Leadership Coaching, EdTech Consulting, Life and Career Coaching. I want to mentor my team to become entrepreneurs and business owners should they desire to open their own companies.
Furthermore, I want to mentor the group of leaders below the executive staff to become executive staff, produce videos on the various media platforms that help people become whole, and walk with them through their problem areas so that they are able to walk in the wholeness of who they are.
The title of this particular platform is Bring Your Whole Self. We will be discussing the 5 dimensions of well-being and how to get better through deliberate practice consistently.
What services/solutions or products does your company offer on par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services.
Products and Services include a Tiered recruitment program based on the needs and location of the individual candidates. We also offer study Abroad, Migrations, and Internship placement.
We are in the development of a mobile application that will be one-stop shopping with real-time access to statuses of any applications the candidate has with refeed. It will also offer training programs powered by machine learning so that the candidate will be able to work on areas of strength and identify areas of struggle. This will deliver a well-rounded employee to whichever company hires the candidate. The mobile application will be subscription-based.
Find Victor D Latson on LinkedIn!