After spending more than 30 years in marketing and business strategy, Mimi San Pedro knows a thing or two about building a brand, building a company and building a reputation. However, she said one of the most important things she has built is her network.
“The companies and brands are not just about companies and brands,” she said. “It’s about the people running it and the people who own it. When they are successful, that means that they are contributing to their employees’ success, meaning they’re contributing to their families’ income and their families’ future.”
Over the course of her career, she has helped transform relatively unknown companies into household names, and she said her most recent post as chief strategy officer at the Venture Center in Little Rock is a culmination of her previous experiences.
She retired in August but still serves as the Venture Center’s executive advisor.
“I enjoy a lot of the programs at the Venture Center,” she said. “Some of them I started, so I’m super dedicated to it.”
She joined the entrepreneur support organization in 2019. While there, she started the Women Achieve program, a woman-to-woman mentorship program that has allowed women to grow their startups and side hustles into full-fledged, full-time businesses.
“I think part of my big accomplishment, too, is putting the Venture Center on the map, meaning communicating all the things that the Venture Center is doing and all the success it has had,” she said. “It is a globally recognized fintech accelerator program, and everybody needs to know that. It’s through strategic communication and aggressive communication that you can really do that.”
Although she majored in computer science and accounting at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, her friend Steve Holcomb insisted she was a good fit for marketing and recruited her to his company, Mangan Holcomb Partners, now MHP.si in Little Rock.
“From there, I learned the trade and became really interested,” San Pedro said. “My personality and my skills, you know, it was just a great fit to be in the marketing/advertising field.”
It was the start of a long and varied career. San Pedro next joined Stone Ward in Little Rock during its infancy, helping grow the advertising agency into the powerhouse it is today. While working there, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 38. She joined ContourMed, a Little Rock company that makes breast prostheses, after a year of treatment.
“I think I came out of it as a person who’s not just passionate about what I’m doing as a career but also doing something else, like a mission, kind of a purpose,” she said. “That’s why I joined ContourMed — because it needed me because I had the experience and I’m also a breast cancer survivor, and I needed it to get well and to be OK again.”
She was then recruited to Acxiom, now based in Conway, which she described as an exciting company in constant flux. She went on to help build the brand of renowned Little Rock-based garden designer P. Allen Smith and help a catalog company transition into e-commerce before joining the Venture Center and retiring at age 58.
“I actually retired because I’ve always said to myself, ‘I’m retiring early,’” she said. “My father’s always said that you work to play, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to play, so I can’t work until I’m, like, 65,’” she said.
Along the way, she has contributed to a number of other causes. She currently serves on the boards of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership, the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame and the Southern Capital Project, which works to empower female entrepreneurs.
San Pedro grew up in the Philippines and moved to the U.S. with her family as a teenager in 1974. The transition was difficult, she said, but she began hitting her stride when she went to college.
“I started just kind of understanding that there’s a lot of opportunities, and I have to be the one that seeks it out and takes advantage of those opportunities,” she said. “It’s the whole thing that my mother and dad were saying, which is in America, you can do anything you want. You just have to work hard.”
She said she and her life partner, Mary Ann Coleman, plan to travel more, having visited more than 50 countries already, and she plans to return to UA Little Rock to take noncredit classes. She also hopes to continue contributing to women’s causes.
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