Many children would find relocation from Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico to English-speaking Orlando, Florida, to be a grossly jarring experience. But at age nine, Sylvia Susan (Hernandez) Montgomery felt nothing but the thrill of adventure—a hunger to succeed in her new life as her family sought opportunity on the mainland.
Upon arriving in Florida, Sylvia and her younger brother were separated from classmates and placed in an isolated Spanish-speaking classroom, but her parents were adamant that their children receive no special treatment. After all, how would their English skills improve if they were not forced to use them? Sylvia recalls this lesson as an important one in her development. “I learned that it takes work to succeed,” she remembers. “If something is a challenge, you work harder. You figure it out without taking shortcuts.” In elementary school, Sylvia was already demonstrating the heady mix of ambition, naiveté, and passion for learning that has carried her headfirst through a string of professional successes, each building upon and evolving from the last.
Today, Sylvia is a Senior Partner at Hinge, a business devoted to branding and marketing a wide range of professional services firms, from accounting, to engineering, to architectural, to management consulting. Launched in 2002, the company has evolved drastically since its acquisition in 2010 by Sylvia and her partners. Initially founded as a local design firm, it is now a national force in branding and marketing, well known for thought leadership in the field. In a few short years, the company has blossomed from four employees, to over 20 and growing, and all of that growth is self-funded. “How do we capture the benefit and the value that a professional services firm brings to the table?” Sylvia poses. “You really have to get to the core—what I call the DNA of a firm. We have a series of questions and exercises that we pose to each firm, and the results are always different and thus lead to true differentiators.”
For Sylvia, never content to rest on her laurels or get too comfortable, the appeal of Hinge lies in taking on the challenge of each new and different client, determining strategies for that specific challenge, and moving on when the work is done. This pattern of taking on, learning, succeeding, and finding something new has been a constant theme through her life. As far back as she can remember, Sylvia’s ultimate professional goal was to be “the boss”. Even as a child, she was adamant about her desire to lead, and to pursue challenges rather than shirk from them. This attitude was encouraged by her parents, and perhaps best encapsulated by their decision to leave Puerto Rico simply because they felt Orlando held more possibility for their two children.
Both parents placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of education. Sylvia’s father was a university professor and taught her early on a love for antiquities and history. His career was cut short when the military called; as a Korean War veteran on disability pay, he spent much of his time writing. Sylvia’s mother was a different kind of driving force, having regretted not being given the opportunity to continue her own schooling beyond the eighth grade and therefore ensuring that her own children got a college education.
After high school, Sylvia embarked on her first solo adventure, leaving Florida for Washington, DC. She enrolled in Trinity College in D.C. with a journalism career in mind, partially influenced by her father’s passion for the written word. As the oldest liberal arts women’s college in the country, Trinity epitomized Sylvia’s latent persona of self-reliance, exceptional commitment to family and life-long friends, love for education, and tenacious work ethic, playing a critical role in her evolution toward achieving her potential.
Though Trinity had no journalism program, Sylvia was not deterred. With the help of her academic advisor, she built her own makeshift program that was supplemented with classes from American University and George Washington University through the college consortium. She majored in visual arts and minored in journalism, and along the way, she tackled the financial toll of tuition payments with her signature can-do attitude. “I had a lot of financial aid and student loans, learning early to rely on a variety of work study and part-time jobs to contribute to the college expenses because my parents didn’t have a ton of money,” Sylvia recalls. True to her nature, she identified possible limitations and tackled them head-on, never stopping to wallow in doubt or self-defeat.
After Trinity, it was only a year before she chose to return to school. While working full-time at BNA, a publishing company, she entered George Washington University to pursue a master’s in fine arts with a concentration in visual arts. The program offered a four-year terminal degree, equivalent to a Ph.D., and during those years, Sylvia maintained an exhausting schedule, spending her days at the office and four nights a week in class. In 1994, she finished that degree and hardly stopped for a breath before taking on part-time work as adjunct professor. Still working full-time at BNA, she was now responsible for fine arts courses on web design and typography back at George Washington and Trinity—work she enjoyed immensely.
A few years passed, and Sylvia found herself growing restless again. Her work kept her busy, but her eyes were fixed on the horizon. In the late 1990s, the internet was creating rumblings in the publishing industry, and BNA needed some of their designers to investigate the phenomenon to learn how it worked and how to best utilize it. “I raised my hand and volunteered to figure it out,” she remembers. “That was my first exposure to the internet, and I realized it was going to be pretty big. I saw it as a big opportunity.”
It was 1998 when she decided to leave BNA and try working for a consulting firm, and shortly after that, she moved on to a dotcom startup, relishing the opportunity to be a part of something truly new and cutting edge. “That was the start of a new chapter in my career,” she explains. “It was my first exercise in building something from the ground up, coming in to hire people, get something running, and deploy it. That feeling you get when you’re trying to figure out a puzzle—I found that intoxicating. It was really the moment when all of the sudden, the writing, the visuals, the figuring-it-out, and the ‘going somewhere you’ve never been before’ all came together.” For the first time, Sylvia felt a sense of free reign for her ambitions, and she loved it.
Sylvia was happy bouncing around between fresh new dotcoms, but when the bubble burst, it was time to pursue her success elsewhere. She took a job as the Director of Marketing Communications at Rubbermaid Commercial, where she worked for three and a half years. The job was stable, and a good resume-builder, but not enough to keep her challenged and engaged in the long term. “It was a different scenario,” she recalls. “It was a Fortune 500 company with different kinds of issues. To me, it wasn’t as fun, and wasn’t quite as transformative.” To keep herself challenged and growing, she earned her MBA from the University of Maryland University College during her limited free time, all the while entering new and unknown territory—becoming a step-parent.
MBA in hand, Sylvia then decided to return to the job market. She found work with an engineering firm and again fell into her pattern of coming into a new environment, building a team, devising a strategy, and implementing it, before leaving to search for something new. It was a push from her sister-in-law that finally opened Sylvia’s eyes to the sensible next step—to go into business for herself. With that, she set about finding a way to constantly take on new challenges without constantly finding new jobs, and joining Hinge offered the ideal solution.
Although the concepts of the business were familiar, Sylvia wasn’t averse to exploring a new role. “When I first approached Hinge in Reston, Virginia, one of the partners asked if I could do business development,” Sylvia remembers. “I had never tried before, but I was willing to learn.” She took on the work with gusto and hasn’t looked back.
Since 2008, Sylvia and her three partners have established divisions of labor that suit each person’s strengths. “One partner is the creative director, so he oversees the creative quality of what we’re doing,” she explains. “He’s a copywriter by training, so he excels at that. Our managing partner, on the other hand, is all about strategy and the future. He’s a researcher and psychologist by trade, so that fits perfectly with what we do. One of our other partners is very operational, so she looks after the recruiting and operations. Then, with my background in marketing, it’s all very complimentary.”
While her partners balance her out well in the workplace, Sylvia’s husband, Norman, provides the crucial balance in her personal life that enables her to be such an effective business leader. “He’s a very calming person,” she says of Norman, a sales executive. “I’m always running a thousand miles a minute, and he’s very supportive.” Their marriage, however, has carried its own set of challenges, and has required its own share of naïve confidence. When she met Norman in 1999 at one of the startup companies she was working with, he already had two children. When they married in 2002, the kids were 11 and 8 years old respectively. “At the time, I simply thought, how hard can it be—I’ll figure it out!” she remembers with a smile. Although she certainly wasn’t prepared for the struggles that accompany parenthood, and although learning how to raise children was the hardest thing she’s ever done, she took on her role with a bright-eyed enthusiasm that helped steer the family through the years.
Like Sylvia herself, Hinge prides itself on reaching further and going beyond. Along with excelling in their field, the four partners have published two books. The first, Spiraling Up, was published in 2008, and explored success among professional services firms. “The entire team was involved in that project,” Sylvia affirms. “One of us wrote it, another edited, and I did the marketing. We interviewed 300 professional services executives, and the final partner did the interviews.” The second book, Online Marketing for Professional Services, was published in the summer of 2012. Again, the Hinge team performed qualitative and quantitative research to discern what ideas and strategies were getting results, and then compiled and published the information, setting them apart as true experts in the industry.
Along with their publications, Hinge has done its share of pro bono work. “We offer in-kind services to groups that have some connection to education,” says Sylvia, hearkening back to the values her parents instilled when she was young. “We do some work for local schools, and we built a website for the Yale Climate School. I think it’s important to find what makes sense in light of your brand, and for us, that’s education. It’s nice to donate money to a cause, but to me, it’s far more meaningful when you support something that’s connected to what you do. To us, learning is the key to taking on, understanding, and solving any problem that arises, and it’s important to us to be a part of that.”
To young people entering the working world today, Sylvia encourages ambition, but also balance. “Don’t be afraid of working hard,” she emphasizes. “I think young people now have the benefit of using technology to help them both work hard and play hard. I really do think that, in life, you can do both.” She also warns against an entitlement mentality. “Don’t feel like you can walk in at the level your parents are,” she continues. “You have to pay your dues! Contribute. Be engaged. It will take you further.”
Beyond that, Sylvia’s journey demonstrates a willingness to delve deep and fly high, no matter what the task at hand was at any given moment. “The attitude that you can tackle anything that comes your way requires a certain level of naiveté, and I think that’s what success is made of,” she details. “It’s the naiveté of believing you can figure it out, whatever ‘it’ is. When it comes to hard work and learning, you just figure it out. Fear can be natural and healthy, but never let it paralyze you. I don’t know any other way than to just move through things.” Indeed, since age nine, Sylvia has taken the steeper, more challenging route—and loved it. From building a new program of study at Trinity, to working full-time while pursuing a four-year master’s, to rushing headlong into the dot com boom, to taking on the role of step-parent, to taking on the role of executive, being willing to tackle anything gives one the opportunity to triumph in anything.
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