Work Hard, Play Hard
What drives James Ordonez of Tayrona Capital Financial Group to do what he does? Extreme sports and a dream to transform the world into a more liveable place for everyone.
JAMES ORDONEZ, CEO of Tayrona Capital Financial Group, believes in the importance of building luxury developments to strengthen a country’s economy. The astute businessman, who was honoured with a knighthood in Spain in 2016, substantiates this philosophy with simple maths. His reasoning: running these hotels creates more jobs, while higher taxes contribute to the economy, thus allowing for a country to prosper.
The global investment conglomerate also offers a wide spectrum of investment programmes and services. This includes Wealth Strategies, allowing access to investments into hospitality projects with strong risk-reward characteristics; the Privilege Hotel Ownership, a hotel investment programme that connects investors with experienced hoteliers and management teams with recognised track records of profitability, and the Privilege Luxury Club, a programme providing captivating experiences with luxurious benefits such as preferential hotel room rates, VIP privileges, room upgrades and special benefits for the use of facilities at hotels and resorts around the world with a minimum five-star rating. These properties include Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts, Mandarin Oriental and Six Senses.
Everybody thinks about the future when the word ‘investment’ is mentioned and this is a mindset I’d like to change. We dedicate so much time planning the future and for retirement that we forget about the present. Hence, most of the investment products we’ve created are designed to allow you to enjoy the present more than the future.
The biggest risk I’ve taken outside work is scuba diving freely with sharks off Gorgona Island, Colombia. There were some 500 sharks around me.
A critical learning point for me during my time with Tayrona Capital was when we didn’t prioritise getting acknowledgement for the movies we invested in. We were focused more on delivering the product (in this case, the movie) without really putting our name out there. We’re now fixing all of this through more marketing efforts, PR and, of course, the media.
The people I spend most of my time with are pilots and flight attendants, aside from my staff in the Singapore office. I travel too much for work.
We want to grow bigger as a country partner in the next few years. What this means is that we wish to become the main financing and hospitality partner for a lot more countries where tourism hasn’t reached its peak, such as Colombia, Malta and San Marino.