About the Director

About Rubin Cheek

Senior Business Empowerment Coach
CEO of Occentra, Inc and Director of the East-West American Business, Technologies and Lifestyles Research Company.

Rubin Cheek, business communications expert, management consultant, business empowerment coach, public speaker and entrepreneur, leads a team that is developing a system that will allow anyone to actively participate and win in business, even during hard economic times.

The seeds of his current efforts go back to when he was a child. It started with a 5 year old Navy brat discovering an old phone book that was discarded. As he flipped through the book that was dampened by the dew of several mornings, he wondered about the best ways to create unique connections and empowerment between the thousands of names in that Key West, Florida directory. He was determined to find a way.

Although being a scientist at heart (His dream as a child was to become an astronaut before entering the field of law in civilian life.), Rubin became a student of entrepreneurism at that early age. Over the years he has created scores of experimental businesses and business projects in order to test his ideas and to gain experience. Some of these projects were ground breaking successes, while others didn't meet expectations, although they taught him valuable lessons he would never forget-lessons he would share with others.

During his entrepreneurial career he experienced every emotion from the depths of depression to the heights of exhilaration. But he always knew that all of his business experiments would culminate in a system that would allow any individual or group to get access to the right combination of business resources whenever they wanted. He knew that it would take a robust "internet" to do it.

While Rubin was introduced to computers and programming languages back in 1974, it wasn't until 1983 that he began to put the pieces together into a philosophy about the major ways that computers could impact business in the long term. The only reason it happened was because he stumbled upon John Naisbitt's Megatrends, hot off the press, back in 1982. This was 10 years before the development of the World Wide Web (1992). This was 2 years before the formal use of domain names became active (1984). This was 1 year before all ARPANET connected networks that used the TCP/IP protocol became collectively known as the Internet (1983).

America was soon to experience one of the most prosperous eras in its economic history. Many of the best lessons to be learned by participants of the American Free Enterprise system were learned during this period that was to follow.

Discovering the newly published book Megatrends was an epiphany for the young seeker. This was particularly true concerning the chapter on the change from hierarchical to networking structure in business. He knew that John Naisbitt was on the mark. What added to his confidence about this was all of the "buzz" in 1983 about the growth of the use of LANs (Local Area Networks) and WANs (Wide Area Networks) in business. Rubin then began learning about the technology that was being developed.

By 1988 he was promoting his ideas about how we were moving to a world where we would be interacting with each other with desktop computers. He began designing business models that entrepreneurs and small-to-medium businesses could use to take advantage of these future developments. This was 4 1/2 years before he formally entered the IT (Information Technology) field.

In 1992 a co-worker at a Boston-based INC 500 contract software and solutions company introduced his fellow staff members to the expanded use of the emerging World Wide Web (1992). Of course the Internet (Formerly ARPANET-1969 ) had been around for several years. But, because of the World Wide Web, the Internet was beginning to develop "critical mass" in the mainstream market. (In other words, the use of services such as email by the mainstream market had become so big and ubiquitous that no one could stop it).

Eventually, he and a partner formed a corporation whose purpose was to identify opportunities to apply the concepts developing in the emerging "Virtual Corporation" arena. After business trips from Atlanta to Silicon Valley (California), New York, Texas and other national hubs, he became convinced that the virtual organization, in all of its many forms and combinations (Including outsourcing and collaborative networks), was a general structure that was here to stay.

After several years Rubin was able to master the knowledge and skills that would enable him to create a model for the infrastructure that would later become the Occentra system.

Their business ended up becoming a think tank/consultancy that identified the sources of the best cutting edge business thinking, trends and resources. During this time, Rubin also developed a high level of efficiency in identifying and accessing business resources.

The Birth of Occentra and East-West

During this particular time, he continued to study business structure. He also reconnected with his technical roots. In January 2004 Occentra, Incorporated was formed and went into the research and development phase. The purpose of Occentra was to design a business model for what is now being developed as the OBEN (Occentra Business Empowerment Network) Master Business Accelerator system.

"I wanted to develop a system with academic roots and a strong, 'real world' foundation".

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