Marc Fecker is the CEO and co-founder of Robo Retail, a full-service digital agency that supports small- to medium-size retailers and provides strategic consulting for large companies like Hertz, Chase Bank, and recreational vehicle maker BRP, which manufactures Ski-Doo, Evinrude and Cam-Am among other brands.
He credits a lifelong passion for learning, a hunger for technology and innovation, and classes he took at Washtenaw Community College as keys to his success.
“Among the classes I took at WCC were HTML programming and speech classes,” he said.
“I really didn’t like public speaking at all. I was shy and nervous in front of an
audience, and I still get nervous before speaking today. But the foundational tools
that WCC gave me, really made a big difference.”
“When I think back to my WCC experiences, those were the most important classes I took,” he continued. “It really changed my perspective and approach to public speaking.”
Today, he is a paid speaker and has done more than 40 engagements including one at the IBM Watson Conference that he describes as “a TED Talk on steroids.”
Confidence in public speaking was not the only thing that he got from his speech courses at WCC. He also received the confidence to go out and pursue his dreams.
“The instructor in my first speech class was a mentor to me,” he said. “She helped me figure out what was important and helped me make some early life decisions.”
One of those choices was joining CorTech Computers, a start-up computer company in New Jersey.
“It was something that I was really interested in doing and very passionate about, but I was scared to take the plunge,” he said.
After leaving CorTech, Fecker joined Ciber, Inc. as an IT Business Consultant and later joined Ford Motor Company. At Ford, Fecker served as the Vice President of Innovation and created the company’s FordDirect Innovation Lab.
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