From an entrepreneurial-spirited 6-year-old saving his weekly allowance to buy baseball cards in bulk to sell them individually to his buddies, to a preteen bitten by the wanderlust bug and daydreaming of exciting adventures in foreign lands far from the 480-acre family farm his paternal grandfather purchased, little did the young Ricardo know he would one day have an ardent desire to make the journey back to the family farm from his world travels — to buy it from his mother, to run it, and to try to fill the super-hero-sized patriarchal shoes once worn by his innovative Mexican father and his inspiring Spanish grandfather.
It’s not that the Texas-born Ricky didn’t often return to the farm to visit his mother and his two siblings (a third sibling died when she was just 8). In fact, he’d head back to the farm while on break from his high school studies at a military academy in Missouri and over the weekends while attending college pursuing a degree in International Studies at a university in Monterrey.
After grieving the death of one of his beloved sisters, and feeling the profound loss in his life when his father died when Ricky was only 13, it seemed impossible at the time to imagine even attempting to replicate his dad’s strong, sturdy, and soulful shoes — well-worn with experience and passion and love for the farm and the family — let alone trying to fill those shoes when he was still just a young boy.
After all, it was Ricky’s dad who conceptualized, shared, and launched the ideas with Ricky’s grandfather to expand from sugar cane sales to citrus fruit sales, to start a packaging and shipping company, to build a facility that made, packaged, and shipped fresh orange juice and delicious fresh fruit salads throughout the USA and Canada, and to transform the cattle farm into a citrus fruit farm – which eventually led to the purchase of two more farms nearby. So, while his mom oversaw the family farm, Ricky attended school and planned for an adventurous and exciting career in international relations.
To bring the goal to work internationally to fruition, Ricky secured an internship at the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey during his last semester in college. The Consulate in Monterrey is one of the largest and busiest consulates in the world. Ricky excelled and shined during his internship and, as a result, was offered a full-time job as an International Trade Specialist with the U.S. Commercial Service in Monterrey, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. In this role, Ricky utilized his multi-lingual skills and international business acumen to assist, guide, and help American business owners and reps looking to sell their products in Mexico. The American business owners would contact the U.S. State Department and be transferred to Ricky, who would listen to their needs and business goals, and then do extensive research on the Mexican companies that would be a great fit for the American products. He’d contact all the appropriate Mexican-run businesses throughout Nuevo Leon, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and most of Coahuila. Although Ricky neither represented the Mexican-run businesses nor the Americans coming to do business in Mexico, he would often serve as the liaison between the two and be requested to join in on the initial meetings.
After working five-and-a-half years in this role in Monterrey, he was assigned to the General Consulate in Ecuador. On his third day at his new assignment, however, Ricky witnessed a traumatic and disturbing event that he details in an upcoming book he is writing; after analyzing the risks in a role at this international location, Ricky realized they could not be mitigated enough to make him want to stay. He wanted to resign from his position; instead, the Department transferred him to Brazil to give him the time to process what he had witnessed. Although the U.S. Department of Commerce didn’t want to lose Ricky as he was an incredible asset and addition to the Department, Ricky resigned.
It was during his short time in Brazil that he met the COO of an insurance company who was so impressed with Ricky’s background, studies, and disposition, that he wanted to hire him immediately. Since Ricky felt that he didn’t know enough about the insurance industry to accept the unexpected job offer, and because he just wanted to return to the family’s farm after his experience in Ecuador, Ricky left Brazil and didn’t think twice about the job offer – until the COO called him a few months later. The COO asked Ricky to simply consider meeting with a friend of his – the owner of the largest insurance company in all of Mexico and the only true 100%-Mexican-owned insurance company. Ricky agreed. It was during that meeting that Ricky discovered that the owner of the company knew and greatly respected Ricky’s dad from their business dealings in the cattle industry. Because Ricky knew it had to be more than chance that led him to meet this gentleman who knew his father so well, he accepted a position with the company.
Ricky was hired to launch and direct a boutique financial services firm catering to clients in a high-end market. He initiated, developed, and secured business with and sold insurance policies to the elite of the elite — from the owner of the largest personal collection of luxurious automobiles in the world who houses them at one of his private mansions, to the owner of numerous thoroughbred horses highly sought after for breeding. In addition to developing a portfolio of clients with special insurance needs, Ricky launched another unique and specialty area for the company — a Special Risks Division.
After the unthinkable happened to his business partner in this high-risk division, however, (another unnerving and heart-wrenching story detailed in Ricky’s upcoming book), Ricky resigned from his position with the company and returned to McAllen, Texas to process what had just happened to his business partner and to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with his family. It was during this time that the American International Group (AIG) in Houston contacted Ricky and offered him a position in their Municipalities and Academic Institutions Division. Ricky accepted the position. This new opportunity led to a chance meeting with a brilliant M.I.T. graduate/Professor of Engineering from Mexico City who was invited to teach some classes at a university in Austin; the professor was concerned that he was not covered on the university’s insurance plan. Ricky knew that although AIG had a Private Client Division, they do not offer health insurance to international visitors temporarily residing in America. Ricky researched possible options for the professor and ended up finding solutions and selling insurance not only to the professor, but also to a handful of internationally—traveling businessmen who also needed coverage.
During his time helping to skyrocket AIG’s services, Ricky’s mom experienced some health issues; after talking with his siblings to confirm they weren’t interested in the family farm, Ricky decided to purchase the farm from his mom while keeping her at the helm and in charge of all facets of it. A few years later in 2017, his mom died suddenly in an auto accident. Now with the loss of his mom – the matriarch of the family and the manager of the family farm, and the realization that there was a dire need in the marketplace for a company that offered specialty products and services for international travelers and “special risk” cases, Ricky resigned from his position at AIG. He launched Purvine-Miller, LLC — his international consulting business — named in honor of his mother’s and his maternal grandmother’s maiden names.
As he has been throughout his whole career, today Ricky is in high demand for the unique health insurance services he provides to Americans living abroad and to foreigners living in the USA; he also offers special risk policies to singers, musicians, bodyguards, and other niche markets seemingly-impossible to cover – until they’ve found Ricky! In addition, when clients secure policies through his risk control company, he provides all of them with risk mitigation consulting services. He is astutely able to assess how changes in society, government, or politics can lead to physical risks to individuals and companies. He offers the knowledge and expertise on how to mitigate such threats and what to do if one should find him/herself in a precarious situation while traveling, residing, or doing business in a foreign country.
When Ricky is not fully immersed in providing the best services and products for a client they have a challenging time securing anywhere else, you’ll find him enjoying his home in Texas with his wife, or on their citrus fruit farm where he’s recently planted 2500 Italian lemon trees to add to the abundant orange and grapefruit groves that his mom tended to and that his dad planted decades earlier.
You might even occasionally catch him daydreaming – reminiscing about the times he and his siblings played beneath the fruit trees, or wondering if he has, at last, filled his dad’s shoes with his own experience and passion and love for the farm and the family.
If you want to talk with Ricky personally, contact him before November 20th or after January 6th — he devotes that time of the year to “unplugging” and celebrating all the holidays and holy days of the season with his family and the community, including: Thanksgiving, Our Lady of Guadalupe Day, Christmas, and New Year’s.
About the Writer. While sporting her favorite PJs with her dog at her side, writer Vicque Fassinger has traveled the world vicariously in search of exceptional nouns – people, places, things, ideas, and feelings that inspire, uplift, and enhance the lives of others. An eternal optimist and faith-filled believer that all things are possible through the power of Prayer (and the written word), Fassinger has helped thousands upon thousands of people bring their brainstormed ideas to fruition. When she’s not ghostwriting through the wee hours of the night for her corporate, academic, and individual clients, you’ll find her committing random acts of kindness, riding her Quarter Horse through the wilderness, SCUBA diving deep below the surface of the sea, whirling a 165 gram Frisbee across an open field, or napping beneath a tree with her dog. A stalwart advocate of the Oxford comma, the compound sentence, and never splitting infinitives, Fassinger has taught high school and college Language Arts courses, held workshops in writing, and never uses abbreviations when texting.
