Ruth is an avid hiker who has traversed the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, climbed Mont Blanc and traced the Pilgrim’s Trail in Spain. As a consultant who finds a way to achieve almost any goal, she helps ROI’s clients reach places they never thought possible.
Ruth Pavilonis
As a young engineer at Procter & Gamble, Ruth Pavilonis earned a reputation as an ace trouble-shooter who could transform troubled assembly lines into models of efficiency. Now an experienced communications professional, she is similarly successful – deconstructing challenges and distilling confusion into clarity.
“I like taking something that is complicated or appears insurmountable, and presenting it in way that is understandable,” Ruth said. “I’m very good at translating technical gobbledygook into clear, compelling language that helps people make an emotional connection and do their jobs better.”
Ruth, who joined the ROI Communication team in 2010, began her career as a manufacturing manager at Procter & Gamble, where she was put in charge of 40 people, a $10 million budget and told to fix a trouble-plagued assembly line manufacturing Scope mouthwash. For six months, she came home exhausted and smelling like Peppermint. Her bosses – impressed by her success – thought she smelled like roses and gave her a promotion. One key to her effectiveness was her talent as a communicator, an attribute she traces to the influence of her father, the chief engineer for Cleveland’s sprawling Metroparks System.
“You could be a great engineer, but if you couldn’t put two sentences together and make it engaging, he wouldn’t hire you. He also emphasized the importance of setting aside ego, and of relating easily to everyone no matter what their role. So I had an excellent role model,” Ruth said.
Over the ensuing 25 years since that first job on the assembly line, Ruth went on to become a communications specialist in a wide range of organizations and companies, including a hazardous chemical distributor and recycler, a medical software company, a freight company, a health spa and a history museum. For the past 15 years, she has worked primarily in the technology industry for companies that include Sun Microsystems, Lucent Technologies, Affymetrix, PCT Systems and CIDCO.
Unusually diverse in her skill set, Ruth is an adept web developer, project manager, writer and editor with strong technical skills. What sets her apart, though, is empathy.
“I like getting in the trenches to understand where all of our customers are coming from, push up my sleeves, and work with them to achieve their goals,” she said. At one global technology company, her barometer of successful communication was whether or not a message resonated with the company’s lone employee in Kazakhstan. “If he understood what we were doing, we had won.”
An Ohio native, Ruth earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. She is a member of the Society for Technical Communication and the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She also serves on the board of Community for Caring, a non-profit organization that helps children develop good values and decision-making skills.
In 2010, she published Betina’s & Bailey’s Adventures, a participatory children’s book which allows children and other readers to illustrate the story differently each time. The project, designed to spark engagement, strengthen reading skills and foster imagination, has also proven to be an effective tool with autistic children and elderly readers seeking to maintain motor skills and mental acuity.