Welcome to
CENTRIC.
We built Centric to solve a growing problem.
There's a widening gap between the relationships clients expect and how people actually connect in today's digital world.
Our brains are wired for human connection. But most technology wasn't built with that wiring in mind.
Centric captures what your best connectors know and builds it into the way your whole team works so relationships stay strong and revenue stays put.
We operationalize your Relational IP®.
We transform the methods, knowledge, and trust your best people have built into proven, accountable systems, accessible to every team member, every day.
We measure and track relationship health.
You decide what great looks like. We track it using our proprietary Relational IP Index (RIPI). See warning signs, step in early, protect revenue, and grow with confidence.
Your current stack wasn't built for this.
Your tools were built to track work, not interpret relationships. They don't capture the micro-signals and human cues that hold a relationship together.
The Spark
This stuff isn't magic.
It can be captured, taught, and put to work across an entire organization.
I spent years managing client relationships, and a lot of that time studying the people who were unusually good at it.
I don't believe any of them were born with it. What looks like a gift is almost always attention, paid for so long it stops looking like effort. When I watched closely, they were all doing some version of the same thing. None of them could have written it down. None of it had ever been handed to anyone else. Each one was carrying some of their company's most valuable assets around in their own head, and the company had no way to see it, hold it, or build on it.
So the most valuable thing in the business sat unprotected: its relationships.
There's no neutral state. You're either cultivating the relationship, or you're losing it. Centric is how you capture the behaviors that build a relationship, teach them, and put that knowledge to work across a whole company.
Jamila Carrington Smith
Founder & CEO
This is where it started. What we saw turned into a set of beliefs, and those beliefs built Centric.
Meet the Team
Jamila Carrington Smith
Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Twenty years with an insider's view.
Agency and client side roles for companies including P&G, Healthy Choice, Kraft, Pillsbury, Burger King, Verizon Avenue, and the U.S. Navy. Relationships decayed unseen, walked out with the people who held them, broke in the handoff. No system caught any of it.
I conceive, design, and ship.
Three products as Chief Innovation Officer — HIPAA-grade clinical platforms, an EMMY-nominated learning product. From first concept to real users — built by talented people I brought together to make them real.
Centric is the convergence.
The problem I lived, met by the thing I know how to build.
The record
Jamila Carrington Smith spent two decades managing client relationships across some of the most recognized brands in the world — P&G, Healthy Choice, Kraft, Pillsbury, Burger King, Verizon Avenue, and the U.S. Navy — in roles at agencies including Leo Burnett, GlobalHue, Mars United Commerce, UWG, and Burrell Communications. Her work on Campbell's Labels for Education earned a Silver REGGIE; her brand integration on P&G won a Fusion Award.
She saw the same failure from every seat. Relationships that decayed for months before anyone noticed. Star relationship managers who left and took the client with them. Handoffs where the knowledge that held an account together simply didn't travel. None of it was ever captured — there was no framework to hold it — so it evaporated the way relational capital does when nothing is built to retain it.
As Chief Innovation Officer at Matio, she conceived, designed, and shipped three products from the ground up: two HIPAA-compliant clinical platforms — an augmented-reality care app and a VR therapy program for chronic pain and opioid recovery — and a $2M-funded school curriculum with a companion animated series that earned a 2023 EMMY nomination. For each, she recruited the team from her own network — people who knew her and signed on for the hard build.
She holds an A.B. from Princeton and an executive certificate in Data Science and Machine Learning from MIT. Centric is the company she was always going to build.
Advisors
Joanna Jarc Robinson, Ph.D.
Lead Behavioral Science Advisor
Joanna Jarc Robinson, Ph.D.
Lead Behavioral Science Advisor
Dr. Joanna Jarc Robinson holds a Ph.D. in Urban Education with a specialization in Counseling from Cleveland State University, and has spent over two decades translating complex psychological concepts into practical frameworks and strategies.
Her multi-faceted background in psychology, human behavior, mental health, and education has inspired the creation of comprehensive curricula, professional development programs, and a wide variety of educational products. In partnership with organizations including Sesame Workshop, LeapFrog, Nick Jr., Learning Horizons, Matio, Smithsonian STEAM, and Pearson Publishing, she has aligned her writing with national educational standards and psychological best practices.
She also brings practical experience as a mental health counselor, art therapist, and instructor of psychology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her ability to transform research-backed behavioral insights into actionable strategies makes her uniquely suited to help Centric enhance client relationship management through personalized communication and behavioral science.
At Centric, Joanna's combination of academic expertise, real-world relationship experience, and skill in creating psychologically grounded content supports the mission to transform client relationships from transactional to irreplaceable.
Matt Nickens
Technical Advisor
Matt Nickens
Technical Advisor
Matt Nickens is a data scientist and machine learning leader with over a decade of experience building predictive systems across entertainment, technology, and retail. He holds a Ph.D. in Econometrics, Applied Statistics, and Quantitative Methods from Claremont Graduate University, and an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University.
His research sits at the intersection of deep learning and customer behavior. Matt co-authored published work on convolutional video networks that extract frame-by-frame features from movie trailers to predict theatrical audience behavior — models capable of profiling films six to eight months before release and outperforming conventional feature-pooling methods. His publications include Convolutional Collaborative Filter Network for Video Based Recommendation Systems and Competitive Analysis System for Theatrical Movie Releases Based on Movie Trailer Deep Video Representation.
Over his career, Matt has led data science at some of the most data-rich companies in the world. He currently leads customer conversion data science as a Senior Manager at CarMax. He previously managed a data science team at Meta, and spent four years at The Walt Disney Studios — rising from Senior Data Scientist to Manager — developing models for audience discovery and theatrical performance prediction. Earlier roles at Rakuten Rewards and McKesson built his foundation across recommendation systems, customer modeling, and applied statistics.
Toni Midderhoff Miller
GTM & Sales Ops Advisor
Toni Midderhoff Miller
GTM & Sales Ops Advisor
Toni Midderhoff Miller is a senior growth strategist and systems builder who has led brand, acquisition, and operational transformation for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to leading healthcare systems, startups, and national nonprofits.
Her cross-industry work includes driving product and brand expansion for Kraft, accelerating global product launches for BIC, developing partnership strategies with the Chicago Bears, and strengthening digital and operational infrastructure for healthcare and EdTech organizations like NorthShore and Fresh Films.
With an engineering degree from Purdue and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin, she builds the growth engines behind measurable financial outcomes: $58M in launch-year revenue, applicant enrollment doubled in three weeks, CRM response time cut in half, with multicultural and digital engagement lifts across platforms.