Three years ago, when I stepped into the startup world, I was in dire need of money. Everyone around me tried to dissuade me by narrating their business failure stories.
Frankly, I was sold.
Now that starting a business globally has become easier than ever, everyone seems to be creating their own startups. With a low entry barrier, starting a business has become easier, but keeping it up and running is more challenging.
Among the millions of startups each year, Forbes claims that only 75% get to reach their first birthday and only 50% get to reach their third year.
In a highly volatile market, where half of new startups are steered out of the market within three years, I was skeptical when my business partner told me that we were going to make it. However, three years later, I am glad things worked out.
What is our secret, you might ask?
Before we delve into the lessons I learned from my co-founder, let me briefly introduce him.
José, my co-founder, is also my neighbor. His parents are both immigrants from Mexico, and they own a small family business. As a child, he lent a helping hand, which allowed him to polish his skills from a very young age.
Here is everything I learned from him that can help you run a business.
Family Over Everything Else
While running a business, I never realized the power of family and community. On the contrary, José was a strong advocate of community-based marketing. As a true family man, he would openly hire kids from his family, collaborate with other related businesses from the Hispanic community, and discuss issues with family and friends.
With open discussion and collaboration, he learned winning strategies and then incorporated these plans within our business.
For instance, he learned from other established brands that customer support is considered vital for business. This led him to recruit a very small team that would offer 24/7 customer support for our startup. Moreover, to accommodate the community, he focused on recruiting bilingual support agents to help with seamless communication.
I later learned that established brands in the U.S. like Spectrum are also using the same strategy. The brand has dedicated Spectrum servicio al cliente en español where Hispanic customers can seek guidance in Spanish.
Small Is Okay
When we started our business, things were dire. With nearly no capital and extremely small office space, I was too shy to say I was a startup owner.
However, José was overjoyed with the whole situation. His family would often visit the office, help with packing things, dispatching orders, and even printing labels. Coming from a humble background, his parents provided unwavering support, even during challenging times.
He was open about the product we were offering and would carry samples when visiting other businesses.
This helped me realize that no business is small, and with effort, any business can become profitable.
Learn Before You Offer
Most Hispanic immigrants come from humble backgrounds, and they work hard throughout their lives. Within the first generation, most families have small businesses where kids participate and help every day. This instills a burning passion in kids to learn new things.
While starting our business, I was reluctant to use digital marketing mainly because I was not familiar with it. Moreover, hiring someone was out of the question because of our limited budget.
That was when José recruited his nephew, who would spend hours looking at social trends, investing a lot of time in marketing. Thanks to his consistent efforts, we were able to gain a lot of organic audience, and overall, the ROI grew sharply.
Feedback Is Never Negative
Hispanic parents are brutally honest when it comes to feedback. They neither hold back their feedback nor try to sugarcoat things. This creates a sense of resilience in kids from a very young age.
When we stepped into business, I was open to visiting different business events, but I was not ready for feedback and criticism. On our very first event, after receiving negative feedback, I nearly gave up.
José, on the other hand, was unfazed. He would actively seek feedback, write it down, and then try to customize the product accordingly. The best thing was that all this negative feedback helped our business grow and improve.
We would invite people from our target audience, make them test our product, and implement the required changes. This strategy became so popular that even after so many years, we have a testing phase for all our products.
Let’s cut the long story short!
For a long time, Hispanics were seen as a marginalized community of immigrants with very little to offer. However, as they have become the biggest minority in the U.S., their quality of life, buying power, and command over business has improved significantly. Thanks to all these things, Latino-owned businesses dominate the U.S. business industry.
Markmalte is an experienced writer for The Celebrity Niche, specializing in celebrity stories. With a keen eye for detail, he brings the latest updates on celebrity relationships, biographies, and news to his readers.
