Growing up in California within a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, my childhood is filled with the sound of salsa music, and my Sunday mornings are filled with the smell of Chilaquiles. My mother would often joke that I am Hispanic by spirit and rightfully so. For what it’s worth, I felt a deep connection to their culture, even though both my parents are white.
My childhood best friend, Jose, was a mentor and a brother to me. His father Alejandro would take us out every Sunday for a walk and his mother would cook breakfast for us. He introduced me to the world of Spanish music and taught me the steps to traditional dances, and his father influenced us with his entrepreneurial spirit.
Eventually, when I started running my small start-up I realized that my progress arch was different from a white-owned business. In fact, most of the business strategies that helped me grow my solo venture to a team of 15 in just one year were all because of my Hispanic neighbors.
If you are also a small business owner struggling with growth and profitability, here is everything that contributed to the growth of my business.
Business Strategies Inspired By Hispanic Family Traditions
Family Grows Together
Within the business world, your team is everything. A powerful team can help you go global, become profitable, and give a tough time to your competitors. Similarly, a divide in the team can affect the business portability and overall business growth.
The trait of becoming a team player comes from strong family bonding. While growing up, I realized that Hispanic families had an unspoken rule of growing together. Families would facilitate each other, gather capital, and lend money to anyone starting a business in the family.
Eventually, when I stepped into business, I prioritized my team over everything. For the first six months, my goal was not profit but instead, I wanted to build a winning team. Empowering my team, celebrating their wins, and helping them eventually contributed to the profitability of my business.
Networking Is Everything
In the world of business, networking is everything. Networking is often limited to certain groups. However, for marginalized communities, networking styles are quite different. While these communities may not have the same financial resources, they offer valuable connections.
When working on my business, one of my neighbors helped me refine my sales pitch, while others helped me with referrals. Even a local Hispanic hotel offered me a small room to start my business at very affordable rates.
To honor their contribution as a society, the Hispanic population became my dominant audience. I started marketing my product in Spanish as well as English. I am not the only one using Spanish to facilitate and appeal to the Hispanic community. Even non-Latino-owned businesses, like Spectrum, are also assisting Hispanic audiences via número de teléfono de Spectrum.
Power of Community
For Hispanics, community comes first. This is the reason: Hispanic business owners get more sales through referrals. In my Latino community, new businesses were often supported and encouraged.
The community would gather to give a fighting chance to every new business, bringing their kids for shopping and referring them to others in neighbors. The power of community in Hispanics is deeply rooted in their family values and their shared history of being a marginalized community.
Their community power flows both ways. Business owners cater to Hispanics as their dominant target audience, offering products to suit their needs and audience and consequently endorse these businesses to gain more eyeballs.
Grow Local for Global Impact
The Latino community values family, community, and local businesses. Businesses would go above and beyond to accommodate their community. This policy is deeply rooted in their family system. Hispanic families always accommodate their family members, come together as a community, and support each other.
Focusing on small communities at first also offers these businesses an opportunity to learn from mistakes without risking it all. Since smaller communities are forgiving, they offer opinions and get happy when feedbacks are incorporated.
Eventually, when these locally loved businesses choose to go global, they do not struggle or commit fatal mistakes. While running my business, my feedback cycle was continued, all thanks to our local community and this helped me refine my product faster.
No Business Is Small
In Latino families, education and career paths are often valued. While growing up, my family would drag me for my business degree and hype up my brother for his medical degree, Jose’s parents would tell him to embrace every opportunity he gets. Consequently, he would drag me to every business conventional, flee market, expo, or business course.
This constant struggle helped me and Jose’ become prone to taking risks. We would embrace small business opportunities, explore side gigs, and pick part-time jobs just for experience. Most of these gigs were not even paying us enough but the exposure helped us get better at our jobs.
Eventually, all this experience came in handy when I stepped into the business world. Moreover, even as a business owner, I would accept my mistakes faster and was never afraid to get my hands dirty. During the first three months, I worked as a salesperson, operation executive, and even as a merchant handler, which eventually helped me with team management.
How to Support Small Business?
- Buy from small business
- Offer them feedback
- Appreciate the change in their product
- Post about their business online
- Offer online review on their site