Managing Growth a Hispanic Entrepreneur

01 May, 2012

One way we minimized mistakes, other than simply paying attention, was to have someone else check your work. I had my work checked and I checked others’ work as well, and we steadfastly maintained a “Good Catch” approach rather than a “Gotcha” attitude. Teamwork will get you much farther than a big fat ego.

Again, the banks. We believed, naively, that as our revenues grew and our longevity increased, that the banks would be interested in us in the form of a line of credit for just one tenth of our annual revenues. Negative. We instead had to rely on a State program that guaranteed small business loans and they assigned a local bank to handle our account. Of course this bank was in Orange County, a good hour and a half away, and of course the program had tons of punitive reporting requirements, along with the inevitable requirement for monthly P&L’s and more, and of course the woman assigned to our account was unforgiving. Yet times changed and we ultimately developed a relationship with a wonderfully sweet and competent woman at a different and nearby bank, and when it was acquired, we followed her to her new employer. She could get anything done fairly, honestly so we stuck with her and she with us.

So we survived. In the meantime, after 10 years of dating, I fell in love with a man at first sight (after six weeks of correspondence–I won his heart by using a semi-colon correctly) and we sold our houses and moved in together. Since I sold my house at a reasonable profit (after having been upside down on it for years), I was able to pay off the State loan and get rid of the banker from OC and move on.

Coming Thursday: Six Lessons Learned From Managing Growth