Lucia de Garcia, International Trade Consultant : Overcoming Hardships to Realize Success

Businesswoman Lucia de Garcia had just left a meeting with President Bush at the White House when she decided to change into blue jeans and white tennis shoes, wrap herself in a red serape and visit the national monuments.

Her meeting with Bush last winter concerned the proposed U.S.-Mexico free-trade agreement, and it was a heady experience--”like walking on clouds,” she remembers.

As she climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, De Garcia eerily recalled that she had dressed the same way during her first visit to the nation’s capital soon after moving to this country from Colombia.

“I thought, ‘These are the steps I came up 27 years ago, and I was wearing red, white and blue,’ ” she said.

A photograph of her Washington trip hangs in her Newport Beach office, the headquarters of her international trade services firm. The memento reminds her of where she came from, and of where she is going.

“I don’t call it a dream anymore,” she says of her business. “I call it a vision.”

Had she not experienced hardship, the 48-year-old entrepreneur says, she might not have known success. In Colombia, she learned to fear political oppression.

Her father was a printer who often produced flyers used by those trying to overthrow the government. “We were always persecuted,” she said. “There were always knocks on the door.”

At 20, De Garcia and her husband moved to California to raise a family “in a free society.”

The couple initially worked at factory jobs. But armed with an architecture degree earned in Colombia, she eventually found a job with an engineering firm. The experience there proved valuable.

De Garcia realized she was the one greeting important clients on behalf of the firm. And also advised the firm on etiquette, telling them not serve coffee in paper cups, or send important guests to a hotel and then ignore them.

“I didn’t learn from books,” she says. “It was common sense.”

As Southern California prepared for the 1984 Summer Olympics, De Garcia worked on a volunteer committee to host Latin American athletes--work that led to the start of her consulting firm, Elan International.

De Garcia made herself a “one-stop” business center for companies needing advice, government permits or other services to set up shop in foreign countries. She struggled to build a client list and cultivated political allies by working on the campaigns of Bush, Gov. Pete Wilson and Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach).

The hard work began paying off this year when Bush invited her to join a small group of Latino business leaders lobbying for ratification of the free-trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

And, after teaming up with her eldest daughter, Alex--who recently earned a master’s degree in international management--De Garcia’s business outgrew her office at home and is now in a high-rise building overlooking Newport Bay.

“At the beginning, I thought I could not make it,” she says. “I think the most beautiful word in my vocabulary is survivor. “