Fertile Soil for Latino Business in Orange County
In Orange County’s booming and changing economy, Alex Uribe, who is building his own moving company, is hardly unique in being a successful Latino immigrant entrepreneur.
Starting a business has become so prevalent a dream among the county’s immigrant communities that when the Santa Ana-based Hispanic Chamber of Commerce held a forum on business finance recently, 200 budding entrepreneurs showed up, most of them recent immigrants.
“They needed advice on the basics--how to write a business plan, how to approach a bank for financing,” says Henry Mendoza, a Laguna Hills-based accountant who helped organize the forum.
Many immigrants favored Spanish-language brochures because “they are more comfortable reading Spanish, even though they do business in English,” Mendoza says.
But other than that, the newcomers are little different from hundreds of other entrepreneurs starting out today in Orange and all the other counties of Southern California. The surge is being fed by a widespread availability of capital and a spirit of adventure born of opportunity in a strong regional and national economy.
Latino entrepreneurship in Orange County is nothing new, of course. Such successful companies as Infotec Development of Newport Beach, Powerwave Technologies of Irvine and Systems Integrated of Orange have been led for decades by Latino businesspeople.
New companies are being started every day, often by the offspring of immigrants. Aaron Soto and Andres Nava, both still computer science students at UC Irvine, started Deztech, a developer of Internet Web sites, last year.
In Santa Ana, physician David Sanchez and his wife, Marilyn, recently opened the Santa Ana Family Medical Center, with the help of a Small Business Administration loan. “The biggest hurdle was devising the business plan, estimating our overhead, making realistic projections of revenues,” says Marilyn Sanchez.
“We used many spreadsheets, but it was an excellent exercise. Once it was done, we could see clearly how it all would work.”
The clinic, which hopes to offer obstetrics, cardiology, plastic surgery and other specialties along with primary care, has been open eight weeks.
In the old days, the launch pad for Latino-owned business was often the Defense Department, which was legally bound to find minority contractors. Systems Integrated, which provides data control hardware and software systems to electric utility and telecommunications companies, started out selling to the federal government. So did Infotec’s predecessor company, under founder Fernando Niebla. But both have been doing business for many years in the commercial marketplace.
Systems Integrated, led by owner Susan Corrales-Diaz, has done business in China, Malaysia, Mexico and other countries. “The big challenges are issues common to every small business--controlling cash flow and finding the right partners to do business with,” says Corrales-Diaz. “Your personal profile, male or female, Hispanic or other ethnicity, is less of a factor.”
Today there are many helping hands and a lot more capital available. Soto and Nava have benefited from scholarship money donated by BridgeGate, an Irvine management search firm, and by the efforts of the California Alliance for Minority Participation, a National Science Foundation program housed at UC Irvine that helps prepare minority students for the rigors of university courses.
The growth of capital has been remarkable. Only two years ago, 20 businesspeople eager to invest in start-up companies held the first meeting of the Tech Coast Angels in Orange County. Today there are 96 Orange County Tech Coast Angels. and the group, led by Luis Villalobos, attracted 60 potential investors to its initial Los Angeles County meeting recently. The organization has invested $18 million in 11 start-up companies.
Knowledge of language and culture can be an asset to any business, but only if understood as part of the mosaic in a multinational, multicultural time.
Lucia De Garcia, an architect who came from Colombia in 1969, founded her consulting firm Elan International 15 years ago in Newport Beach. Her specialty is providing contacts and advice for companies seeking to do business in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil.
But De Garcia learned her trade working in the Middle East in the 1970s. And today her biggest project is for a South Korean firm building a plant in Mexicali, Mexico. “We are multicultural in Orange County,” says De Garcia, noting that the head of a local firm told her that he needs to learn about the Hindu religion because software workers for his company are from India.
Still, the growth of the Latino population offers special opportunities. Anthony Eros of San Diego formed Hispanic Sports Marketing two years ago to handle broadcasts of U.S. baseball and football teams over Spanish-language radio. Today his company has contracts to market games of the San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets of football and the San Francisco Giants of baseball. He and his staff of 12 are bidding for Spanish rights to the Oakland Athletics and raising additional financing.
Finally, among the offspring of immigrants there is often an undeniable desire to give something back. Soto and Nava are designing Web sites for the California Alliance that helped them as well as for the Mexican American Engineers Society.
Dr. David Chavez grew up as one of 11 children of immigrant parents in Los Angeles, got an education at the medical schools of UCLA and the University of Mexico, and became director of Santa Ana’s Clinica Medica Generale. He sees his new clinic as both a chance to deliver good medical care to Santa Ana’s large immigrant population and to make a good living if the venture succeeds.
It’s a strength, for Orange County and all of this region, that the land of hard work remains the land of opportunity.
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James Flanigan can be reached by e-mail at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
