SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA–In Santa Ana, one Latino entrepreneur founded a newsletter for people and businesses all over Orange County that still runs today. Ruben Alvarez was the CEO of the Orange County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce around the same time that he started his newsletter “Stay Connected OC” in early 2000.
“I started on a shoestring, I didn’t have money. I had to hustle, I had to figure out the system, so that goes to my ingenuity more than anything else.” Alvarez said. E-publisher Alvarez started “Stay Connected OC” from a base of 500 to 700 people when email was first becoming a thing. Now, 9.2 million emails later, Alvarez has 20,000 readers.
For Alvarez, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was where he brushed elbows with the U.S. Small Business Association, the Small Business Development Center of Santa Ana, and dozens of other regional organizations. There, he led programs that were, in his words, ahead of their time. But, he was also disheartened by the bureaucracy that he saw as getting in the way of real progress for small businesses.
“But as far as getting loans, they’re harder and harder to come by because basically, if you’re already living on a shoestring, the bank only lends you money if you already have money.” Alvarez said.
In 2020, there was an increase in entrepreneurship overall, according to the Kauffman organization which studies indicators of entrepreneurship in the U.S.
A Kauffman study from 2016 also found that the share of business owners who are White decreased 16.4% between 1996 and 2015, but still remained over 60% of all small business owners.
Dr. Amy Schmitz Weiss, a journalism professor at San Diego State who also teaches a course on “Media Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship,” discussed the parameters of entrepreneurship. Over the last 20 years, she said, it has trended upwards, slowly but steadily.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report in 2021 on the lack of access for minority businesses, noting that entrepreneurship can be a catalyst for economic mobility, and citing that “minority-owned businesses have required significantly more money out of the owners’ pockets than white-owned businesses.”-
“Certainly I think there has been mechanisms in place over the years that have become more, I guess, comprehensive in terms of providing resources,” Schmitz Weiss said in a Zoom interview. “For instance, in the past couple of years there’s been a lot more resources provided for BIPOC communities in terms of getting their businesses up and running.”
In San Diego and the Imperial Valley area, places like the Small Business Development Center advertise plenty of resources and people available for small busness owners. Pam Covarrubias (with a big RRR), who you might have heard on her well-recognized podcast, Café Con Pam, juggles that with business consulting and coaching, being a speaker, advising at the SBDC, and more.
“If we were to look at a map or if all the pieces were a puzzle, there’s a lot of missing pieces, that prevent people from getting from point A: I want to start a business, to: alright let’s raise some funds and some money.” Covarrubias said. “One of them is safety, one of them is trauma, one of them is education… it’s very layered.”
Covarrubias said she thinks that every small business owner should go through the
SBDC. But, Pam Covarrubias and the resource group Black Entrepreneurs Leaders and Learners, or BELL, exemplify how these entrepreneurial resources being made by and for a certain community make a big difference.
“You have to come in the door already at this level a lot of times, it seems, versus us, we accept you and want to grow you,” Brian Ware, the Vice President and Co-Founder of BELL, said about the SBDC.
At BELL, entrepreneurs can find what they need to start completely from scratch. “We’re really out here to help, but we aren’t overnight.” Harps said. “We’re here for you, if there’s questions that you have, we’ll seek those answers out for you.”
Jayton Harps and Brian Ware were both entrepreneurs juggling multiple full-time ventures in addition to founding BELL in the midst of the pandemic. Giving back is on of their priorities, through educating youth in STEM with their entrepreneurial ventures and through educating modern entrepreneurs with their nonprofit.
“We just want to make sure that people in our community understand that and, don’t get left behind, because that’s what happens really,” Ware said. “I think it’s, it’s great that we’re trying to change the status quo of what success means and looks like as well.”
Hamlett is the Director of Design for BELL in addition to her own business and her 9 to 5 in corporate America. She started her own marketing business in the beginning of the shutdowns, right after moving to San Diego from the East coast and finding BELL.
Hamlett said that BELL was a huge influence for her when she was first transitioning her business from a concept to a company. For her, the difference between a resource like the SBDC and BELL is representation, and a community to exchange knowledge with. “So what’s best to communicate to people of color, if you have somebody else that looks
like you, who’s dealing with the same type of struggles that you’re dealing with, on a day to day when it comes to having your business?” Hamlett said.
BELL offers a wide network of other Black and minority entrepreneurs, and “tribal knowledge,” or community knowledge.
“That’s a word we use in our meetings in the organization to understand that a lot of us were first in our families to be in this position, especially as minorities,” Brian Ware said. Hamlett, Harps and Ware, Covarrubias, and Alvarez are all the entrepreneurial pioneers in their families. Hamlett talked about how many people don’t receive generational wealth, including herself.
“We had to figure it out and do it on our own. That’s a struggle, but it’s also a strength,” she said. “I’m proud that I will have a legacy for my kids.”
