Anny's Bread Factory getting ready to scale with the SLEI Program

Growing up in Venezuela in a family of immigrants, I witnessed my grandparents making an effort to stay true to their origins while being grateful to a new country that received them with open arms and gave them the opportunity for education and economic success. I grew up eating arepas while hearing them speak Romanian.

40 years later, I’m eating arepas in another new country that in 8 short years has given me the opportunity to participate in this outstanding program at Stanford and to send my two children to top universities.

I’m honored to be here with you to celebrate our achievements and I’m excited and humbled to be representing the 3% of Latino business owners generating more than $1M in revenue per year in their business.

I discovered the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative when I was sharing my company’s growing pains with a friend. As an alumnus of this program, he told me that if I was serious about scaling the business, that this was the place to be. A year later, here I am, and my friend was right.

The SLEI program has been transformative. It has been 8 weeks of directed reflection and self-evaluation combined with mentorship, new skills, and goals that have stretched me.

Each week we watched the class, read supporting material, and figured out how to implement the new concepts in our business.

I remember milestone one. Writing about the possibility of failing wasn’t easy. In fact, at first my mind was completely blank. I finally realized that I had to start by admitting to myself that the possibility of failure was real in order to write my company’s story. That was difficult, but somehow liberating.

The next week, as we worked on the second milestone, my mind was again blank. I remembered Professor Porras talking about the BHAG. I had worked with my mentor Jorge on giving a number to this dream, and he encouraged me to dream uncomfortably big.

I realized then that my mindset had to change and again remembered Professor Porras’ words, “this program was built to give us the tools to grow our businesses to the point where we impact the economy of this nation.”

Until that moment, I had never considered a dream bigger than myself and my company’s legacy. It was a true milestone moment and I was excited because I realized that I was learning the correct mindset to scale my business. I even understood that my Catholic approach had to make room for a little Buddhist too.

Each week brought more new lessons which I could then implement within the company.

Sometimes the mindset shift came from holding up a mirror to our own behavior. In the broken windows class, one classmate had the courage to share that she had recognized that she was a broken window in her company. It was a lesson in humility, vulnerability, and courage.

Finally, when I turned in the 1 pager and the presentation assignment, I felt like my lessons were over. Little did I know that I had one more major lesson to learn.

The review email arrived. It had so many comments that it even talked about my grammar. My ego was bruised until I understood that I couldn’t let my ego get in the way of my dream.

Achieving that goal is not about winning a race; it’s about achieving a purpose bigger than ourselves. That lesson helped me check my ego and re-focus my attention on the larger objective.

What’s happened to my entrepreneurial vision as a result of this program?

I started the SLEI program wanting to be a significant player in the Florida bread manufacturing market. Thanks to the SLEI program and our wonderful teachers, that dream has grown into defining my own category and space in the market. I will specialize in the top 4 products and scale uncomfortably big. I know I now have the tools to create the organization needed to get there.

I wouldn’t be honest if I took all the credit for this process.

One of the dominos from the chain of excellence of this program is the one-on-one mentorship.

I was matched with Jorge Zavala, who pushed me to dream bigger. He challenged my mindset and celebrated every lesson learned. The motto was always “how can we go further and do this better?” and the sacred was “growing, excellence, and cooperation.”

Jennifer, Elian, and Mark are the personification of everything we learned during these 8 weeks. Excellence isn’t strong enough word for the leadership, skills, and drive that they have. We are forever grateful for you and lucky to be able to call you our friends.

The teaching team was outstanding and thank you Beibei, Neepa and Azjah.

To my newfound family, Cohort 7, thank you for all the support and teachings. Bertha and Alan, I really enjoyed every night we spent working together to complete our assignments.

And to Stanford, thank you for creating this program. It has changed my life personally and professionally. I will be a better businesswoman, and I’ll go forward with new clarity and the confidence to achieve my dreams.

Cohort 7, we are shaping the narrative of U.S. Latinos as significant contributors to the American economy. All of us here have to fight our ground war moving a thousand people forward one step at a time. Soon, all of us will change the statistics.

Thank you.