Maria Prado`s Mexican immigrant parents, both Chicago factory workers, were always proud to say their daughter traveled throughout the U.S. and South America as an accountant for the First National Bank of Chicago.
Then, 2 1/2 years ago, Prado came home and told them she was leaving the comfortable corporate world to start her own accounting firm.
”My father looked scared,” Prado said. He asked: ”You mean you have to go out and get your own business or you don`t get paid?”
Today Prado, a founder of the city`s only Hispanic female accounting firm, Crozier, Prado and Renteria, said she is still not making as much as she was when she worked for someone else. But the firm has 11 employees and is projecting $500,000 in gross revenues this year, she said.
”I also feel a new respect from my father, signifying a different kind of relationship than normally exists in the Mexican family,” Prado said.
”Usually, it is always the children who direct respect to the parents, but now it is mutual.”
Prado was one of four Hispanic female entrepreneurs who discussed the role ethnicity and gender have played in developing their businesses. Their remarks came Wednesday night at a forum sponsored by the Chicago Chapter of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs and LaSalle National Bank.
In 1987, the last year for which statistics are available, the nation had 1.2 million minority-owned firms, 388,309 owned by minority women, according to a U.S. Census Bureau minority business enterprise report. Hispanic females owned 29 percent-115,025-of all firms owned by minority women, earning total annual gross receipts of $4.3 billion, the report said.
Rita deMedici, who this month is launching her own public relations and marketing firm, Diversity Markets Inc., asked the panelists if being Hispanic and a woman provided them with a competitive edge or posed more of a barrier. Ethnicity and gender cut both ways, said Margarita Perez, a Puerto Rican who is founder, president and portfolio manager of Fortaleza Asset Management, a 2-year-old Wheaton-based firm.
The new focus on having minorities and women manage pension funds, particularly public pension funds, was precisely the reason, said Perez, that she started her own firm after 12 years of working for a large company. Now Perez mainly handles corporate pension funds and has $32 million under management with Borg-Warner Corp., one of her largest accounts.
”The disadvantage,” Perez said, ”is that this whole industry has been a male-dominated industry over the years.
”I feel that I have to hang all my diplomas on the walls in my office so that people know I`m for real,” said Perez, who said men rarely are compelled to justify their credentials.
”I started my firm with 51 percent ownership, with my partner, a man, owning 49 percent,” she said. ”But I quickly bought him out because I found that his part ownership of the firm raised too many questions about whether I- a woman-could handle the business.”
Going into business with a man-her non-minority husband-also posed problems for Rita Alborez-Pozniak, the Mexican-American owner of Golden Express Inc., Chicago-based trucking company with $3 million in annual gross revenues.
Even though Alborez-Pozniak owns 55 percent of the firm, and as president calls all the shots, she said the Chicago Regional Purchasing Council, which certifies minority vendors, has been reluctant to certify her firm as minority.
She is certified as a minority vendor by the state, she said.
Her husband`s prior experience in the transportation field led the Regional Purchasing Council to conclude he actually was running their company, a finding that, she said, did not take into account her extensive management experience with McDonald`s Corp.
Minority status also was no asset when she went looking for a $1 million loan four years ago to buy her firm.
Even with help from her employer of 13 years, Oak Brook-based McDonald`s, including business references from the chief financial officer and corporate calls on her behalf, the couple spent months making the rounds of 16 banks before getting a loan from Northern Trust.
”It was clear that some of (the banks) really intended to talk to us, and others were just going through the motions,” she said.
”As a minority who luckily had a corporate background, it made it very difficult for them to push me around. I was feeling very badly about the minorities who came before me and who would come after me. (The banks) say that they want to do business with minorities, but you`ll sell your little heart out and you`ll find that they really have no interest in doing it.”
Leticia Herrera, one of very few Hispanic females in the commercial industrial janitorial service business in Chicago, didn`t even try to get a bank loan 4 1/2 years ago when she started Extra Clean Inc.
The firm now has 12 employees and clients that include AT&T and United Airlines.
”I literally started with $1,000 in personal savings, a mop and a bucket,” she said.
”I hated to clean. I figured other people did, too, and could use my services.”
