“The Mexican national team is a gold mine,” said Vicente Navarro, director of Hispanic Marketing for Soccer.com, referring to the country's soccer team. Navarro, a Spaniard, picked up on the potential of the US Latino soccer market in 1995 while crisscrossing the United States setting up soccer specialty stores for Kelme, a Spanish soccer goods company.
“There was huge potential (in the Hispanic market) but no one was doing it right. No one was talking to Hispanics in a relative way,” said Navarro. Soccer.com, an American owned e-commerce retail site, hired Navarro in 2007 to implement their Hispanic initiative. The effort entailed many changes with the golden egg of their work being their extensive and detailed customer database. The company is now the world’s largest soccer retailer and sells as many Mexico jerseys inside the United States as they do U.S. jerseys.
“Mexico sells. If you want to win, the jackpot is the Mexican fan.” Navarro estimates that in soccer, Mexicans are worth about 80 percent of the soccer business in the United States.
“When Mexican fans watch the games they want to have the same brands they see their players wearing. If someone bought a Mexican jersey, we will make sure that they see the other Mexican products too,” he said. Soccer.com offers five Mexican brands that the e-commerce site did not sell before the Spanish native came onboard.
But to pigeonhole Mexicans as consumers slights the greater economic contributions they bring to the table in the form of small business creation. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Mexico the highest of its 28 member countries in entrepreneurship, above even the United States and Great Britain. Roughly 25 percent of Mexicans are self-employed business owners according to Mexican census data making it no surprise that Mexicans lead all other immigrant groups in small business establishment when they cross their northern border. But only 6 percent of Mexicans continue to build self-employment in the United States after leaving their homeland, prompting some to wonder if more could be done to support these entrepreneurs.
“Small businesses make up 90 percent employers in the United States,” said Daniel Mantilla, business consultant for the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund (HBIF). “They are a force that helps the economy grow.” HBIF, a Florida non-profit organization, opened its doors in 1991 and has since offered free business planning services to the public, regardless of race or ethnicity.
“Our mission is to create jobs in the state of Florida through business development and training Hispanic entrepreneurs,” said Rosalina Stober, vice president of the agency’s central Florida branch. “What makes us unique is that all our staff is bilingual.”
Grants to Hispanic startups are another unique offering of HBIF. The State of Florida provides the grants under their mission to stimulate minority small businesses. Funds from the U.S. Small Business Administration, along with their own fundraising, cover operation costs for the organization.
The Florida non-profit offers all the building blocks to put a new business on solid footing including business plan development, one-on-one business consulting, legal assistance, and bookkeeping and tax workshops. Among the organization’s success stories are clothing manufacturers like Black & Denim Apparel and health food companies like Acai Masters.
With the largest number of Mexican immigrants in the country, California has yet to follow Florida’s lead to maximize the economic contribution of these residents and their fledgling businesses. SCORE, a national non-profit that receives the same federal monies as HBIF, operates multiple locations and offers the same array of services for free or a small fee. They do not offer startup grants nor do they mandate that locations have bilingual staff.
“In order to offer services in Spanish, we need Spanish speaking volunteers. We don’t have any of those,” explained Nancy Tiako, office manager and workshop coordinator for the Los Angeles chapter of SCORE.
