Meet GES Delegate: Alfredo Atanacio Cader
Alfredo Atanacio Cader (@aatanacio) is an entrepreneur from El Salvador. His company, Uassist.ME, is dedicated to providing remote bilingual English/Spanish business assistants that are highly skilled in administrative duties, accounting, social media management and maintenance, customer care, and specialized tasks that include graphic design, programming and content writing.
At the age of 23, Alfredo Atanacio traveled often as required by his work. He soon realized that he needed an assistant to help him keep things organized. After some trial and error with virtual assistance companies in Asia, he figured that he could do better by hiring people in El Salvador due to the Salvadorian ties with the U.S.
He associated with Rodolfo Schildknecht and Ernesto Arguello (who is no longer with the company), set up Uassist.ME in San Salvador in 2009, hired the very first three assistants and let the journey of entrepreneurship begin.
Goals
Alfredo is aiming to create an entrepreneurs’ community through strategic ventures and associations, in order to motivate young people to create their businesses way beyond the local limits. Both Alfredo and Rodolfo are now co-founders of Point, the very first coworking offices in El Salvador, and Space, a similar venture. They’re also investing in a co-living venture called Live.
Alfredo has big plans for Uassist.ME. For now, he aims to achieve exponential growth through offering additional, specialized services. Specialization would be a double win: Uassist.ME clients would get a quality performance on their requests and the company would get to hire personnel with specific skills, improving its employee base.
Challenges
In Alfredo’s words, uncertainty is the first challenge all entrepreneurs have to overcome: “It doesn’t matter how big your business is, how far along the entrepreneur path you are, you’ll always want to anticipate what exactly is going to happen after taking a decision”, he states, “however, one has to dare and just trust that everything is going to be alright”.
In reality, obstacles are not as unbreakable as they seem: if your business model is good, it will thrive.
Think Global
Alfredo tends to give this advice to his students and conference listeners: think big, think global.
“Frequently, our worst enemy is ourselves: we limit our outreach, we tell ourselves we’re not enough to achieve a wider reach. Don’t encapsulate your business in a local outreach — even if it starts as local, it has to be scalable and be able to go beyond your country’s limits. Think of thousands and millions of buyers/users, not just hundreds. The very first thing you got to do is to believe in yourself.”
