After YLAI
December 2012 I went to visit my parents in Ecuador. On my way back my bag carried 4 bottles of avocado oil and my entrepreneurial spirit was more alive than ever.
Back in Bogota, I thought: I will have a business that imports, distributes and sells avocado oil. I love food, and I am very good at selling products. So let’s do this!!
This is how it all started.
La Viña del Sur, how I decided to name my new venture, would be an importer of Latin American food to Colombia. We grew from avocado oils to chocolate, quinoa, and others.
In our first year we doubled our sales, and in the second year, we tripled our sales. We went from selling in ten stores our first year, to more than one hundred stores in our third year.
Things seemed to be going great. We had not reached our break-even point, but we were not expecting to do so until the end of the third year. We were focused on growing sales and we were doing it…
I always say WE when I refer to La Viña; I guess I am referring to the team, two people in the first year, three people in our third year and five in our fourth year. But the truth is, La Viña del Sur is mainly me…
I was always in charge of making any decision and only allowed for accounting to be done by someone else…
I had envisioned La Viña del Sur to be a way to share the amazing variety of food there is in South America. I worked with small companies that had their own brands, but I also wanted to work with small indigenous communities and create a new concept owned and produced completely by them. I had so many plans, and so much to do.
Last year, we went through rough times. Sales were going well, we were growing compared to the year before, and we had run out of product before we had planned. The problem was that I had no more money to import a new batch of avocado oil, nor to hire a new person to help with sales, much less to launch that new campaign I had been thinking about.
Banks do not lend money to small companies in my country, and an imports business is not seen as a very social, or innovative, or generating a big impact- kind of venture, so I didn’t get any of the funding initiatives I applied to.
My very tired self wanted to shut the lights off and leave (apague la luz y vámonos).
If there is something true about the life of every entrepreneur, it is that you are ready to give up, but then usually something happens and gives you the strength to continue.
Just when I was about to quit, I heard about YLAI, and THEN I WON YLAI! I had the amazing opportunity of not only going to meet incredible people that were struggling just like me, but also, it was a chance to take some fresh air, and come back to my company with a new vision.
So I went to Raleigh, North Carolina. I lived with two strong and crazy Mexicans, a sweet Jamaican, a magical unicorn, a Venezuelan socialite, a rice loving Cuban, a Peruvian mother, a big sister from Dominica and a Chilean who likes to think that even arepas are a Chilean invention.
I learned so much from this bunch, and then I learned some more from the other amazing entrepreneurs I met during the YLAI experience.
All of them had one thing in common: each and every one had decided to live a passionate life and believed they could change the world.
YLAI was life-changing for me. I realized that I was missing the passion, the kind of passion that fueled everybody else.
So my time in Raleigh was also spent going to restaurants and food shops, reminding myself WHY I had decided to create a business in the food industry.
I did come back to Colombia with new ideas for La Viña del Sur; I found new strength and had decided to fall back in love with my business. I needed to renovate and refocus.
And then in January 2017 reality hit me: I was doing it wrong.
I had decided not to notice the big financial mess that my company was in. I realized that all the brands that I was managing were growing, but my own company wasn’t. I realized that my need for control had created a team that would not move a finger without my authorization. Not only was I lacking the passion, but I had also allowed myself to get consumed by the little things, not seeing the whole picture and losing sight of the objective.
Plus… no matter how much I worked to fix everything, La Viña del Sur is in the consumer goods business and not in the culinary one.
Two months ago I decided to start with the liquidation of La Viña del Sur.
There is still a lot to do, lots of money to pay back, lots of contracts to close. Many clients to call and lots of people to face.
Some days are filled with hope, and some are hard to keep up. Opening a company is very easy… closing it takes more time.
La Viña del Sur was an amazing school. It allowed me to meet and work with incredible people, and most of all it taught me about perseverance and that passion is a must, but planning is a bigger must. It showed me that some dreams come true: I dreamt of introducing new products into the Colombian market and I did; I dreamt of entering big retail stores and I did. Some others don’t: I dreamt of doing this for a long time…
If I look back, I made at least a hundred mistakes, but if you ask me, I could not have done anything differently. I needed to try it, I needed to be lost, I needed to look for light (if I would not have been looking, I would have never applied for YLAI); and I needed to fail.
I needed to fail to understand that it could happen to me, and that even if it did, I needed to be strong enough to stay on my feet and face the consequences.
So what now? I am not ready to surrender… I will always be an entrepreneur, even if I do not own a company at the moment. I will always have great dreams. I will always be in love with food.
So…I will send my resume to every restaurant in the world that works with products from South America and will offer them my capability to find amazing ingredients and manage small community providers. I will go back to school and really learn to cook. I will spend some more time with my friends. Most of all, I will believe in myself and my capacity to change the world. And then, when I feel I am ready again or when I have a new idea that resonates with me, I will come up with a plan and I will jump again. Knowing that entrepreneurship is just that, jumping into the void just because you feel in your gut that somehow “during the fall you will grow wings and fly”, or at the very least at the end of the fall there will be a pond. You may crash and feel like you’re drowning at some points, but then that same water will help you rise and do it all over again.
