For Costa Rican entrepreneur Hazel Naranjo, learning how to navigate her construction and home accessories business has meant succeeding as a woman in a man’s world. And it was the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs that helped her create the road map.
“AWE was so important,” says Naranjo. “Construction is distinctly a male environment, but with AWE I met so many women entrepreneurs, and I learned that as a business-woman I am not alone.”
Trained in interior design, Naranjo worked in a home-building company for years, designing ornamental fixtures, moldings, mosaic tiles and other home décor pieces. But becoming a mother changed her priorities.
“I had a two-year old daughter, and I couldn’t be present for her working in that company from 7-to-5 every day. I wanted to be with her, and I couldn’t,” says Naranjo.
She left her job of many years, but soon found that the male-dominated home-building industry was not interested in hiring a woman in her forties looking for part-time work. When a fellow craftsman asked her if she’d be interested in opening her own home accessories business, she saw it as an opportunity to follow a dream.
“We started in 2014, from my house with one computer,” remembers Naranjo. “I had my contacts from my old job, and I knew how exporting worked.” A former client in Panama gave her the first order for a container of cement tiles and construction materials – and her business got off the ground.
But she admits that she didn’t know the first thing about running a business, and she struggled to grow over the next five years, and managed to expand slowly from a home-based business to a small rented space with her own machines and 15 employees.
“I have my design degree. But that doesn’t teach you anything about business management,” she admits. She says that most women know how to run a home and manage household finances, which are rudimentary business skills. But running an actual business is harder. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”
When she joined AWE in 2019, she was thrilled. “With AWE, I learned how to design a real business plan, and I realized just how much was missing from our operation,” she says.
For example, she says her business was producing more than 200 types of mosaics, and hundreds of different types of moldings and ceramic pots. AWE helped Naranjo realize that she was losing money because her products were too varied, and she couldn’t focus her product line. AWE taught her a simple concept: less is more.
“AWE helped me to concentrate on our flagship products – which are our tiles. Learning how to better market our flagship products actually helped me make more money in the business,” says Naranjo.
When the COVID pandemic and its economic crisis hit Costa Rica, Naranjo’s AWE experience helped her to cope.
“We saw a 30% drop in sales in 2020. I had no salary, and I still had to pay the families of the artisans who work for me,” Naranjo says, adding that she opted not to take advantage of a Costa Rican government program that advised businesses to close for three months to reduce their losses. She couldn’t do this to her employees, “If you are a family, how will you survive with no salary?”
She says AWE helped her though, because it taught her to see her business not as a static thing, but something that changes and adapts with the times. During COVID, she changed her business model to recuperate lost sales, all the while networking with other AWE classmates to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive.
When First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visited Costa Rica in May, Naranjo got the chance to tell her story, along with other women entrepreneurs from AWE and other U.S. government exchange programs.
“Interacting with the First Lady was so motivational,” says Naranjo. “She listened to our stories, she paid so much attention. I really felt like we were visible, like we were acknowledged.”
Naranjo hopes that her story can motivate other women to follow their own dream to run a business one day. “There is always fear, always uncertainty, always those people who say you can’t do it,” she says. “But you have to follow the dream in your heart, because the heart never lies.”
The Academy for Women Entrepreneurs has been helping women entrepreneurs follow their dream, using the DreamBuilder online learning platform, made possible through a partnership with Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School for Global Management and the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation. Since 2019, AWE has empowered nearly 200 Costa Rican women and more than 16,000 women worldwide with the knowledge, networks and access they need to launch or scale a business.
Original source can be found here.
