Helping Businesses Grow & Succeed
There’s no escaping the pandemic’s pounding when you own an events company. Just ask Yesenia Leon. She runs Pandora Events, along with her co-founders Allison Burgos and Amy Alonso (pictured above). For more than 20 years, they have been putting on events large and small in South Florida and the […]
To survive and then grow their business during the pandemic, the leaders of The Gilchrist Law Firm, a veteran-owned, award-winning small business headquartered in Coral Gables, employed an action-oriented approach, a key aspect of the military culture. They drew upon their initial success buildin up a government contracting arm of […]
Florida International University has received a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Community Navigator Pilot Program. The funds are earmarked for improving underserved entrepreneurs’ access to government programs that provide assistance in launching a new venture, growing a business or managing unexpected business interruptions. The Miami-Dade Small […]
We checked in on a few of the small businesses we followed during the pandemic. They have survived, and dare we say it, thrived because of the steps they took and pivots they made during the pandemic, sometimes painful, to get through it. These are just a few of the […]
By Ellen Forman Back in 2015, Richard Laviña (MAcc ‘13) was rising through the ranks at accounting giant PwC. He was offered a job at the firm’s national headquarters in New Jersey, required for all partnership candidates, which meant leaving his Miami home and family. Hitting what he called “a fork in […]
Growing up in Wisconsin, Dustin Pfundheller knew family members that couldn’t afford dental care and thought it could be cool to create a dental practice that people could afford to use. “I would always ask people why isn’t there a clinic like this and why has nobody made one, and […]
Stephannie Cetoute took over the reins of the family business, Amer Plus Janitorial Maintenance, in 2018. While she had a background in economics and finance and from time to time helped out her father who started the business in 1998, going in “full throttle” to run a business for the […]
Starting over in a new country with a business of any kind is difficult. Setting up a manufacturing company in a new country for both exports and domestic sales is even more challenging. Now throw in a global pandemic. Despite it all, Carmine Colarusso, owner of Ultra1Plus, maker and seller […]
Daysi Cepeda never thought about closing her Creativo Dance Studio before 2020, when the pandemic shook her to her core. Since 2002, Cepeda had been teaching young students dance in her studio locations, watching them blossom into happy, self-confident girls and boys. She adjusted the programming over the years and […]
In 2018, sisters Astrid and Katherine Lentino launched Inspiration Design Lab after searching for a business idea that would be an outlet for their creativity. They wanted to sell all-natural products that would bring happiness to people and were good for their health, without doing harm to the environment. “In […]