Helping Businesses Grow & Succeed
As a longtime massage therapist, Aurelia Edwards had to keep her nails short for her trade but when she went to parties she used press-on nails and thought it should be easier to size her nails and buy press-on nails and nail art online. Before the pandemic, in order to […]
Lemay Sanchez remembers talking with his childhood friend, Daniel Galano, about building a business together. They lived in Cuba and weren’t even teenagers yet, but they proclaimed to each other they wanted to build something big and important when the time was right – “something that matters,” Sanchez said. Fast […]
If you haven’t tried a delightful Turkish doner kebap yet, you will soon, if entrepreneur Ongun Kocabas has anything to say about it. Ongun, born and raised in Turkey was always inspired by his father, a successful business owner in the food manufacturing industry. After Ongun studied economics in Turkey, […]
The last time you stayed at a hotel, you may have received a text from the property asking if you had any special requests before checking in. Want a dinner reservation or theatre tickets? They could help with that – no phone call required. Then while you were there, an […]
There’s just something special about the traditional ways of the Latin bakery. Jose Fernandes bought Miami Foods, an industrial bakery and distributor, in 2015. At the time, the company founded in 2004 was selling mainly imported cheese, Latin cream cheese and yogurt, but he quickly converted it over to entirely […]
By Karen-Janine Cohen – Guest Contributor Growing up in Haiti, Macdeur Alabre (FIU MBA ’21, FIU BBA ’19) – known to most as “Mac” – was pretty sure he would be a doctor. After all, law or medicine were family traditions. But then the entrepreneurial bug found him after a […]
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 […]