How One Entrepreneur is Building Up Latino Businesses
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Martha de la Torre describes herself as a “reluctant entrepreneur,” but to everyone else, she’s seen as a powerful advocate for the Latino community. As the CEO of EC Hispanic Media and co-founder of El Clasificado, she has transformed a humble Spanish-language classified ad publication into the largest classified marketplace for Hispanic people in the U.S.
De la Torre’s entrepreneurial journey began in 1988 with a simple idea: develop a “Pennysaver in Spanish” to serve the growing Hispanic community. “There was nothing free for Latinos to find jobs, rentals or cars,” she said. “I kept saying someone should do it, and people told me, ‘Well, you do it.’”
The Latino Leaders Index500, powered by BMO, aims to better understand the needs of this key economic segment and help investors recognize the economic muscle and potential of Latino businesses.
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Reading the trends
Maria Salinas, CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, was the ideal person to lead the conversation with de la Torre. Not only does Salinas oversee the largest business association in LA County, but she’s also the first woman and Latina to lead the Chamber in its 136-year history. Given EC Hispanic Media works directly with Latino businesses, Salinas wanted to know what de la Torre sees as the best way to tap into the Latino market. “You have to know your audience and present yourself accordingly,” she said.
Building businesses up
For de la Torre, the key to her success has been helping small businesses grow, offering business webinars and expos in Spanish, and working with different Chambers of Commerce to learn about and grow her network. She explained that her company’s mission has always been to find ways to help clients get more clients and build an audience for them in print and online.
Other agencies might require clients to spend at least $10,000 a month, which is out of reach for many of de la Torre’s customers, but EC Hispanic Media finds ways to serve the community for a fraction of the cost. One way she’s doing this is through artificial intelligence (AI). “We’ve already incorporated AI when people are placing ads,” she said. She’s encouraging designers to use it to generate ideas. “Some of our employees are reluctant, and I tell them, ‘Learn to use this because you will produce more, and it will provide more job security.’”
Helping the next generation
To wrap up the Fireside Chat, Salinas asked de la Torre for her advice for other Latino leaders. She responded by touting the benefits of attending conferences and connecting with the local Chamber of Commerce to network and learn from others – including competitors. “I go to conferences with competitors, and we learn from each other,” she said. “It’s a neutral place, and it makes you better.”
Salinas echoed that sentiment and said those events help lift the whole community. “We have members that are like, ‘Oh, I don’t need those resources,’ but how about showing others how you got to that next level,” she said. These events are particularly beneficial for young rising stars to go and absorb information from everyone in the room.
De la Torre agreed. “There are so many Latino businesses that you can network with now and learn from each other.”
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Markets Plus. We're leading experts from across BMO. Discuss factors shaping the markets, economy, industry sectors, and much more. Visit Bmocm.com/marketsplus for more episodes. The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of BMO Capital Markets, its affiliates or subsidiaries.
Eduardo Tobon:
Hola, I'm Eduardo Tobon, Latino segment head at BMO Commercial Bank. We now have the privilege of introducing our next episode with Maria Salinas, CEO at Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the largest business association in LA County, and the first woman and Latina to lead the chamber in its 136-year history. And Martha de la Torre, CEO at EC Hispanic Media, the largest Spanish language classified marketplace in the U.S., and co-founder of El Clasificado.
According to the most recent study by Latina GDP, Latinas contribute 1.3 trillion to our U.S. economy, or 41% of the total contribution, but the entire Latino cohort with 2021 GDP data. There's a lot of power in that data. Our two Latina speakers gathered at a recent BMO Index 500 event in San Diego at Latitude, the largest business event in the country, focused on the new Main Street economy within our U.S. Hispanic cohort to discuss the importance of Latinas in our U.S. economy, the inspiration and evolution of a successful Latina led company and some proven tips among other topics. Disfruten. Enjoy.
Maria Salinas:
Thank you to BMO Bank for the invitation to be here, and I promise we're going to have such an exciting conversation here. We're going to power through a couple of questions to get to know amazing entrepreneurs like Martha de la Torre, who is here. So Martha, I know we've had a chance to talk about this afternoon, but Martha and I are both Lions graduates of Loyola Marymount University, so definitely go way back. Let's jump right into this conversation because you've had an amazing career. Tell us a little bit about your business and really what inspired you to start that.
Martha de la Torre:
Well, it wasn't easy, and I joined Arthur Young before I became Ernst & Young when there were two female partners in the whole country, and that originally was my aspiration. I did become an audit manager, and they wanted to open the doors and make it easy for us, so they were a great company. But I left because I started dating my future husband, and one of my clients was La Opinion. And I used to help them a lot and they needed help, so they asked me to be their CFO. I went over there, and I was inspired about media and reaching out to Latinos and realizing that there's nothing free for them to find jobs, find a rental, get a car, like the Penny Saver. And so I used to always say someone should start a Penny Saver in Spanish, and people kept saying, well, you do it.
I go, I'm not an entrepreneur, but I liked writing business plans, so I wrote a business plan and it inspired me, the more I learned about it. And you have to remember, this is 1988, no internet, and I used to make maps and color in pink the parts that were Hispanic.
When I went to Arthur Young, there weren't a lot of Latinos, now there are so many, and it was started to boom in the 1980s after Amnesty, and I just was really inspired. I thought if I could just copy services that exist for the general market and do it for Latinos, especially immigrants like my parents were, I think I can provide something that's useful. And I just really fell in love with the idea of helping the communities, East L.A., where I happened to have been born in. Huntington Park and places like that. And so El Clasificado became a community idea.
We struggled for 10 years. I didn't take a salary and I did have investors and fortunately things started working out. My husband joined the firm, two CPAs, and then we really started putting our old process improvements from our CPA background, our business side. My friends used to say, I always had financials. I knew exactly how much we were going to spend. I just didn't know how much revenue there was going to be because that wasn't my side.
So I was inspired many times initially because the boom in Hispanic market. We started when right before the recession of the early nineties, of course we didn't know that Hispanic marketing is the first thing to get cut, and we just lived through it, lived through it until we reinvented ourselves. And I think that's kind of the story of El Clasificado. We're always reinventing ourselves and pivoting, but it's all about helping the Latino community.
Maria Salinas:
And Martha your story. You talk about all the different roles that you took on, right, in the research, the marketing aspect of it, which is very much an entrepreneur, even though you call yourself the reluctant entrepreneur, right? and yet you also managed to evolve the business. Can you talk a little bit about that? When you look at the trends in media, how did you incorporate that into your story?
Martha de la Torre:
I think we looked at it organically. How am I going to help this appliance repair shop to make business? It was always, how can we help our clients get more clients? And it's always thinking, being customer-centric.
And it's funny how you say, I also had to evolve. So when things didn't work out the way I thought it was, according to our projections, the costs were right, but there was no revenues. We started off direct mail and everyone said, oh, there's no direct mail Spanish publication, so if you do direct mail, going to get all the national account and all the inserts. And it was about chasing the big guys. And I finally realized, stop chasing the big guys, help the guy on with your boulevard. And that's when we started changing and we realized we don't have to do direct mail, that's what almost bankrupted us.
First we started door to door, and then that didn't really work out. Then we were giving up and put it in racks. And at our peak, which really was our key to success, was our distribution. We had 22,000 racks. So it's about being in the community once again. It's always that. And then building trust and how did I involve when my husband joined, okay, I'm no longer... I used to be the person, I can't believe I did this because I don't drive anymore. I used to drive a truck with a suit and high heels and pick up the people delivering door to door in the morning with their little things and put the magazines in, drop them off in Northridge, go do my sales, come back. So I had to-
Maria Salinas:
You had to do that to survive.
Martha de la Torre:
[inaudible 00:06:52] Were drivers. I was a driver, I was distribution, and what we probably weren't doing was marketing enough, and that's what I do now.
And then, my husband took over accounting, but he still had to have another job. Then he came full time and then I didn't have a job anymore. I evolved in becoming the PR marketing person, which as an accountant, I always hated that, but that is what we do. And it became easy because we were helping so many people.
This one man came one day and he dropped his coins and dollars. He said, don't cancel me yet, you haven't billed me, I haven't paid you, but please, I want to pay you, and this is how I keep my family alive. We get a business, have to live a good life. And I go, oh my God. It's all about the classifieds. Once again, it's about the community, those little organic ads that people pick up every week to get services from people who speak Spanish who want to help them.
Maria Salinas:
So I want to talk about that because your customer, who your customers have been, Spanish speaking audiences throughout Los Angeles, that customer is definitely the growing Hispanic market. Why we're all here at Latitude, just knowing the power of the Latino community. What do you say based on your experience of tapping into that market for your whole career at El Clasificado, what has that meant for you when you see what's going on here, this impressive conference?
Martha de la Torre:
I just love it that we really focus on immigrant communities. They might be recent immigrants or they might be third generation immigrants, who started a business and still speak Spanish. And we offer business webinars, business expos in Spanish, working with Chambers. We stick to that even though we have bilingual. With Quinceañera, you have to have bilingual. With Al Borde and entertainment, alternative rock, you have to have bilingual, but we really work on helping that small business, the lifestyle entrepreneur with less than 10 employees. That is our bread and butter, and we're loyal to them. Now as a digital agency, there's so many digital agencies that say, I won't take your business unless you spend at least $10,000 a month in AdWords. That's a lot of money. And so we say, we'll take you, and we could do as little as $20 a week because we keep doing it with technology, we've always embraced technology.
So, you need to know what Hispanic market you want to target. A lot of times I get male and Spanish, I get ads in Spanish, and it's kind of wasted because I was born here. I consume my media in English. Just because I have a Spanish language media doesn't mean that's how I want to consume my personal media. So when you're reading a Spanish market, who are you reaching? Are you reaching families that, even after three generations, they're still in East LA and they're comfortable and they love it? Or are you reaching the ones in Torrance who never speaks Spanish? So that cultural competency...
Maria Salinas:
Is of paramount importance, right?
Martha de la Torre:
There are many different kinds of Latinos.
Maria Salinas:
Audiences. So talk a little bit about that. Many different types of Latinos. How do you tap into that?
Martha de la Torre:
So this is why we became so big with ElClasificado.com, because we were sensitive that in California mostly Mexican community, you communicate in a certain way, and then in Florida it's different. It used to be mostly Cuban, but now it's mixed Venezuelan. So we are fortunate, we have our own focus group because our employees are from all over Latin America. And we ask them, okay, which word do you use here? And then in the Midwest, what do you use there?
And being respectful and trying to communicate. We did all this free translation for one of the local child guidance clinics that I used to be on the board. And when they read it and they had a little focus group, the parents said, this is way above me. I don't even understand what they're saying.
So you have to be sensitive about when you do that. My mom used to do the proofreading and she would cancel all the classifieds because they said, quiero tasa, acerca de la marketa. And I go, that's not a word. And I told my mom in classifieds, people who are paying for those classifieds could say whatever they want as long is not a bad word. In the display adds okay, then you can make it a little different. But still, you have to know your audience and present yourself accordingly.
Maria Salinas:
Wonderful. Thank you for that. Well, Martha, thank you so much for that conversation and what a pleasure. Thank you.
Martha de la Torre:
Thank you so much. Thank you all.
Eduardo Tobon:
I hope you enjoy this podcast, Espero Lo Hayan Disfrutado. If you haven't already, be sure to listen to the previous podcasts in our series where we take a deeper dive into how the Index 500 was born, and purposefully highlight the remarkable achievements of many Latinos and Latinas.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For more episodes, visit bmocm.com/marketsplus.
Speaker 5:
For BMO disclosures, please visit bmocm.com/podcast/disclaimer.
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