Building Businesses Together
Too many promising business ideas never launch due to lack of capital. Even when the market is there and the plan is solid, many financial institutions are hesitant to take a chance on a customer who doesn’t fit the traditional model of “business owner.”
HOPE sees things differently, making business loans to underserved populations at a much higher rate than other financial institutions. That’s because HOPE realizes that sometimes the improbable idea that other lenders deny becomes the successful business that changes an entire community.
From Up in Flames to Back in Business
Little Rock, Arkansas
Fedrico “Fred” Salas was working in the construction industry when Little Rock’s growing Hispanic population gave him the idea for a new business.
Salas and his brother, Benjamin, grew up helping in their father’s butcher shop in Monterey, Mexico. Together, the Salas brothers put their childhood knowledge to work and opened a small meat market in a “tiny, tiny, tiny” space in Little Rock.
As the business grew, the brothers expanded until their once “tiny, tiny, tiny” store became a booming business that spanned three city blocks. The brothers added a restaurant serving Hispanic food from tamales to tacos, produced their own salsa and charcoal, and eventually launched a second venture selling produce and meat to every Hispanic restaurant in Arkansas.
“The business was always crowded, full of people,” Salas says. “Families came to the restaurant with their kids and they enjoy the food, the environment, the people. The owners, my brother and myself, we always interact with the customers. The community around here considered us family…We were doing pretty good and were there for 15 years until we had this incident.”
This “incident” was a devastating fire that destroyed the business the Salases had worked so hard to build. The brothers lost their livelihoods and their 52 employees lost their jobs.
The Salases had insurance, but instead of simply rebuilding, they decided to expand, to make their business even bigger and better than before. But when they sought a commercial loan, the brothers ran into an obstacle. Because they had conducted most of their business in cash, neither Fred nor Benjamin had strong credit histories.
Fred and Benjamin turned to the HOPE Little Rock branch for help, where the HOPE representative walked the brothers through the loan process step-by-step – in Spanish.
“[I] can speak English, but when you get to the point where you have to understand the financial terms, it’s very useful to have somebody say, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll translate it. I’ll break it down for you and explain how this will work,’” Salas says. “Thanks to HOPE, we can now say, ‘We have hope.’”
And with hope for the Salas brothers came hope for their entire community.
“My dream for the people of this community is for them to have more opportunity,” Salas says. “God has given us the opportunity to hire people, to create jobs, to help others. Emotionally, that gives me pure satisfaction.”