Peru Hope

Women own Businesses

We are in an a new year and this blog is one of four that I set up to promote our business ventures. One of the things that we haven’t talked about is how this all fits together and why.

My wife is from Peru, and one of the first friends of hers that I met was a woman whose husband had died of a heart attack here in the United States. Her house was for sale and the question was if I could help her. I was a licensed Real Estate agent in the State of Washington. There was nothing that I could do, the agent who had the listing had already run it into the ground and it was sold at foreclosure.

The two points of the story are that she didn’t know what to do because her husband had always handled the business end of things, and second was she recovered. Let’s focus on the recovery.

She asked, and we answered that, like my wife, having a cleaning business is the cheapest, quickest, way to get get some cash coming in. She started with two other women from Guatemala who spoke no English. They cleaned about ten houses a week for a few months. She put up the fliers in the markets, handed out pamphlets, and took out an ad in the local paper.

After the first year she had a couple of vans. First she went the way of having all the employees be independent contractors and then finally had them all be employees, she now has eight.

That would be great, but she had an idea to buy a house in Peru, on the beach. Her mother and father live near the beach and scouted for her. It was a little run down. She then sent money from the business down to Peru, and her father watched over the work being done. She now spends about three months of the year in Peru. This is what she accomplished in the ten years that I have known her.

Now you can rationalize any way you want, but I saw a defeated woman create her own future. I also know a lot of people who come to the United States with nothing and become another success story. What is kind of impressing me is that we see men on TV, selling books, or talking about success while women are quietly accumulating wealth.

Just as an aside I’ll point out that by chance Casa Latina in Seattle, and Discover Hope Fund in Peru are women owned charities. There may be a lot of people involved in the operation, but women had the idea and put it all together.