The Latino Professionals Association Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month: Elevating Small Business
Born in severe poverty in Cuernavaca, Morelo, Mexico, Giovanni Aleman Soleto has come a long ways to now consult with small businesses of color, providing different business-related skills.
By Jonathan Gramling
Giovanni Aleman Sotelo has come a long ways, continuing an innate sense of entrepreneurism imparted on him by his parents. Sotelo was born in Cuernavaca, Morelo in Mexico in an extremely impoverished community with a train track and gravel for roads.
“We were all living in a little hut put up with sheet metal and a lot of people didn’t have a concrete floor,” Sotelo said. “My grandma had gravel and dirt for her floor all throughout the house. We didn’t have running water. Once per week, on Tuesday, we would get our fill. We’d have big tubs that we would fill up and use that for everything from cooking to washing to bathing. We would have to get a bucket and dump the bucket in the toilet so that it would flush. That’s the kind of community that I grew up in.”
Sotelo’s parents did not accept their lot in life and so when Sotelo was seven-years-old, they moved to Chicago and then to Madison.
“My mom had family in Chicago and my dad was originally living in Chicago before moving up to Madison,” Sotelo said. “My dad actually came up here to live with a few of his cousins and thought it would be a lot more family-friendly than Chicago was. That’s why we landed here. It was just friendlier than Chicago. It’s a smaller city. And my father thought it would be a better place to raise a family.”
After working long hours and not seemingly getting ahead, Sotelo’s parents founded their own business, Aleman Cleaning LLC. It was a lesson in entrepreneurism that wasn’t lost on Sotelo.
“I’m quite privileged in my life,” Sotelo reflected. “I’m doing okay. But I think I am only here because my mom and my dad really worked hard to afford these opportunities for me.”
And Sotelo has worked hard to take that sense of entrepreneurism to the next level. After graduating from Madison East, Sotelo attended Madison College for a year before dropping out and working for quite a bit of time.
It gave Sotelo the space to reflect on what he wanted to do with his life.
“My parents started their own business,” Sotelo said. “I got to see many years down the line that was the right move for them. Reflecting back on the opportunities that being self-employed offered my parents and me as a son, I developed this passion for wanting to help other people do the same thing. Understanding the complexities of being a business owner, I decided that accounting was pretty important for being a business owner, so I decided to take that on so I could help other small businesses. Eventually I got back into school part-time and slowly, but surely made it through an accounting program there. I worked my way through school. I paid for my own school and lived on my own. I earned my accounting associates degree.”
The lessons learned from his parents’ lives and the economic situations of people he knew gave Sotelo a passion for helping others develop their own small businesses.
“After graduation, I worked at a few places,” Sotelo said. “I’ve done tax prep and accounts payable. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, early on as I was doing some internships, I realized it was very black and white and I needed some way to release my creativity. Being in the position that I am, trying to figure out how to help other businesses, I decided that marketing was the next best thing for me to get into. And so I picked up a camera and I really enjoyed it. I’m not much of a photographer and never was, but video was a lot of fun. So I started messing around with video. At first, it was very, very simple. And then eventually, I started being able to help nonprofits emphasize their brand and create awareness with my video editing skills. That was really fun to do. And so I continue to do it on a small scale, but that offered me an outlet to create an LLC, a small business of my own called GA Business Solutions.
Sotelo’s work with nonprofits led to the next stage in his professional career.
“I was in the market and I was looking for a better opportunity to be able to grow professionally and the Center for Community Stewardship came across my desk,” Sotelo said. “It was really interesting. I had no idea what a fiscal sponsor does because the name is not telling. But as I looked into it, I realized that this is a way for nonprofits to outsource everything that is really not involved with their mission and creating the impact that they set out to do. It’s a lot of technical services that slow people down in business and in organizations. It was great. I interviewed for the job. And I learned more about fiscal sponsorship and I decided it was so well aligned with what I wanted to do, so I took the job. I really wasn’t expecting to be in the nonprofit world, but there you go.”
Sotelo has been a life-long learner, improving his skills has he worked to improve the situations of others.
“At the beginning of the year, I actually enrolled for web development services because that’s next,” Sotelo said. “I have accounting. I have marketing. Now I have to understand how to make websites and use technology to automate and systematize things that are typically tedious and labor intensive. That didn’t happen because I have so much on my plate.”
What was filling up his plate was that in addition to his work with the Center for Community Stewardship, Sotelo had teamed up with GHW Capital Partners to implement a Madison Black Chamber of Commerce initiative.
“MBCC Means Business is a program being put on by the Chamber,” Sotelo said. “It’s being funded by some of the federal ARPA money. At the beginning of the year, I was recruited to consult with them to build business development programs for an incubator and accelerator cohort. I designed content and material and now I am being brought in more of an administrative role. Again it allows me to exercise everything that I am passionate about. We’re offering shared services and we are able to offer anything from customer service to sales to marketing to digital design to accounting. All these services are being offered to local business owners here in our community. It’s just really neat to see all of this develop and be able to ultimately still help people build their businesses even if I am not the sole person managing any of those projects. We’re a team that intends to partner with entities in the community who want to provide a new angle to business development. We view the challenges from the business owner perspective, as we are business owners ourselves. Our measure of success is the success of our participants, who we have committed to stay in touch with, and assist, for 24 months, not just the duration of the program.”
Sotelo is all in with giving budding entrepreneurs with a great idea, but lack some of the ingredients to make their dream a reality.
“Over the last few months I have been networking with professionals, individually and at many events to connect with entrepreneurs in our community,” Sotelo said. “It turns out to be hard. Not only is there a shortage of BIPOC business owners, there is specifically a shortage of BIPOC entrepreneurs with business ideas that can be scaled nationally and/or internationally. I want to connect with BIPOC business owners who want to expand their business practice. I genuinely want to create relationships with people in our community that are business minded, and possibly help them out, if the opportunity arises. I'm thinking web and app developers, accountants, videographers, marketers, you name it.”
Giovanni learned the spirit of entrepreneurism from his parents. He has made it his life’s mission to pass it on.